And Come Dine With Me for the social commentary on entertaining guests. And America’s Next Top Model because I nurse a long-lost dream of fashion photography. And Dancing on Ice because I really like figure skating. I’m also an exceptional liar.

I can be reading a damning newspaper article on the cultural catastrophe that is reality TV one minute, and transfixed the next by Justin Bobby giving Audrina the brush off YET AGAIN, or a particularly unfair 4/10 after a perfectly well-organised dinner party. I intersperse writing my final-year English essays about masculinity in John Updike with breaks watching Whitney fall for Jay on The City. I’ll settle down to watch a foreign film or read Jane Eyre, but only once Strictly is over. Whatever else I can be snobby about (and there’s a fairly long list) television escapes the scathing putdowns. And of course the magazines that write about it are part of the package. I’ll bypass the Jodie Picoult bestsellers and pull a face at trailers for Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (which I will never apologise for), but television? Television is allowed to be a bit rubbish. Reality TV is escapism without having to think too much about it, and generally, without the gloom of the soaps. You can become involved for half an hour but forget about it by the time the ad break is over.

Currently, reality TV works in two ways. It is comforting to see that beautiful people really do have beautiful lives and to lust after the elusive glamour that will (probably) never be ours. Watching glossy individuals spend their cash unwisely and swan around LA like they own it (which they possibly do) is captivating, and reassures us that for some people life really is that easy. But it is even better to see the idiots who are prepared to make fools out of themselves on television. Surely we’re better than them, even if we do waste hours of our lives watching their misfortunes? Perhaps, perhaps not, but for every time I hate myself for investing more emotion into Masterchef than my funding application for next year, there are ten more times when I forget about my worries and settle down for an hour of trivial rubbish. Then another hour of talking it over with housemates, a phone call to my mum to see if she saw it, a change of Facebook status in relation to what happened in that episode, a Google search for any extra gossip, and a trip to buy some magazines. Ok, so it may be bordering on trash telly addiction, but it is a bewildering concept that I, and millions of others, can both yearn to live in Laguna Beach and laugh at the biggest dilemma of the programme being how to ask someone to the prom. It doesn’t actually matter to me whether or not The Hills is scripted; that’s not the point. The point is clearly whether someone will bump off Spencer before the end of the series.

Expectations for reality should be fairly low; this isn’t some hardhitting, gritty BBC drama. It’s frothy fun to relieve the pressures of our working/studying day, and so long as we are aware that it’s not Chekhov, it’s not a problem.

I’m not going to solve the mystery of why we love reality TV so much and I’m certainly not going to stop watching. You must be joking…the new series of The Hills has just started and Lauren’s talking to Heidi again. I’m on the edge of my seat.