“They” tell us that our attention span is getting shorter, yet the way in which TV execs manage to eke out the flimsiest concept for a quiz show to fit an hour’s worth of programming (51 minutes on commercial telly) suggests that the contrary is true.

When plot development, implication and context are banished from drama in case the audience gets bored and switches on QVC and no comedy is allowed on air unless it gets four shots of canned laugher in the minute after the opening titles end, how can this have come to pass?

I think it started with Tarrant and Millionaire, with his constant incantation of the rules at every 20 seconds and cheque-waving “antics”.

While off work earlier in the year I became acquainted with Deal Or No Deal, a 51-minute programme in which 22 boxes are opened at random. Quite how or why it takes 51 minutes for someone to choose 22 random numbers is beyond me. It’s a show best watched on Sky+ at 30x speed, which begins to approximate how long the process should take.

Tonight, for the first time, I found almost an hour of my life sucked out of me by Sky One’s Are You Smarter Than A 10-Year-Old? (The title is ambiguous but it turns out they’re talking about a ten-year-old child rather than a nicely maturing malt whisky.) It somehow takes 51 minutes for a series of chav “characters” to squeal, bounce up and down and answer (invariably incorrectly) about a dozen brainteasers such as “What is the range of the numbers 1 and 11?”

I saw three contestants – two left with nothing, the third with £250. (You could win £250,000 if you know things such as that “a torch” is the only light source on a list made up of “a mirror”, “a window” and “a torch”.) Noel Edmonds, who by law is now mandated to host all new game shows, repeated the rules three times in the 40-odd minutes I saw.

I ate my lasagne and orange yoghurt and barely moved throughout as I watched the car wreck unfold. When the credits rolled I began to feel the sort of guilt I’ve not often felt since teenage fumblings and had to take a shower.