Ask anyone with a Sky box: the problem with the multi-channel universe is how samey it all is. Hundreds of stations pumping out the same palliative mulch.

But every so often a new start-up channel emerges with a leftfield agenda. It's always worth tuning in once, just for the surprise value. There was Isle Of Wight TV, which seems to have vanished now. And SoundTV, which consisted of old-school variety and interviews with Richard Digance. That's gone too. These rogue stations don't tend to last long.

Well here's a new one: Edge Media TV (Sky Channel 200), "a platform for alternative and suppressed viewpoints". In other words, it's chock-full of conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theorists need to believe their viewpoints are being suppressed, rather than, say, assessed and dismissed as ropey and ludicrous. Which makes a channel devoted to spreading these viewpoints a bit of a paradox. If "the system" was even 1% as efficient and sinister as they believe, their station wouldn't exist.

But it does, broadcasting programmes with titles like Question Everything and Hidden Agenda, and a talkshow called Esoteria, which according to the host is "a SHOW, not a PROGRAMME - we aim to SHOW you alternative viewpoints rather than PROGRAM you to accept a particular point of view". He must be proud of that bit of mind-expanding wordplay because he repeats it quite a lot. A bit like he's programming you, actually.

And herein lies the tragedy. The other day I tuned in to Eerie Investigations, in which the host, a strangely simpering woman with Eerie Investigations printed on her T-shirt, conducted vox-pop interviews with people at an anti-ID card rally. There are a thousand valid reasons for opposing ID cards and questioning everything the government does, but instead both the host and her interviewees spent most of their time talking about how we're all going to have microchips planted in our heads as part of the New World Order (which, naturally, orchestrated the 9/11 attacks), intermittently breaking from this theme to dismiss the general public as idiotic, docile sheep with such towering self-assurance it made you actively wonder whether labouring under a fascist police state in which government computers monitored your dreams and doled out electric shocks each time you had a subversive thought would be preferable to living in freedom alongside these massive wankers.

Maybe "wankers" is a bit harsh. These are essentially clever people gone wrong. Having learned to mistrust the powers that be, they take a giant leap, mistaking bossiness and incompetence for ultra-organised and sinister plotting - and then compound the error by mistaking themselves for journalists or scientists. The result is a depressing descent into fairytales backed with risible "evidence"; fairytales told with the defensive assertion that anyone who doesn't believe them is a shill or a sheep.

Consider Ludicrous Diversion, an Edge Media documentary which implies the 7/7 bombers weren't really bombers at all, but patsies framed by "the system". Rather than offering any hard evidence for this startling claim, it highlights minor anomalies in the official version of events, the police's reluctance to release CCTV footage, and references to past miscarriages of justice such as the Guildford Four, then expects the viewer to add two and two to make 25. It's like a lazy and badly made Power Of Nightmares, convincing only to the eagerly paranoid.

In-between the programmes, there are adverts for Cillit Bang (whose exact role in the New World Order has yet to be established) and a seven-hour - yes, SEVEN HOUR - "DVD presentation" from David Icke, in which he tells the viewer how the world really works. And presumably apologises for not employing an editor.

In summary: it's bunkum. But then I would say that, wouldn't I? I'm a mainstream media shill. They've got to me already. And now they're coming for YOU.