Daytime television on BBC1 has a new slogan: "Make the most of your day." Is this capitulation? Is daytime TV conceding its addictive time-killing, life-sapping effect and exhorting us to escape while we still can? Are the forces of evil finally losing heart, like Darth Vader turning on the Emperor to save his son or O'Brien repenting tragically too late of the soap-based booby trap she'd laid for her mistress? (And if you haven't watched either Return of the Jedi or Downton Abbey then I'm bang out of cultural references that you're going to get.)

No. The BBC is actually claiming that watching daytime TV constitutes making the most of your day. The slogan is preceded by an exciting-looking montage of excerpts from shows. They went past in a blur so I'm not sure what they were, but they exuded an overwhelming sense of significance: a clip from Doctors where someone is diagnosed with a terminal illness; a heartbreakingly botched dormer window from Cowboy Trap; the rescue of a malnourished spaniel from Animal 24:7; a bit of Land Girls where someone gets cross, that sort of thing. Don't touch that remote, it's imploring. Don't change channel or get off your arse. No need to move because this, watching this, is making the most of your day. Do not leave the room! It's Bargain Hunt in a minute! This is life lived to the full.

The BBC Trust disagrees. In its review of all aspects of the corporation's output, it picked out daytime as the weakest link and pointless – and that's just a snippet from the schedule. It called for shows that are less "formulaic and derivative". It wants to put a stop to the endless footage of people buying and selling antiques and houses.

This makes me uneasy. I work from home a lot and so I'm a major user of daytime TV. I use it to waste time in a very specific way – to squander short chunks of it. I'm supposed to be working, I can't face it, I wander round the house, I put the kettle on, I turn on the TV, it engages me for a few minutes, then gradually I lose interest and return to my computer, maybe do a bit of work – writing this sentence, for example – then pop back to the kettle and/or television. I'm going there now, back in a minute.

I'm back. A professional couple from Peterborough who are looking to relocate somewhere with more space for the husband's motorbike collection didn't like house number two because it was too close to a noisy road. The host suggested double-glazing. I wandered away and put some toast in.

Texturally, daytime TV is a delicate and remarkable thing. The morning schedule on BBC1 is a series of programmes that, while apparently almost unbelievably bland, becomes more intriguing and varied the closer one looks, like a patchwork of a thousand different beiges, while retaining the key attribute of being too boring to watch for more than 20 minutes at a stretch. The toast has popped.

Well, that's the last of the good jam. A mother and daughter from Plymouth just sold a decanter for a £19 loss but then it didn't have its own stopper. The next lot was a 1950s Mickey Mouse ashtray so I went for a look at Twitter.

BBC Daytime is a groundbreaking experiment into how much people can be induced to take a passing interest in activities that don't concern them. There's a programme about a company that specialises in finding the relatives of people who have died intestate. It simply follows their working day: "Gladys died in St Thomas's nursing home in 2006 leaving £82,000 from the sale of her house. The nurses at the home say she often spoke of a half-sister, Gwen, who died of pneumonia during the three-day week. But did Gwen ever marry and have children? Investigator Peter Edwards goes to Preston records office to find out." Then they film the guy setting his satnav.

There's a programme in which people who want to move house are shown three hastily chosen properties, pick one and are then allowed to "try before they buy". This means "sit in for part of an afternoon". They get the full experience of residence but not for quite long enough to need the loo. At the end, they're asked if they're going to buy the house and they always – in my experience absolutely always – say no.

There's my personal favourite, Homes Under the Hammer, where the production company has just set up a video camera at a property auction and sent presenters to stalk the successful buyers. And there are three different antique purveying shows: one where the antiques are bought and sold in the same show; one where an expert trawls someone's attic for valuables to raise them money for the scuba holiday of their dreams; and one which is basically a more mercenary version of Antiques Roadshow with worse antiques. The subtle distinctions between these formats would be lost on those with proper jobs but are as apparent to me as different types of snow to an Inuit.

Just made a tea and watched an RSPCA man give a woman a stern talking to for not giving her horse the right jabs. He'll be checking up again in six months.

I need programmes like these – shows during which it is completely unnecessary to think. Of course I've got better things to watch – there's a cellophane-wrapped box set of The Sopranos on the shelf above my TV that's been gathering dust for three years – but they're no good to me. I need brief distractions that are easy to be distracted from. If I unwrapped a DVD, it would be like cracking open the scotch – I might as well file for bankruptcy.

I know daytime TV isn't primarily provided as brain massage for lazy comedy writers, but I wonder how many of its regular viewers are as displeased with it as the BBC Trust? My suspicion is that those trustees don't usually watch it; they're not familiar with the genre. They're comparing it to primetime programming, which people are perfectly able to watch during the daytime instead – on DVD, cable repeat, iPlayer or Sky/Virgin/Freeview Plus. Daytime pap has never been so avoidable. If it's still getting viewers, isn't that a sign that it's not just feckless freelancers who are in the market for inconsequential television?

I still take issue with that slogan, though. I have a suggested replacement: "BBC1 Daytime. Because there's always tomorrow."