His one word response conveyed myriad meanings, from dumbfounded disbelief to intense incredulity. “Really?”

Really. I don’t watch television.

I am aware that since I have spent the last three decades either making or appearing on TV, it must seem bizarre that I don’t watch it. No doubt there is an element of struggling to watch and enjoy when I know so much about the 'back end' process - the magic is somewhat diminished. I will watch the odd film, a box set or the news but gone are the days of an evening spent relaxing on the couch, remote control in hand. This wasn’t always the case - far from it. I loved watching TV when I was a boy. Growing up we were allowed to view until 9pm on a school night, but were given special dispensation for the news which would give us an extra 25 minutes staying up. Friday nights ushered in a weekend of joy by way of Starsky and Hutch. Dallas was a family favourite, one of the rare shows that my dad enjoyed. He wasn’t a big fan of the goggle box. Our summer holidays were wars of attrition with him trying to stop us vegetating in front of the flickering screen, while all we wanted to do was vegetate in front of the flickering screen. He loathed the notion of what can best be described as “rolling viewing”. He would make us mark the Radio Times in advance of the day ahead, selecting and justifying what we intended to watch. One summer he lost his rag and removed the plug from the old Sony Triton, the once joyous box of delights sat sad and silent. It was the first and only time I have ever seen my dad with a screwdriver in his hand. While my dad attempted discipline, my wee mum preferred the age old method of standing between me and the screen and simply shouting - her mantra revolved around the notion that watching so much TV as a kid would not serve me well. “What are you going to do when you grow up? Work in Television?”

Neither of us would dare even have dreamed such a thing was possible. Back in the seventies the notion of someone that looked like me working in the media was remote, at best. I doubt there were any creatives making TV, outside of the 'ghetto' programming, led by the BBC. You only need recall the depiction of brown folk on screen to realize that there were clearly no brown folk behind the scenes, working on programmes. If there had been they would have added a second and third dimension to the very rare appearance of anyone from the sub-continent - we grew up watching the all too occasional caricatured, wobbly-headed, heavily-accented minor characters.

It’s ninety years since John Logie Baird broadcast the first transatlantic television signal from that big London to that twice-named New York City. Television has since become the single greatest influence on the shaping of modern society. While the novelty of social media has become a new reality with the world’s most powerful man using and abusing and confusing fifty million followers and the rest of the world with misspelled tweet after badly punctuated tweet, it was reality TV that delivered him to the White House.

“Television, drug of the nation, breeding ignorance and feeding radiation…” The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy released that single in 1992, the year I moved to Television Centre in West London, the BBC’s iconic and sprawling nerve centre of creation. In those days there were just four TV channels, the edgy and experimental Channel 4 added to the holy trinity of BBC1, 2 and ITV that defined my childhood. There are now almost five hundred channels available via a plethora of platforms, as well as a seemingly endless array of on-demand, catch-up and subscription channels.

What was once a vibrant network of fifteen commercial regional franchises have since been merged, acquired and consolidated into a broadcasting behemoth owned by ITV plc which accounts for over 80% of those original fifteen. (STV owns the remaining two). This ever-increasing centralization of the media means that just over half of the BBC licence fee money raised in Scotland is actually spent here. Only about a third of all TV production happens outside of London. And then they wonder why we get fed up with their parochial London views.

Maybe this lack of diversity explains why I find much of the televisual output un-engaging. Or maybe I have just got old and curmudgeonly. But when there was but three channels and I wore short trousers there seemed to be so much more quality projected from the cathode ray. Allow me to borrow and amend the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “TV, TV everywhere, but not a drop to watch.”