That’s it, I’m off. Kind of. After over a decade of scribbling weekly TV reviews for the Guardian’s Saturday supplement The Guide, I’m hanging up my hat – the hat with “Screen Burn” stitched into it.

Since I started writing the column, back in August 2000, TV has changed beyond all recognition. Big Brother, The Wire, 24 and Friday Night With Jonathan Ross came and went. Doctor Who, Noel Edmonds and Battlestar Galactica returned. Celebrity humiliation became a national sport. Johnny Rotten fought an ostrich. Timmy Mallett drank a pint of liquidised kangaroo penis in front of Ant and Dec; Jade Goody received her cancer diagnosis in a Diary Room. Ambitious US drama serials with season-long story arcs enjoyed a renaissance. The Office, The Thick Of It, and Peep Show popped up. Stewart Lee got a BBC2 series. The cast of The Inbetweeners sprouted sex organs. Glenn Beck occurred.

The way we watch changed, too: from peering at a cumbersome box in the corner of the room to basking in the unholy radiance of a 52-inch plasma screen buzzing quietly on the wall. The images leapt from SD to HD and now 3D. Time itself began to collapse as YouTube, Sky+ and the BBC iPlayer slowly chewed the notion of “schedules” to death.

At the start of the decade, I was receiving shows to review on clunky VHS tapes. By around 2005, roughly half the offerings arrived on DVD. Now online previewing is the norm. In five years’ time, most shows will probably come in the form of an inhalable gas which makes visions dance in your brain.

So why quit now? Well partly because I’m afraid of that future, but mostly because 11 years of essentially rewriting the phrase “X is an arsehole haw haw haw” over and over until you hit the 650-word limit is enough for anyone.

See, I was never a proper critic. In my head, a “proper critic” is an intellectually rigorous individual with an encyclopaedic knowledge of their specialist subject and an admirably nerdy compulsion to dissect, compare and analyse each fresh offering in the field – not in a bid to mindlessly entertain the reader, but to further humankind’s collective understanding of the arts. True critics are witty rather than abusive, smart rather than smart-arsed, contemplative rather than extrovert. I, on the other hand, was chiefly interested in making the reader laugh. And the quickest way to do this was to pen insults. Oh, I tried to make the odd point here and there, but the bulk of it – the stuff people actually remember – consists of playground, yah-boo stuff.

I was horrible. I fantasised about leaping into the screen and attacking a Big Brother contestant with a hammer; then, without a hint of irony, announced that Nicky Campbell exuded the menace of a serial killer. I also claimed Jeremy Kyle (who struck me as “a cross between Matthew Wright and a bored carpet salesman”) was the Prince of Darkness himself – almost (“Look at his eyes: there’s a spine-chilling glint to them … Not that I’m saying Kyle himself is an agent of Satan, you understand. I’m just saying you could easily cast him as one. Especially if you wanted to save money on special effects.”).

The moment anyone appeared on screen, I struggled to find a nice way to describe their physical appearance. David Dickinson was “an ageing Thundercat”; Alan Titchmarsh resembled “something looming unexpectedly at a porthole in a Captain Nemo movie”; Nigel Lythgoe was “Eric Idle watching a dog drown”. I called Alan Sugar “Mrs Tiggywinkle” and said he reminded me of “a water buffalo straining to shit in a lake”. What a bastard. And I’m no oil painting myself, unless the painting in question depicts a heartbroken carnival mask hurriedly moulded from surgically extracted stomach fat and stretched across a damaged, despondent hubcap. I think that constitutes some form of justification.

Looking back at the earlier columns I see that when I wasn’t preoccupied with looks, I was quite bafflingly angry. I’ve either mellowed since then, or simply grown a soul. For instance, these days – to pick a random example – Jamie Cullum strikes me as a harmless, twinkly eyed, happy sort of chap. But back in 2004 the mere sight of him on an episode of Parkinson sent me into an apocalyptic tailspin.

‘I’d like to say that I wasn’t nasty about women but I’d be lying. I wrote that Ann Widdecombe had a face like a haunted cave in Poland’

Photograph: John Wright/BBC/PA Wire

“Cullum should be sealed inside a barrel and kicked into the ocean,” I declared, before going on to label him “an oily, sickening worm-boy … if I ever have to see this gurning little maggot clicking into faux reverie mode again – rising from his seat to jazz-slap the top of his piano wearing a fake-groove expression on his piggish little face – if I have to witness that one more time I’m going to rise up and kill absolutely everybody in the world, starting with him and ending with me.”

Shortly after that article appeared I read a short Me And My Spoon-type interview with Cullum in London’s Metro newspaper in which he seemed cheerily bemused as to what he’d done to provoke such fury. And I felt bad. I’d like to say that I wasn’t nasty about women – but I’d be lying. I wrote that Ann Widdecombe had “a face like a haunted cave in Poland”, and that Cilla Black was “starting to resemble the result of an unholy union between Ronald McDonald and a blow-dried guinea pig”.

Neither of them warranted that abuse, although the poo-prodding food fascist Gillian McKeith probably did deserve to be called a “charmless, judgmental, hand-wringing harridan … incapable of smiling naturally on camera … the rictus grin in her official photo makes her look like she’s trying to shit out a pine cone, which given her diet she probably is.”

People sometimes ask if I’ve ever bumped into any of the people I’ve been rude about. Yup. As soon as I started appearing on television myself, I began receiving invites to various industry functions and found myself too curious and big-headed not to attend. Suddenly you’re standing in a room full of people you’ve slagged off in print, and they’re not 2D screen-wraiths any more, but living, breathing, fallible humanoids, many of whom are clutching wine glasses which – should the mood turn sour – would make for fearsome improvised weapons. Once or twice I found myself in conversation with someone I’d been awful about in print, and discovered to my horror that the ruder I’d been, the warmer and more pleasant they appeared to be in the flesh. A black eel of guilt writhed in my skull. Why was I so nasty? These were TV presenters, not war criminals. Well, most of them.

Sometimes they weren’t even presenters. The rise of reality shows led to a ceaseless parade of instant hate figures, plucked from obscurity and flung onscreen for us all to sneer and point at. And I fell for it, endlessly picking holes in fellow human beings simply because they happened to be on TV.

I reached my misanthropic peak during series six of Big Brother, during which the contestant Maxwell was labelled “a goon, a berk, a gurgling bore, a ham-eyed poltroon and a great big swaggering chump”, not to mention, “a Norf Lahnden bozo best described as the human equivalent of a clipping from Nuts magazine bobbing in a fetid urinal”. His girlfriend Saskia had “a face that could advertise war”, while eventual winner Anthony was “a man so profoundly thick you could sell him a pair of his own socks for £500, even if he was already wearing them.”

I met Saskia several years later, incidentally, when she had a cameo as a zombie in a horror serial I wrote. She was lovely, and I felt bad, yet again. The bad feeling reached a nadir when I reviewed a contrived Channel 4 reality show in which families road-tested servants. I proclaimed that the family in question were a bunch of shits: shits so shittily shitty they might as well actually be called “The Shits”. Given that they’d doubtless been edited to look bad, this wasn’t really a fair assessment. Worse than that, it wasn’t funny. The moment I saw it in black and white, I felt like a witless bully.

I realised that I’d fallen into the trap of writing from the point of view of an exaggerated cartoon persona, so from that point on I tried to pick my targets with more care, and to moderate the overt abuse which undoubtedly made the columns less vicious, more whimsical, and probably more boring, although hopefully this meant that when invective was still called for – as with a piece on the Aryan Brotherhood, or the rolling news coverage of the Raoul Moat standoff – it had more sting.

But now … now it’s time to stop. Like I said, I’m exhausted. And writing a TV column over the past few years has felt progressively weirder, as I’ve gradually, simultaneously, become one of “them”: one of the many faces that flit across your screen, gently spoiling your evening. Fortunately for fans of unpleasant similes, my successor Grace Dent is a singularly heartless individual who’ll have none of my wussy qualms about insulting people. That woman is pure hate.

Oh, and reader: I’ll be back later in the year with a new column, right here in these pages. I give it three weeks before I’m filling it with playground insults. You’re still not shot of me. Remember, reader: only one of us gets out of this relationship alive.



Order the Screen Burn anthology from the Guardian bookshop. The 10th anniversary reissue of Charlie Brooker’s TV Go Home book is pulished by Faber on 4 Nov