Friends - well-meaning friends - occasionally flatter my ego by telling me I'm intelligent. Not brilliantly clever, but relatively smart when compared side-by-side with, say, a tangerine. They're kind, my friends. But I know they're lying. Inside, I feel dumb as a backward monkey. Especially when I watch the news.

That's because when I watch the news, I don't always fully comprehend what's happening. Tuning into the news can be like stumbling across episode 908 of the world's most complicated soap opera; a soap with an immensely labyrinthine plot which has been unfolding for centuries. It's a backstory I'm not familiar with. Unless you strain to pay attention, or are naturally addicted, it's easy to fall behind, to lose track of current affairs, and be left with a fuzzy sense of what's going on; a smudge of images and headlines and buzzy phrases: Carbon Footprint, Credit Crunch, Broken Britain, Quantitative Easing.

To make matters worse, everyone else in the world seems to inherently understand precisely what's happening, and furthermore, to hold pretty strong opinions on what to do about it. They debate and debate till they're blue in the face, on Question Time, on the internet, in the front of a cab or the back of a pub. Where are they getting all this information from? And why does the world seem so simple to them? It rarely looks black and white from where I'm sitting; more a swirl of grey smears which grow more indistinct the more you look at them.

Still, ignorance is a shameful thing to confess to. We point and chortle at the stupidity of reality TV stars who think Palestine is a type of modelling clay, but if we ourselves aren't 100% sure if the IRA are Catholics or Protestants, we daren't admit it when Northern Ireland comes up in conversation (I myself wasn't sure about that one for years, and feel incredibly embarrassed even now to come clean in print).

And, as the real world gets more complex and the other world - the virtual realm of fictional distractions - grows more sophisticated, more alluring and hypnotic, keeping abreast of current events is surely harder than ever. It doesn't help that the news has to travel through a series of distorting Crazy Straws before entering your brain. TV news now comes packaged as a dazzling CGI cartoon, with the names of star anchors included in the programme title, and an absurdly theatrical air of bombast underpinning every second of every broadcast. Traditional newspapers, beaten to the punch by the immediacy of the internet and 24-hour news networks, are becoming less and less bothered with breaking actual news than celebrity gossip, or provocative comment, or shouty campaigning. The internet, meanwhile, can be a great source of rapidly updated information, but is also home to an endless range of partisan news sources, paranoid imaginings, and outright hoaxes. Is it possible for anyone to truly know what the hell's going on?

Probably not. But in a wild and possibly ill-advised attempt at self-improvement, I decided to immerse myself completely in the world of news by trying my hand at a current affairs-based spin-off of my BBC4 show Screen Wipe. Screen Wipe, if you haven't seen it, largely consists of me sitting at home hurling abuse at various television programmes and occasionally pretending to masturbate until people write in to complain. Newswipe is - as the title suggests - essentially the same, except this time I'm way out of my comfort zone. I'll be reviewing the news as though it's an entertainment show. Which it both is and isn't. It's one thing to take the piss out of Britannia High. It's another entirely to sift through hours of reportage on quantitative easing looking for funnies, or a point. Right now my life consists of rolling news networks and daily deliveries of countless news bulletins on DVD. I'm at the point now where I can actually picture Robert Peston's face more clearly than my own.

Interestingly, the first thing I've learned is that the more news you ingest, the less you actually know. For one thing, your brain - or my brain at any rate - can't hold that much information. And all stories are fractal: the closer you look, the more detail emerges, and it's apparently infinite, down to the atoms. When it comes to complex issues such as the economy, there are a billion differing points of view, and the only thing that can be said with any certainty is that there is no certainty whatsoever. The news doesn't like this kind of ambiguity one bit, of course, and tries to break everything down into an exciting two-sided mud-slinging match that helps no one.

Another thing I noticed is that my timing's absolutely dreadful. At the time of writing, the news seems to consist solely of financial apocalypse, celebrity illness, terrorism, and spree killings. They may as well replace Sky News with a channel called Abyss 24; a dark, bottomless chasm for the viewer to stare into. Although it might prove hard to sell advertising space. Current Affairs Land is a profoundly depressing place to visit. I preferred my time on Ignorance Island. At least it was warm there.

Newswipe is not aimed at politics junkies or (for want of a better term) Radio 4 listeners. It's aimed at people like me: average types who feel like they've fallen behind and are a touch ashamed about it; people who feel the world has become a dark joke they don't fully understand. And people who appreciate bum jokes and swearing. Not that it's all bum jokes and swearing.

Thankfully, to counterbalance (or possibly just distract attention from) my ignorance and inborn puerility, we also have contributions from people who know what they're talking about and rarely, if ever, resort to cheap wank jokes: Bad Science columnist Ben Goldacre, Flat Earth News author Nick Davies, and political journalist Peter Oborne. The documentary maker Adam Curtis has made us a lovely little film about the rise of "Oh Dearism", and there'll be specially-made pieces from comedian-reporters Shazia Mirza and Natalie Haynes and some funny topical poetry from Tim Key. Basically what I'm saying is that the show will consist of a very stupid person (me) surrounded by some very clever people (them), trying to make sense of a very complex thing (the world), in a way that will entertain you (the viewer).

Yes, entertainment is the ultimate goal, and possibly a bit of explanation along the way. Although it could well turn out to be absolute shit. I have no idea, just as I don't know what's going to happen next in the news. And news being news, things could go horribly wrong between now and the first transmission. You could be reading this in a bunker for all I know. Still, that's what makes the world exciting, I guess. The uncertainty of it all.

• Newswipe, 10pm, Wed, BBC4;

Things I've learned from watching the news

'If it bleeds, it leads'

It's a cliche, but a depressingly accurate one. On the day thousands of people took to the streets of Northern Ireland to denounce violence, their efforts were shunted down the news menu by a lone German maniac's random shooting spree. Bad news wins.

Robert Peston's delivery

His speed up/slow down speech patterns make him sound like a man receiving a blowjob under the desk who's desperately trying to cover it up. Just like the chief of police in that scene in Police Academy.

Terrible wordplay is in

Sky's Dermot Murnaghan spent a week travelling the UK by bike to see how the recession was affecting ordinary people. The item's name? Dermot's Economic Cycle.

The economic crisis is vague

It's so complex, and so non-visual, the news networks send themselves insane trying to illustrate what, say, quantitative easing is. They cook up so many different metaphors - one minute the economy is like a frozen fish tank, the next it's a faulty car engine - that the more reports you watch, the more confused you get. Still, this bafflement qualifies you as an expert, since the pundits don't know what's happening either.