The London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games boasts that huge city-centre television screens will be a “lasting legacy” of the Olympic Games. I have a horrible feeling it may be right.

Nobody can rationally object to a temporary screen and a fleeting festival, but eight permanent mammoth tellies with 40 more to come, for ever, will clearly be a horrendous imposition - useless except as an eyesore for most of their projected life, especially in winter. They are already, rather too obviously, advertising billboards - flickering ominously through the night and bearing the legend “Philips” in big letters. Would I be correct in guessing that this is the real reason they have to be permanent? Is it that “temporary” would fail to satisfy the sponsors.

Sadly, these proposed city-centre TV screens embody far less sinister doublespeak than George Orwell predicted. They are not evil, but gormless. They combine government gung-ho with the relentless creep of commercial pressure, and that curse of the 21st century - well-meaning nincompoopery. They will certainly happen in areas not protected by good sense and proper government - places that already suffer from ugly town centres and derelict planning.

It is shaming that the Government should ignore its own advisory groups, such as CABE (the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment) and English Heritage not to mention local trusts and societies which object to such wilful desecration. All their reservations are ignored. It sends a message to all of us: don't bother to join your civic society, don't bother to care, don't bother to have pride in your town; our latest temporary bully-up enthusiasm is “urgent” and overrides your knowledge and concern.

Personally, I do not relish watching the Mayor of London engaging in would-be Nuremberg rallies. I don't want to be told by the Lord Coe that I have some sort of public duty to commune with his pet project. But now, as a passer-by, I will be forced to encounter it on a mammoth television. Mind you, as a passer-by I can jeer loudly, toss my Coke can down, stub out my fag and do that - pass by. But if I live near one, and have invested my life in the area, what choice do I have? I can see it all day or listen to it all day. I am doomed to endure the crowd that congregates around it, doomed to have it desecrate my environment for ever.

The Olympic committee seems to assume that no one actually lives in the centre of towns. They are wrong. In London, Leeds, Manchester - everywhere across Britain - people are moving back into town centres, helping to make them liveable spaces. This sort of development destroys their environment.

People care just as passionately about their towns as Lord Coe does about his athletics. The Olympics will come, and difficult as it may seem to Lord Coe and his supporters, the Olympics will also go. Not these mega-tellies. Our cities have been ruined in the name of commercial interests in the past 60 years, and the results have been wastelands of violence and indulgence, largely predicated on the notion that these are “fun” areas where normal rules don't apply. We need people to live in those city centres for many reasons, including sound, modern, green ones. Now they must have TV sets blaring out at them.

How long will it take before the screens are no longer economically viable as “entertainment centres” and are given over to advertising? Soon charity displays and, shortly after, “approved sponsors” will follow. Even the National Lottery has to advertise. I once visited a croft in a highland village dwarfed by a sign trumpeting its lottery grant. Murder must advertise. Surely the lottery and basic services could restrain themselves.

Most councils have public buildings under their care that they are letting fall into disrepair. There are countless churches, beautifully designed cinemas and huge theatres descending into rot. Many are buildings of public assembly. If our mentors want to gather us up to watch their beanos, why not use these places? Well, I know why. And so do they. People might not choose to watch their circuses or their rock concerts or step off the roadway to view the valuable instruction they are to be offered, if they had to make the slightest effort to do so.

They already choose not to go to these places. The underlying truth is already flashing glaringly at us. Don't risk personal commitment - just broadcast. Don't expect people to choose, just propagandise. Don't give people the option, just push your “entertainment” on them. A short-term, badly thought-out proposal for a hot summer night is transformed into a permanent flickering hoarding, blaring away during a wet February. What a legacy.

Has the Government learnt nothing from the Dome debacle? They are not entertainment moguls. That any of these screens should become permanent, is a dreadful, wasteful, aesthetically horrible idea. That lottery funding can so casually be sequestered to achieve this is verging on public corruption. Orwell never imagined this cack-handed horror even in his worst nightmares.

Griff Rhys Jones is a broadcaster and president of the Civic Trust

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