Mrs M and I are committed telly watchers. We always have been, but especially so when our four daughters were younger and funds were limited.

Once the kids were fast asleep in bed, we would hope and pray that there would be something good to watch for the last hour of the evening before we collapsed into bed.

We are not just a family of TV watchers, we also try to be fully engaged with the process; commenting on the storylines, arguing about which contestant is our favourite in a gameshow, and occasionally shouting in the direction of the screen if we find something to disagree with.

This last one is usually my practice and tends to annoy the other family members, but at least I have stopped throwing things at the TV these days.

Although we had the luxury of a video player back then, most of our tapes were either cartoons or compilations of home movies, unlike today when we have so much technology available to aid us in our free time.

One of our favourites of the new inventions is the ability to record most of our favourite programmes using something called Series Link.

In addition to the fact that we very rarely miss episodes, we are also able to fast-forward past the adverts. This has increasingly brought to our attention the fact that an hour of TV only contains about 40 minutes of the actual programme.

If this is not bad enough, there is the use of a phrase that I have come to detest. It is employed in nearly every show and without any sense of how it affects the viewer’s experience.

The phrase is ‘coming up’. It is used just before the advert break and seems to suggest that TV producers have very little confidence in either their product or their viewers.

They must assume that we will get distracted during the ad break and forget what we were watching. So they try to tantalise us with snippets of what is about to happen.

Well I would like to announce to these producers that I am not interested in what is ‘coming up’ until it arrives; so stop telling me what I am about to see.

You might detect my annoyance coming through in these words, but don’t be too concerned, because my pain has been alleviated by the fact that we can now fast-forward past such nonsense.

Added to this ability to eliminate this TV chaff, is the fact that I can increase my engagement with a programme by shouting at the screen ‘we are not interested in what is ‘coming up’!’, before pressing the fast-forward button on the remote control.