“I’ve finally bitten the bullet and bought myself a TV worthy of the name,” he says, dismissing the loathing of both TV and monster tellies as “the last refuge of the snob”.

“Etiquette expert” William Hanson, who recently wrote an article in the Daily Mail that included big televisions and cinema rooms in a list of “12 items you should never own”, says Webb’s revelation has not made him change his mind, and he is happy to plead guilty to the charge of snobbery. “Television is a downmarket medium,” he says. “It is not the high church of culture. So having something that is so ginormous in order to watch something that is already pretty downmarket is even more downmarket than the medium itself.”

“I’m with Justin Webb’s wife,” says Linda Levene, design director at LLI design. She reckons it’s a gender thing. “If it’s a man, they love huge TVs. If it’s a woman, they hate big TVs. I’ve never come across a woman yet who says: ‘Let’s go for the biggest TV ever’. Men love gadgets and they love showing off.” Size really does matter to men.

Many online guides suggest that the perfect size for your flatscreen depends not on room size but on how far away you’re going to be sitting – if you’re sat six feet away, a 42in HD screen is the best. In design terms, it’s probably the case that a sleek 65in TV will fit a modern house with contemporary design, but won’t look great in a Victorian three-bedroomed semi filled with old oak or pine furniture.

Levene says that, unless you are living in a spacious Manhattan-style loft where the proportions are appropriate, interior designers hate huge tellies. “If I said to somebody, ‘I’m going to paint a huge black square on your wall, is that all right?’, they’d say: ‘Absolutely not. Why do I want a large black rectangle on my wall?’ It’s like sitting in a cinema all the time.”

But she accepts they are now a fact of life. Her solution, like Webb’s, is to confine the monster to its own room if possible. Where it’s in the living room, she prefers to use a “picture lift” – covering it with a tasteful piece of artwork which, at the touch of a button, will rise to reveal the plasma invader – or build it into an attractive unit. Other designers favour tellies that double as mirrors, but Levene thinks they are “tacky”.

She especially warns against mega-TVs in bedrooms, which she says contradicts every rule of feng shui. Jan Cisek, a feng shui consultant, agrees that huge tellies in bedrooms are a no-no, because of the electro-magnetic pollution and the disturbance to sleep caused by late-night TV-watching. But he’s less hung up about them generally. “It’s not a problem,” he says. They are fine in a living room unless they are competing with another focal point, such as a fireplace. Note to Mrs Webb: just get rid of the Victorian fireplace. Or Justin, of course.

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