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This is a cure for a condition commonly known as ‘Nothing on the Telly’. When we complain that ‘nothing’s on’ what we mean is that there’s nothing that’s going to grab us by the scruff of the neck, slap us on both cheeks and demand our attention. Well if that’s the case, then this will fix it.

Here’s how to use your television to pick up a 13.7 billion-year-old signal from outer space, in three easy steps.

1 Turn on telly.

2 Unplug satellite or cable box, unplug aerial.

3 Stare at static.

That ‘snow’ or static is background ‘noise’ generated by the soup of radio waves washing around the earth. When you’re tuned to Coronation Street, the signal is so strong you don’t see the noise. But when the telly has nothing else to latch on to it tries to translate the ‘noise’ into a picture, and ‘snow’ or ‘static’ is the result. Now turn up the sound and listen, because here comes the good bit…

Most of this static is caused by the radio and TV signals that are constantly buzzing around the world, Chinese minicabs, Somali weather men, Russian tank commanders. During the Battle of the Atlantic in World War Two a young telegraphist on a Royal Navy cruiser picked up what he thought was a coded signal from a nearby German U-boat. Out there in the Atlantic they tended to think about U-boats quite a lot. Nobody could understand the message or even recognise the code. The report was duly sent back to Liverpool to be pored over by the experts, who couldn’t understand how this message had come to be received in mid-Atlantic. It wasn’t any code or language they recognised. Then, eventually, its origin was tracked down. It was a short-range transmission from a Russian tank commander in Stalingrad, appearing as bright as you like thousands of miles away at sea. This is a shining example of the erratic behaviour of radio waves and their tendency to pop up all over the place, a syndrome known as analogous propagation.

But 1 per cent of the noise that you’re seeing (and hearing) is something else; it’s the radiation left over from the event that gave birth to the entire universe, it’s the receding echo of the Big Bang, now showing on your very own TV.

I’ll pause here while you take in the enormity of what you’re looking at. Now stare at the screen again. One per cent of that fizzing energy and activity is coming to you from something that happened more than 13 billion years ago.

For me this is a bit like smelling salts: you can use it to snap you out of any mood, at any time. And that’s not the end of it; the explanation of how we know all this is pretty good too.