I hate television. I hate the way it keeps encouraging us to keep watching. The BBC, in particular, encourages us to watch their programs, as if their programs are somehow virtuous. "Sit down on a Saturday night", they seem to say, "and watch three or four hours of TV...". And within and between programs there are adverts for more programs, and the announcer encourages you in a friendly voice to keep watching. And you feel like this voice is an authority figure, someone you can trust.

I think TV is for lonely people. The viewers want to be around other people and they do it through the TV. Watching TV feels like sociability, but it's not, it's the furthest thing from it. It's like the viewer is an orphaned child and the TV is a doll they've picked up, a desperate substitute for real human warmth and love.

It's so violent too... very often, I hear screams, violent music, explosions. It sounds as if women are being habitually raped in the living room. I rarely see violence in real life. If you were to take TV as being a good representation of reality, you would expect to see a murder every half an hour.

And it's so pointless... what happens is, a writer creates a plot and then they write the script around this. And then a big team of other people film it. And usually, the plot is something cobbled together from 100 other things made before, so there's hardly anything new.

Even the documentaries are empty... There was one on in the background about Glasgow, and I noticed that it contained almost no facts about the city. Most of it was just generic hyperbolic crap - "This city is extraordinary - it embraces the new, yet has bags of culture". The filler was the presenter doing stupid things and telling the audience how wonderful Glasgow is. If this is supposed to be a documentary, then where do we go to get actual, useful facts?

TV is mainly for entertainment, I would say about 99% of it. But I don't need to be entertained. I don't want to be. I can entertain myself by doing something constructive.

And all the time, my Dad has the TV on the background. My brother thought it was strange that I could overhear his conversations, even though I usually wear big headphones. "My headphones aren't plugged into anything," I explained. "I'm wearing them to try to block out the noise of the TV".

Once you switch the TV off, it's like leaving a warm incubator. Your window to the world is gone. Your mind gets bored, used to years of being entertained with flashy images, throwaway dialogue and exciting music.

I remember in this part is a Red Dwarf book where the crew realise they've been a virtual reality simulation for several years. When they finally come out, their bodies are shrivelled and their muscles have atrophied from non-use. The situation reminds me of that. You have to turn off the TV and reclaim your mind back. You can do productive things instead... no matter what the TV tells me, I will not believe that watching it is useful.