Unless the weather's majestically terrible or some new 9/11 magnitude event takes place, there's absolutely no excuse for watching TV on holiday. If you're somewhere sunny, chances are you won't watch anything at all, unless you're such a dull football-liking git you think you'll lose the ability to breathe if you can't see the latest match via satellite in a horrific bar specialising in full English breakfasts and sugary cocktails surrounded by fellow pink-shouldered, cow-brained, hooting, awful wankers.

By the time you read this I'll be back, but right now I'm in Crete, staying in a place whose satellite TV system offers about 10bn channels, approximately 100% of which aren't in English. OK, so you can pick up the BBC World TV news channel, but no one's ever willingly watched that for longer than nine minutes. It's a channel whose viewer demographic consists exclusively of men sitting on the edge of a hotel bed impatiently waiting for their girlfriend to finish in the shower so they can go and have a shit.

Part of the fun of having so many incomprehensible foreign channels is flicking through them and trying to guess what country they're from. If you're as ignorant as me, this is usually completely impossible. Lots of them look like news broadcasts from the Star Wars universe (specifically, the Clone Wars era). The basic visual grammar of news is always the same - host, desk, spinny CGI graphics and so on - but they're often accompanied by national dress codes and entire alphabets I've never seen before. I swear one channel featured a newsreader with a designer lampshade on his head and a headline ticker comprising nothing but triangles and spirals scrolling right to left across the screen. I couldn't tell you precisely what story he was reporting on, but I think it concerned a trade dispute in another dimension.

News aside, there are hundreds of channels promoting phonewank services, usually with an Indian or Middle Eastern flavour. One consisted of a photo of a lady's bum, a phone number, and nothing else. It didn't change once during the six or seven hours I watched it.

Still, every so often you stumble across something that authentically draws you in. The other night it got too windy to venture outside, and I wound up watching an Arabic TV movie (helpfully subtitled in English) about a guy called Majid who kidnapped an Iraqi general who'd killed his parents, and then agonised for ages (and ages and ages) over whether to shoot him or not. There were scenes shot in real bombed-out villages - incredibly disconcerting to my western eyes - and despite being shot on pretty harsh video, the overall level of visual artistry seemed higher than the average British TV drama. Majid didn't shoot him in the end, incidentally: the general escaped, only to be killed moments later by a landmine. God moves in predictable ways.

But perhaps the most mesmerising thing I've seen was a few moments of the Greek incarnation of Britain's Got Talent. It was instantly recognisable - same format, same logo, same visual grammar and similar acts. This only served to highlight the differences. Instead of young, slim Ant and Dec, there was one middle-aged paunchy bloke standing just off stage giggling to the cameras. The judges, meanwhile, were spectacular. Impossibly, they look even weirder than the British Morgan/Holden/Cowell lineup. There was a pretty woman, a bloke who resembled a bleached-blond pimp from the year 2049, and a terrifying man who appeared to have undergone extensive plastic surgery at the hands of a demented satirical artist - who'd decided to make him look precisely like David Hasselhoff morphing into Michael Jackson. I didn't see him indoors. I was standing in the night air, watching him for several minutes on a silent plasma TV through the window of a shut hair salon, before snapping out of the trance and getting on with the holiday. Wherever you go, TV ultimately tastes the same. And there's more than enough of it at home.