I have five of them in my house. Five. I can half-convince myself that this is because of what I do for a living but not entirely. Creeping in around the edges is a large measure of guilt. Five really does seem an awful lot. If David Burke had his way, I wouldn’t have any. And nor would anyone else.

But then David Burke is a man with a mission: he wants to rid the world of television. Thirteen years ago, Burke decided the time had come for him to take his protest on to the streets. One morning in 1996, he climbed on top of a symbolically busted TV set outside Westminster Abbey and called on Prince Charles to ban TV cameras from his coronation – whenever that might be. As the Queen’s coronation in 1953 had marked the start of widespread television viewing in the UK, a TV-free Charles coronation would, felt Burke, have a pleasing symmetry to it.

A few days later, he received a reply from Charles’s office; the Prince of Wales thanked him for his interest, but felt that he was unable to comply with his request. Burke was not greatly surprised by this, but nor was he disheartened. He’d always known that convincing the world he was right was going to be an uphill struggle.

On Monday, Burke, a 44-year-old expatriate American with a cheerfully undaunted air, will launch his 13th annual TV Turnoff Week. Once again, he will invite people to unshackle themselves, however briefly, from their television sets and sample the joys of a TV-free life. Posters in cities round the country will call on people to “Get Out of the Box”, while in Brighton – a big centre for anti-TV campaigners, largely because Burke has lots of friends there – residents will be encouraged to sit outside their front doors and chat with their neighbours for a change. The benefits, he claims, will be instantaneous. Not only will people feel better about themselves and become more self-reliant, but their creative resources will blossom too.

Burke does not expect to be taken altogether seriously. “I’ve always been laughed at,” he says, “probably for a very good reason.” Apart from anything else, he earns his living by peering intently at a screen – he’s a web designer. After a “normal TV-saturated upbringing” in America, he came over here in the early 1990s and was invited by friends to help distribute an anti-TV newsletter . Because he had nothing better to do, he agreed, and the message began to sink in.

“The odd thing is that it wasn’t until I stopped watching TV that I started feeling really strongly about it. Suddenly you walk into a room and everyone is watching TV and you think, ‘Why isn’t anyone talking?’”

Burke is not the only laughing-stock out there. At the same time as he exhorts UK citizens to turn off their sets, similar events will be held in the US, Australia and New Zealand. Last year’s TV Turnoff Week in the US claims to have attracted 5m participants. After years of ridicule, could it be that Burke’s time has finally come?

At the heart of the anti-TV movement is a simple and, as the campaigners see it, irrefutable fact: television turns people’s brains to cardboard and their bodies into blubber. Just look at the statistics, they say.

According to the most recent figures, taken from a Office of National Statistics survey in 2006/2007, 84 per cent of men and 85 per cent of women in Britain rate television viewing as their most popular leisure activity. By comparison, “Spending time with family or friends” was chosen by 75 per cent of men and 82 per cent of women. People watched an average of 3.88 hours of TV a day, so by the age of 75 the average Briton will have spent more than 12 years of his or her life watching television.

Six reasons to watch more TV

It’s absurd to seek to ban television, writes John Lloyd. It’s true that some people should watch less of it – but some should watch more. The key word is not “more” or “less”, but choose, rather than just gaze. Here’s why:
1. TV offers a vast and increasing choice, and while much of it is bad, some of it is good. The same is true of books, newspapers, magazines, plays, concerts and films. We don’t seek to ban any of these: indeed, the notion of book-banning is overlaid with images of totalitarian regimes.
2. Those of us who live in anglophone countries are even more spoilt for choice in our own language than others. This is because of two quite different triumphs – one socialist, one capitalist. In the former, the BBC is the biggest and all-round best broadcasting and production organisation in the world (arguably even better at radio than it is at TV). In the second category, the vast US TV production industry has always produced – and is certainly now producing – pearls of programmes, mainly comedy and drama – (The Simpsons and Mad Men being exemplary examples of each)
3. Nothing gives you a better sense of what’s going on in the society than TV. News, current affairs, chat and entertainment shows all say much about the culture – more even than artfully crafted films and plays. A favourite example: you learn much more about the nature of Italian politics during an hour of the chat-show/political interview /entertainment/starlet showcase programme Porta a Porta on Italy’s RAI 1 channel, than you could from reading a whole tome on contemporary Italy.
4. TV can tell a story, whether in documentary or dramatic form, better than any other medium except, at times, the cinema – and do so more intimately and urgently than film. Last week, Five Minutes of Heaven (BBC1) illuminated, with close observation and great delicacy, the aftermath of a sectarian murder committed in the Belfast of the bloody 1970s.
5. It offers consolation to the lonely, the old and the miserable. It’s not the same as human company, to be sure, but it’s often more reliable, better than the radio (for most) and a way to alleviate brooding. It’s all very well to quote TS Eliot (from “Burnt Norton”) about being “distracted from distraction by distraction”, but if the alternative is some sort personal pit of despair, then roll on distraction.
6. Finally, to repeat: the key word is choose. We do not go into a library and read through a shelf in the order presented to us; or take everything from a magazine rack and flick through it indifferently. TV gives us a choice of increasing versions of our culture and other cultures – and if we exercise our choice, we also exercise our minds.

“One of the strange things about television is that almost everyone feels guilty about the amount of time they spend watching it,” says Burke. “It’s as if they know in their hearts that they’re doing something they shouldn’t.”

Ah yes, guilt. The reason I have so many TV sets, I tell myself, is that I am a television critic. While this is true, I’m still not sure it’s that good an answer. I, too, have a sense that I might be watching more TV than is good for me. Not only that, I’m beginning to suspect that the habit may be hereditary. As well as five TV sets, I also have two young children – a boy of two and a half and a girl aged one. I’d like to be able to tell you that as I’m writing this piece, they are out in the fresh air, building little houses out of sticks and baking mud pies. But they’re watching television.

Like many parents, my wife and I try to regulate how much television our children watch. But, like many parents, we plonk them in front of the screen if we feel they – or we – need a break. What is this doing to them? Is it making them more informed, better able to follow a narrative and – perhaps – engage with the world? Or is it doing something more worrying to their brains?

Dr Aric Sigman, a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and an associate fellow of the British Psychological Society, is convinced it is the latter. In a 2007 address to MPs, Sigman called unfettered TV-watching “the greatest unacknowledged health scandal of our time”. He also advised that no child under three should be allowed to watch television. Far from helping children acquire language skills and teaching them about the world, Sigman reckons TV is more likely to scramble their brains – maybe literally so. (A study by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 1999 linked “early exposure to television during critical periods of synaptic [brain cell] development” to attentional problems” – in particular, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), now the most common behavioural disorder in US children.)

Sigman doesn’t see himself as an anti-TV campaigner. “After all,” he says, “I have a TV set.” But he is appalled that “the average child in the UK will have watched an entire year’s worth of television by the time they are six, and more than half of three-year-olds now have televisions in their bedrooms.”

Last August, France’s government decided to ban TV channels from airing shows aimed at children under three. According to the French broadcasting authority, Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel: “Television viewing hurts the development of children under three years old and poses a number of risks, encouraging passivity, slow language acquisition, over-excitedness, trouble with sleep and concentration as well as dependence on screens.”

The history of television is full of troubling evidence of its effects. In the mid-1960s, an unnamed Canadian town – dubbed Notel by researchers (short for No Television) – received television for the first time. Researchers monitored the effect it had on the town’s schoolchildren. After two years of TV watching, the children were subjected to a battery of tests designed to gauge their reactions to a number of social situations. These tests revealed the children to be three times more aggressive than they had been before. A nearby TV-free town that was also monitored, showed no such increase. At the same time, levels of social interaction in Notel fell by 25 per cent. More recently, the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan became, in 1999, the last country on earth to introduce television. Within months, it was experiencing the first crime wave in its history. A 2003 government-sponsored “Impact Study” conducted by Bhutanese academics found television had caused increasing crime, corruption, an uncontrolled desire for western products and changed attitudes to relationships. One-third of Bhutanese girls wanted to look more American – with whiter skin and blonde hair – while 35 per cent of parents preferred to watch TV than talk to their own children.

Such studies are alarming but do they offer conclusive evidence? Many people – not all of them employed by the TV industry – would argue that these findings are nonsense. Indeed, the past few years have seen a fightback by the pro-TV lobby. In his 2005 book Everything Bad is Good for You: How Popular Culture is Making Us Smarter, American writer Steven Johnson argued that television was a “a potent promoter of cerebral fitness”.

According to Johnson, TV dramas now have storylines that audiences 30 years ago would simply have been unable to understand. Shows such as Lost and The Sopranos boost brainpower by accustoming audiences to ever-increasing levels of complexity.

Johnson cited studies showing that IQ scores in the US have been rising steadily at a rate of three points per decade – to the point where someone who was in the top 10 per cent in 1920, would fall into the bottom 30 per cent today. As far as he’s concerned, TV should get its share of the credit here.

Johnson also believes shows such as 24 teach viewers how relationships work. But I wonder just what sort of lessons you’re likely to learn from 24 – that people betray you and you’re usually better off plugging them full of holes before they get the chance?

Personally, I think his arguments have more holes in them than Elvis Presley’s TV set – Elvis famously blasted his TV full of holes if he didn’t like what he was watching. Yes, people may be better able to follow more complicated narratives than they were 30 years ago. But is that because they are more intelligent? Surely one could argue the opposite: that people’s powers of attention have been so ripped to shreds that they now require lots of little hooks to keep them snared rather than one big one.

Where does this leave me? Probably more ambivalent than I’d like to admit. When I first watched television as a child, it was regarded as a faintly shameful activity. My parents’ set had sliding doors like a cocktail cabinet that would be pulled shut every night before bed. Nowadays, huge flat-screen TVs are regularly given pride of place.

After 15 years of watching television for a living, I still love what I do. Every time I sit down to watch a promising-looking programme, I do so with relish. But at the back of my mind is a nagging question: has TV done what its Reithian proselytisers hoped it would – opened a window on peoples’ lives? Or has it made us more insular, so that we now see the world through a plate-glass screen? We’re curious, yet detached. Safely insulated. I’d like to believe it’s the former, but I’m not sure I do. Not any more.

While the arguments see-saw, campaigners hope to convince more people that chucking out their TV sets could lead to a more contented life. In Lewes, Sussex, jeweller Justin Small and his girlfriend Alexis Dove will be joining Burke at the barricades during TV Turnoff Week. Dove will also be selling cut-glass necklaces made from old TV screens.

“I gave up TV eight years ago,” says Small. “One day I just got sick of it and chopped the plug off. Unfortunately, it turned out the TV set didn’t actually belong to us, so I had to stick it back on again. I’d watched my kids sitting in front of it for hours and becoming completely unresponsive so I was curious to see what would happen if we got rid of it. I can honestly say our lives improved dramatically. The children interact with one another much better, and they’re much better at amusing themselves. Of course, people think we’re nuts but that doesn’t bother me any more.”

Though Aric Sigman believes the anti-TV movement is gathering momentum (“I don’t get the volume of hate mail I did, say, 18 months ago,” he says), abstainers still tend to be treated with derision and disbelief. Small patiently endures regular phone calls from TV Licensing asking why he hasn’t got a licence. “The last one said, ‘We operate on the basis that we don’t believe you and we’d like to send someone round to see for themselves.’

“I said, ‘Fine, but just telephone first to make sure I’m in. I tend to go out quite a lot, you see.’

“‘Why’s that?’ the man asked.

“‘Because I don’t have a TV.’”

TV Turnoff Week runs from April 20-26. For more details see www.whitedot.org