Fair Point: Why can't they leave us alone and let us watch love island?

And yet at least once a week I find myself powerlessly tied to the screen with a cup of tea and a packet of biscuits, feeling dirty and cheap. I try to make excuses such as 'it is an interesting case study of modern psychology and culture' and tell myself that maybe if I don't tell anyone I'm watching it, it is sort of like I'm not watching it.

Why are we racked with this guilt over what we watch? We are ridiculed by people that are probably no better than us really.

One person I know is terrifically vocal about his belief that watching Love Island is an utterly trivial waste of my time, but when asked why he used to watch Big Brother, reasons that he only watched 'when it used to be good.'

It is as though watching a bit of rubbish television automatically makes you unintelligent, no matter what else you do or how you spend the rest of your time. I had a friend at university who studied Biochemistry. She spent hours every day filling test tubes with disgusting chemicals, crouching over Bunsen Burners and line graphs. In her spare time she liked to kick back and give her brain a rest watching a cocktail of Geordie Shore, Ex On the Beach and whatever else was on that involved young people getting intoxicated and forgetting to put on clothes before ripping hair extensions out of each others heads in a fight and waking up with kebab over themselves.

If you work hard in a mentally challenging and stimulating job, such as mine, which can also often be quite emotionally demanding as it involves a good deal of speaking to angry or crying people on the phone; why should we feel guilt over watching a bit of vacuous drivel when we get home?

But it feels today like we are berated for watching anything that isn't Question Time or Countdown. Perhaps it is time we took a stand. Instead of looking sheepish whenever Love Island arises in conversation I should follow the lead of my colleague Sam Greenway and stand proud.

Of course it is terrible tele and we should all be reading scholarly articles every night or perfecting our Mandarin, which is undoubtedly what those who mock us have been spending their nights doing.