I'm not really one for New Year's Resolutions, but I figure one entry a week here won't kill me, so that's my aim. And here's the first one.

I am, broadly speaking, enthusiastic about television. At its best it enriches and stimulates, and it affords an opportunity to see comedy and sport which would otherwise be both practically and fiscally beyond me. Of course most of it, the vast majority in fact, is worthless. Most of the Freeview channels are a complete waste of time for all but the dimmest amongst us. But it is not those channels that incur my most passionate loathing. No, that honour belongs to one of the elder statesmen of British broadcasting.

ITV.

I loathe ITV. I hate it even more than Channel 4, and that's saying something. I loathe ITV not because of the endless brainless pap it pours forth, not because of Jeremy Kyle, This Morning, Loose Women, an evening schedule which is a relentless barrage of moronic soap operas. No, I loathe it because I have to pay for it.

Every time another Daily Mail article spews forth its agenda-laden bile about the BBC and the licence fee, I despair of the fallacy trotted out by advocates of ITV that it is "free to air". No it isn't. ITV is paid for by advertising, and advertisers pay for adverts from their profits, and they make their profits from me. I suppose it is feasible to shop without going to a supermarket, and get my energy from the sun, and in a thousand other ways avoid using products and companies which fund ITV. But in the first place it would be a logistical nightmare, and in the second place, in an age of globalisation, when gargantuan multinationals have a thousand fingers in pies you never would have imagined interested them, a complete nightmare to research. No, the sad reality of it is that I pay for ITV whether I like it or not, and unlike the BBC whose services I use every day - even disregarding television I make numerous visits to the sport section of their website, and download six of their podcasts (if you haven't tried Adam & Joe, you're missing out) - I go weeks on end without watching anything on ITV. Other than Harry Hill and 'Dexter', both of which have stumbled onto Britain's most conservative broadcaster from the more inventive and adventurous channels which spawned them, it's just the Champions League. Apart, that is, from the ten minutes or so every morning which make me want to put my head through a window.

Mine is the last generation, I suspect, to remember a time when at certain hours of the day there was literally nothing on television. In the morning you might get a bit of Open University, but that was it. There would be nothing on all day. Apart from weekends, everything stopped at about midnight. On BBC1 you even got the national anthem (about which I will moan another time). I can remember the birth of breakfast TV and thinking, even as a 14 year old, "this is the thin end of the wedge". What a prescient teenager I was. Anyway, television at breakfast time has always felt vaguely wrong to me, and it hasn't felt any less wrong as over the last couple of years my wife has insisted on inflicting upon me the witless banality that is GMTV. Is there a more dispiriting way to start the day than being reminded of how thick people are? I think not. The High Priestess of Moron TV, the woman who simply by appearing on my screen could make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up in hypertensile anxiety, was Fiona Phillips. And there is the happy ending to this entry - the use of the past tense. Because Fiona Phillips, a woman with the journalistic prowess and intellectual rigour of a cantaloupe, has gone. She has left GMTV. Everybody breathe a sigh of relief and move on with a smile on their face.