Ahaaa! This is where TV as we know it all started

And I have a theory on who is to blame. The 1990s. Yes, 90s, you heard. It's all your fault.

But it didn't start out that way. I began the decade as a student, so watched A LOT of TV. A favourite of us slackers at that time was Channel 4's The Word – a car crash of a show featuring the "talents" of Mancunian lad-about-town Terry Christian. It was awful, but staple post-pub TV.

I still remember clearly as a newcomer to Preston (where I was being educated) seeing scary American musician Henry Rollins – all sweat, tattoos and muscles – being interviewed and declaring the town I now called home was the roughest place he had ever been. The Word was – to be 90s about it – bonkers. In all the wrong ways.

A show that was bonkers in all the right ways was Vic Reeves Big Night Out. The very definition of surreal, it featured characters like The Man With The Stick (a man with a bag over his head carrying a stick with something – usually unrevealed – at the end), the Ponderers (doing what their name suggests) and Wavey Davey (responsible for a nickname I acquired for a time).

Then there was the less surreal but no less funny Bottom, with Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson taking the anarchic comedy of The Young Ones to a new level. Take this episode description, for example: "After accidentally beating up the gas man, Richie and Eddie must remove an illegal gas pipe without disturbing their violent neighbour."

It was a rich time for comedy, bringing as it did the all-too-brief Father Ted, Alan Partridge in Knowing Me, Knowing You and introducing us to six far-too-attractive New Yorkers with whom we would become firm Friends.

And it brought us the beginings of the comedy panel show which now dominates the laughter landscape with the likes of Have I Got News For You and Never Mind The Buzzcocks. They proved so popular they continue to this day, and have spawned offspring such as Mock The Week, QI, Would I Lie To You and Eight Out Of Ten Cats.

The 90s would also give birth to another phenomenon. Yes, there were cooking shows before, but Can't Cook Won't Cook and Ready Steady Cook radically changed the format. And it was also the decade in which MasterChef became a thing. Yes, we can blame the 1990s for now having to look at Gregg Wallace's face.

Costume dramas found their feet back then too. Lady Chatterley gave us Sean Bean losing his shirt – and more besides – over Joely Richardson, while Pride and Prejudice witnessed a nation of women going gooey-eyed over Colin Firth's Mr Darcy. There were, of course, more gritty dramas. Helen Mirren was superb in Prime Suspect, Robbie Coltrane equally in Cracker.

Then there was the "anti-Friends" as This Life followed a group of twentysomething law graduates drinking, drug-taking and sleeping (in the biblical sense) their way through their lives.

There were undoubted highlights in TV Land during the decade, but for giving us the legacy of a saturation of TV chefs, comedy panel shows and Downton bloomin' Abbey, 1990s, you have a lot to answer for.