A new study reveals the terrifying truth that too much television lowers your volume of grey matter. But TV is the defining art form of our age – so I refuse to quit

Until now, claims that television makes you stupid have only been backed up by anecdotal evidence. True, at a certain point it does seem that people who watch vast amounts of TV do become so intellectually impaired that they start involuntarily clapping along to theme tunes like imprisoned sea lions performing for fish, but that isn’t anything you could write a medical paper about.

Now, sadly, science has trundled along to back it up. According to Dr Ryan Dougherty, from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, the more television you watch in middle age, the lower your volume in grey matter. Examining the viewing habits of 599 American adults between 1990 and 2011, Dougherty found that those who watched an above average amount of television showed reduced volume in their frontal cortex and entorhinal cortex. Basically, your mum was right: TV really does rot your brain.

Once seemingly a fast track to cancellation, TV shows are again dancing around the censors with almost-curse words in their titles. But do they still make viewers go WTF?

When Eugene and Dan Levy were first pitching their idea for a comedy about a wealthy family who go broke, there was one major stumbling block: the name. When several channels asked them to change the title from Schitt’s Creek to something less vulgar, the Levys doubled down. They pulled out pages from a phone directory to prove that there were actual people with the sweary surname. “If CBC was doing a news broadcast with the name Schitt, would you not use it?”, Eugene Levy told the Toronto Star. “They said: ‘Yes, we would air the name.’” After throwing it at the network’s wall, they finally got Schitt to stick.

But when it aired in 2015, the series was not without its issues. NPR had to spell out the word when talking about it; some channels, such as CBS, had to flash up what’s known as “the lower third” – subtitles literally spelling it out – every time they mentioned it on air. Some TV and radio stations were reduced to simply calling it “Creek”, presumably confusing both Dawson’s Creek and Jonathan Creek fans in the process.