WHAT did people do before TV was invented? I’m about to find out...

My telly is on the blink. I’ve been without it a whole five days and it’s making me feel irritable and hard done by. For several months I’ve had poor satellite reception and now I can’t get any channels, or even watch recorded programmes. Having twiddled all the buttons, checked the cables and done the turning-off-and-on-again thing, I contacted Sky and was told they couldn’t send an engineer out for three weeks.

I remember the days when people rented TV sets, and I’m pretty sure that if something went wrong a man from Radio Rentals would be round to fix it within a day or two. Now it’s 2018 and I have to wait the best part of a month for an appointment. Digital TV is fine until it goes wrong.

I only have one TV (it’s bad feng shui or something in the bedroom), my laptop has died and I’m not modern enough to watch telly any other way. So, for the first time since I was a student (when I had a life instead of a telly), I’m not watching any TV. It feels like I’m part of a social experiment, like those programmes that take families back to the 19th century when they have to eat lard, wear a shawl and use a mangle.

I keep telling myself it’s no bad thing to be without television for a while. I’ll go swimming instead. I’ll sort out all those old photos left untouched in a box. I’ll paint the bathroom, clean the oven, read the works of Dickens. I’ll become ‘accomplished’ and fill my time with embroidery and poetry, like ladies of old.

It’s not as if I watch loads of telly anyway. I don’t get home from work until the evening, and I’m often out one or two nights a week. I never watch daytime TV, and if I’m home at weekends I’d rather have the radio on.

But, like many people, after a day at work, if there’s nothing else planned, I like to unwind with a bit of telly. Not even having that option makes me feel churlishly sorry for myself.

Maybe it’s God’s way of getting me off the sofa. According to a report I read this week, UK adults spend eight times longer watching TV than they do exercising. Research by not-for-profit health body ukactive reveals that Brits spend an average of 12 hours a week watching on-demand TV, compared with one hour 30 minutes being physically active. That’s roughly 624 hours a year (26 whole days), compared with 78 hours (three days) of physical activity.

A quarter of UK adults are classed as physically inactive, getting fewer than 30 minutes of exercise a week: 14 per cent admit they get no exercise at all. Leisure time risks being dominated by screen time, with adults spending around 12 hours a week on social media and 17 hours in total per week on smartphones and tablets.

Add to that the amount of time many of us spend sitting at a desk, and behind a wheel driving home, and a sedentary lifestyle dominated by the job, the car, the TV and the computer starts to look like an inactivity crisis.

Meeting the recommended levels of exercise can lead to significant health benefits, including reduced risk of type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia and some cancers, according to Public Health England.

Physical inactivity is a silent killer and it’s lurking with a scythe in my living-room. Time to hit the gym. Maybe there’ll be a telly in there...