I haven't actually seen The Wright Way, Ben Elton's latest sitcom, but I've sensed the waves of negative feedback it's generated, in much the same way Obi Wan Kenobi felt a great disturbance in the Force when the Death Star destroyed the planet Alderaan, except rather than sensing a million voices crying out in terror, I've merely seen it trend on Twitter accompanied by a swarm of Anti-LOLs.

Despite not having seen it, I can safely say it can't possibly be as harrowing as everyone's making out, unless it consists of nothing but live footage of a kitten autopsy performed by a blindfolded drunk. Having co-written The Young Ones, Filthy Rich and Catflap, and Blackadder, Ben Elton has been responsible for more deep, gut-level guffaws than the vast majority of people on the planet, an achievement that will prove ultimately snark-proof when they finally come to write his obituary.

One of the major criticisms of The Wright Way, apart from the title and scripting and performances and set design and soundtrack and ambience and positioning of each individual pixel making up the overall image, is the main character's chosen career: he's a bungling council health and safety officer. Satirising health and safety is like moaning about the weather: as British as it is boring. And it's something I've never quite grasped, because in my view, health and safety legislation doesn't go far enough. Everything is a threat. Existence is hostile. To be alive on Planet Earth is to be pinned by an unseen gravitational force beyond your control to the surface of an almighty bauble of death cluttered with sharp objects, death traps, diseases, disasters and killers concocting new and exotic means of inflicting agony upon your person, all of it revolving silently in an infinite and eternal vacuum, the sheer insensate vastness of which is simply too ghastly for the human mind to contemplate. Printing "CAUTION: CONTENTS HOT" on the side of a disposable coffee cup doesn't come close to mitigating the horror. But it's a start.

My mind prints warnings on everything. Shove any object into my eyeline and my mind immediately paints a vivid triptych detailing all the ways it could possibly hurt me. I can't walk past, say, a loaded knife block without the words "CAUTION: DEATH" hovering over it, like an annotation in Google Glass, and I automatically imagine myself tripping up and skewering my eye on the knives, the blade piercing the socket and stabbing my brain right in the pain-processing lab, even though the knives are safely stored handle-side-out, the cutting edges shielded by an inch of wood.

Being a parent just makes it worse, because suddenly there's a miniature offshoot version of you that's simply too stupid to be terrified of everything yet, crawling towards power sockets and choking hazards with cartoon delight on its face. And those are just the obvious risks. There's a whole universe of neurotic horror if you go looking for it. Did you know it's risky to feed honey to babies? Nor did I, till I stumbled across that rib-tickling fact online. Something to do with infant guts and botulism. Honey. Killer honey. It shook me, and I briefly lost sight of the fact that my offspring was human. Instead he was a mysterious, precious machine the world wanted to destroy by any means necessary. I ran Google queries like "is bread deadly for one-year-olds?" and "will sleet blind my child?" I want health and safety advice etched into every object in the universe, thanks.

And not just objects that currently exist, but also things to come. For these we have to turn to the news: part early-warning-system, part Argos catalogue of exciting new threats. I'm a fear hobbyist. An early adopter of perils. Obviously I'm busily keeping one eye on the latest bird flu outbreaks in China, but my fear antennae recently started twitching over reports about the world's first 3D printable gun, the CAD files for which have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times since being placed on open release last week. A future filled with plastic firearms-on-demand doesn't sound too rosy to me, although on the plus side I guess the next generation will be shit-hot at ducking. Not to mention wreath design. So it won't be all bad. And besides, eventually all the 3D printers will be so busy churning out coffins, the print queue will stretch into decades, thereby preventing the creation of more bullets. Incidentally, if I had a 3D printer, I'd mess with its mind by commanding it to print out nothing but a series of precise replicas of a single sheet of paper. That'd show it.

I'd like to think this paranoid fretting serves some evolutionary purpose. I'd like to think we easily alarmed types are historically better at survival. But I suspect that's not true. There's no rhyme nor reason. It's random. When a volcano goes off, it incinerates the carefree and cautious alike.

Don't know about you, but I hate the carefree for that. It's downright arrogant of them to die in disasters without worrying first. Almost a waste. Almost.