"Event TV" drives me to suicide

I lost Philippa for two hours last night to the final of the Great British Bake-Off. I didn’t even know she was interested in it, but apparently she’s been watching all the episodes on iPlayer at work and was determined to see the final ‘live.’ 
I had two choices - sit beside her and watch this drivel unfold or get the Hell out of there and hide myself in the garage. So I picked up my sticks and practised my Christmas drumming. I wasn’t happy about it. Why should I be ousted from my own home just so my wife can waste her life watching something with no intellectual value whatsoever; just so she can keep up with the thing that everyone else is keeping up with, not because they enjoy it, but because they don’t want to be the only person at work who didn’t see it and therefore can’t feel part of the masses by joining in with the banal conversations about who should have won and who shouldn’t have?
See - I don’t even watch it, and my intelligence and ability to write short, coherent sentences has been severely dumbed-down anyway, simply by my knowledge of it’s existence. 
I know different people have different viewing tastes, but why waste time on something that teaches you nothing, expands you not one little bit, and just adds to the mindless mire of modern mankind, when you could be reading a well-written book or watching Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” on youtube? I used to enjoy programmes like “Ready, Steady, Cook” because there were fun interviews involved in it, and it actually taught you how to cook stuff you might not have thought of trying before. That shit last night was just up-themselves inept presenters walking around a tent while fame-hungry, desperate nobodies threw together a plateful of sugar, which was then tasted and rated by a dead woman and a man from a ‘Just For Men’ advert.
Is this really what British TV has come to?
It’s people rolling pastry, for feck’s sake. 

RC 28-10-16