Dom Joly: I'm drowning in a sea of small-screen sewage

The road seems unending – mile after mile, up every hill and down every dale of these fair isles. Occasionally we stop but the process is always the same. We hang around for 20 or so minutes while introductions are made and technical "recces" are sorted out. Then the order comes – "Back in the car please Dom, we're going to do an arrival...."

The filming of a real arrival is never contemplated – all TV is artifice and you either go with the flow or flounder in its electronic wake. I'm normally in charge of my shoots but, for Made in Britain, a show where I try and stock my home with products made in the British Isles, I am meat, there for the butchers to cut and chop as they so desire. We'll get into a van and drive for hours until we arrive somewhere even grimmer than the last location. Praying that we're not over-nighting here, I'll receive my briefing – "Right Dom," says the 14-year-old director, "this is Britain's last surviving pony factory. Shetland ponies have been manufactured here for the last hundred years but now the place is on its last legs and it doesn't look like it'll make it...."

I fake an arrival, squeeze myself uncomfortably out of the British sports car that I've been forced to drive around in and – "Lights, camera, inaction" – another set of dull shots of me wandering around a factory with the most TV-friendly employee that the company can provide. We observe the moulding process, or the distilling process, or the ponying process, and then – hey presto, there's the finished product – a tiny, shiny Shetland pony that I try to squeeze into a bag and pretend to take home for the big "reveal" at the end of the series.

Three locations a day, bish bosh, and off to the next one, no time to think, learn, analyse.... I have my little victories in the filming process. Once you've finished an interview with someone, you have to pretend to be walking and chatting while the camera moves far away to get "wides", – distant shots of the scene that the director can use to cut between scenes to shorten dull conversations. These are sometimes "noddies" – reaction shots of someone pretending to listen and nod to a conversation.

Unlike Alan Yentob I don't have the luxury of not being at the filming, so I have my own signature little "cut-away" – when we do a wide shot I point randomly to things while whispering to whomever I'm with to do the same. "TV loves pointing" is my catchphrase. My companion normally does what I say, so you get two people wandering through somewhere pointing in different directions for no reason.

If you watch my series you probably won't notice these little details, but to me they are a sign of defiance, a cry for help – it's the desperate hand of Mordechai Vanunu pressed briefly against the window of a speeding vehicle. They say, "I am not a number, I am a free man" – a free man who just happens to be trapped in the formulaic dungeon of television.

We end a day in a toilet museum – it's somehow strangely fitting. We wander round a room charting the evolution of the loo from a hole in the ground, through the invention of a porcelain bowl complete with waste water being used to flush it, right through to the future – a machine that analyses your deposits and orders more bran should your diet be considered deficient in this area. If things look really bad it will notify your doctor.

This sounds terrifying – every time you go you wait anxiously, hoping the doctor won't turn up at your door. The humble toilet, like the TV, has been on a long journey, but they're both still filled with the same end product.