Sky EPG

It's pretty apparent that I have a lot of time on my hands. The fact I go out of my way to write insulting articles about nothing in particular means I spend more time in front of an LCD screen than is healthy for any adult. With this in mind, it may come as a surprise that my next point of hatred is directed at another LCD screen: my television.

Well, I say my television, but that would be wrong. I love television. What great company it provides. Suffice to say, it's on a lot of the time that I'm home. So that's not my point of hate (not today, anyway). What is? It's Sky. Well, not even Sky per se (and trust me, I would find it easy to jump on the bandwagon of Murdoch-bashing). No. It's Sky's electronic programme guide (EPG).

As previously alluded to, I am an adult male. My attention span is rather short ("that's what she said"). If I'm settling down with nothing else to do but watch television, I will quite easily get bored of one show and look for another. And that's where the problem lies. I'll bring up the EPG and begin my search.

Ladies, you seem to have the patience to look through the whole selection of programmes on each page. But every male out there reading this will do the same: scroll through the EPG at breakneck speed, looking out for buzzwords and ultimately repeating the process time and again until something is found.

What really irks me, however, is that, maybe after one drink too many, those buzzwords become figments of your imagination. Just last night, I was ploughing through the dirge, racing from page to page without batting an eyelid. There was nothing on.

Then, from the midst of the mundane, I caught a glimpse of something I could settle on for a couple of hours: Sin City. What a great film, I thought. I halted my forward progress and began heading back through the EPG. But where was Sin City? I know I'd seen it. I could swear it was on. I flitting through the last few pages. And then it hit me. In my haste to view the complete listings in a nanosecond, I had made a fatal error.

The Sin City I thought I'd seen listed was nothing but. But it gets worse. I had seen the listing of Sex In The City. 'Time for bed,' I thought.