Close your eyes - not right away, but when you've got to the end of this sentence - and try to picture a world without you in it.

How was that? If you were being brutally honest, everything and everyone would probably look almost precisely the same, except someone else would be sitting at your desk at work, sleeping with your partner, or rifling through your DVD collection - which isn't even yours any more. It's theirs. And look at some of the crap they've bought. A Director's Cut, anniversary edition of St Elmo's Fire? Jesus.

Anyway, if a world minus you is depressing, a world minus everyone is worse. Which is why it's weird that someone's made an entire TV series about it: Life After People (Sun, 9pm, History Channel), which details what would happen if everyone on the planet disappeared tomorrow.

Yes, disappeared. The programme spends precisely zero time whatsoever speculating on what might have wiped us out. We've just buggered off somewhere. Migrated. Deleted ourselves from history, leaving no trace behind. Perhaps we had to leave in a hurry before some intergalactic cops turned up and started asking difficult questions about our human rights record.

Because we've merely scarpered there aren't billions of our bodies littering the streets, as you might expect following a more traditional apocalypse. Fortunately, we have left an almighty mess behind, and it's this detritus the series concentrates on. Episode one is devoted to exploring what might happen to all our previous bids at immortality: mummified bodies, cryogenically frozen corpses, timeless artworks, etc. Turns out we're startlingly transient.

Take the mummies. They've survived for over 3,000 years, but because there's no power any more, they quickly start to decay in earnest in their plexiglass museum display cabinets. In Moscow, the embalmed corpse of Lenin shrivels until he resembles an anorexic, tannin-stained Gollum. In California, the cryogenically frozen bodies of movie moguls dribble into mulch. Immortal? Ha! In your face, suckers!

Upstairs, the (abandoned) International Space Station still pointlessly orbits the Earth. Onboard is an Immortality Drive containing the digitised DNA sequences of an eclectic bunch of people including Stephen Hawking, Stephen Colbert, and a Playboy model called Jo Garcia (this, astonishingly, is true). A species of highly intelligent aliens might come along and replicate it, thus ensuring the survival of both the human species and The Colbert Report. But they don't. Instead, after several decades, the station plummets to Earth, burning up on re-entry and presumably killing a few hundred toucans as it smashes into an overgrown Times Square.

The show goes on to explain in sobering detail just how little mark even the greatest of us can hope to make. We see Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel fresco crumble into bits. We also see skyscrapers buckle, bridges tumble, ships sink, and the Houston Astrodome collapse inwards like a depressed meringue. The remains of cities are hidden beneath a carpet of vegetation. There's nothing left. Even Bruce Forsyth's dead.

Cleverly, for a show about unremitting atrophy, they've reframed the slow decay of everything the human race ever achieved as an exciting contest. Apparently this isn't a depressing look at how quickly civilisation might putrefy into nothing, but a "race to see what survives". The answer, unfortunately, is "almost nothing". Apart from a few human fossils lying deep beneath the ground, waiting to entertain the viewers of a future alien episode of Time Team, about a million years after we've gone, there's no sign we were even here.

But do I care? Not much. It's hard to give a shit about what happens to a flat after you've moved out, let alone a planet. Besides, if I want to see what happens when humans fail to perform basic maintenance on a day-to-day basis, I don't need a million-dollar CGI recreation.

I can just walk round my flat. Now that's a proper shithole.