I've decided that in 2009 I am going to watch a lot more television. It won't be hard. In 2008 I would guess that I watched, in total, not counting cricket and news programmes, something like seven or eight minutes. And the figure would be the same for every year before that, going back nearly 20 years.

During that time I have tried - really, really tried - to watch a bit of telly. But I just can't. I don't have the concentration span. I have been away from television for so long that I simply don't understand the grammar of it any more. I flick it on and there always seem to be the same, thickly accented, pugnacious men and women with bad skin cursing at each other in rooms full of cheap furniture. And I swear to God I can't tell for minutes at a time whether it's a soap opera, a celebrity vote-out competition or a chat show (unless the skin is better and there are guns, which means it's American, and thus probably a cop/medical/ superhero drama well into series 217 and too late to join in with now).

I was about to write, at this point: “I am not especially proud of myself for this”; or “I do not mean this as a boast”. But then I realised that, in truth, I am, and I do. Or was, and did.

For the past 20 years I have been one of those people who hilariously misname famous television shows - “Britain's Got Strictly Come Yodelling Location”, “I'm a Kitchen Nightmare, Swap My Wife!” and all that - in order to show how aloof from mass entertainment culture I am, how undirtied by the dumb hand of popular taste.

I get presenters' names wrong in conversation, make a big deal about not knowing who any of the people on Celebrity Big Brother are and express surprise that EastEnders is still running (and then insist on confusing it with Albion Market). And what it is all designed to do is to make you think: “Gosh, if he doesn't watch television he must be awfully clever, just imagine all those books he must be reading, and exciting, highly cultured thoughts he must be having...” But all you are thinking is: “What a pillock.”

My ignorance is not a total pretence. Like most aggressive non-watchers of television, I really don't know who most of the people on telly are, or how they got famous, or what people like about them, or why one text-voting dance-off is more interesting than another, but I know more than I admit, because having decided that ignorance in the area of television is an indicator of brilliance and depth in, well, everything else, then I must exaggerate and highlight it.

But I see now what a fool I have been, to believe that ignorance of anything, ignorance of any kind, could be considered a positive human quality.

Alas, I have tended to see television-watching as the enemy of reading and thinking, and television as the enemy of culture. And, indeed, in my own case, while not watching television these past 20 years, I have instead been reading. I have now, in fact, read everything. And for what? So that I can have highbrow chats with myself while the world watches telly in the next room?

For years I thought that smart people claiming to be hooked on television shows were being ironic. But the joke ran on and on and on. All those Times columnists claiming to be deeply involved in the X-Files or The West Wing or The Sopranos, and as for the thing with grown-ups and Doctor Who...

I simply didn't see how a person with an even half-trained brain could care what happened next in 24 or House or Holby City any more than they could laugh at the lame, humpety old jokes of Friends or Frasier - thin, barely potable gruel brewed up lovelessly in LA basements by large teams of paunchy American thickos on 14 Starbucks lattes a day.

But the joke's on me. Pretty much every social outing I had last month was punctuated at some point by a scrum round the television to watch (and vote on) Strictly Come Dancing or The X Factor. Not new shows. Not daft pikey crud briefly of comic interest to educated people (as I assumed Big Brother was back in the summer of 2000, and I'm a Celebrity... a couple of years later), but must-see experiences for people very close to me.

It cannot be that they are all idiots. It must be me. For 20 years I have been fighting a pointless personal battle to define myself by my non-watching of television, and have risked making myself culturally redundant as a result.

Maybe it is because I am weak. And a slow reader. And actually fairly thick. It takes quite a lot to get me through a book. Hours of pained concentration and self-denial. Perhaps I feared that if I gave in to television even for a moment I would become hooked, and that hours would disappear down the tube as they used to when I was stoned all day, during the last recession in the early 1990s, and measured my life not by nightfall and daybreak but by the spaces between showings and re-showings of Neighbours - and that terrible feeling in the stomach at 2.30pm when the closing credits scrolled on Going for Gold and I still didn't have a job.

But I'm a grown-up now, and it must be possible to watch a bit of telly without falling off the end of the world. I don't want to end up some terrible, fogeyish, pipe-smoking Bufton-Tufton and have to go and work for The Daily Telegraph.

So let us call it a new year's resolution. I shall go downstairs now and switch on the box and watch just whatever the hell comes out. And I shall stick with it no matter how witless, thumping and savage it seems, resisting all temptation to switch it off and open the new Philip Roth. If you can vote on it, I will vote. If there is a funny bit I shall laugh aloud and repeat the joke endlessly to my girlfriend.

And when it's over I will phone my friends and say, “Hey, did you see...?” I will get over myself and my stupid “literary” thing. I will put aside my little snobberies. And when I have got the hang of television, I will maybe buy an iPod, and walk the streets nodding gormlessly to newly downloaded dance tunes. I will get an iPhone and play video games in my left hand during meals, meetings, conversations...

I will start buying a lottery ticket twice a week, and the odd scratchcard, I will read the Daily Mail, talk a lot about cars, and get into Harry Potter and Nick Hornby and Irvine Welsh. I will have a favourite Page Three girl. I shall wear huge, baggy, long-crotched jeans and hooded tops and turn all my sentences into questions.

In short, I will be free.

The second series of Giles Coren's The Supersizers Go... will be shown on BBC Two in May

Times Recommends

• Fundamentalist brew: faith and power
• Big guns wheeled out for the marginals
• Wanted: new merchants of light