LET’S TAKE A BREAK FROM BLATANT ADVERTISING

Every day, cable and satellite television viewers are faced with a bewildering choice of hundreds of channels – one of which will be pumping out back-to-back repeats of “Only Fools And Horses” 24 hours a day.

I was a big fan of the late John Sullivan’s sitcom and don’t begrudge his family the repeat fees.

But, who would want to spend all day and night watching repeat-after-repeat of a decades-old sitcom, especially now they’ve been artificially inserted with commercial breaks, unlike when they were originally broadcast on BBC One.

Thumbing through a copy of any TV listings magazines to see what next week’s schedules offer, now takes about as much time as it does to plough through the Christmas double-edition of “Radio Times”.

A friend recently told me he thought the greatest invention of modern times was the set-top box that allows him to record TV shows and fast-forward through the adverts, which he hates.

Then I pointed out that many of his favourite BBC shows, including Graham Norton’s Friday night chat show and The One Show, are  elongated adverts for new films, books, albums and TV series – and he rarely fast-forwards through them!

Give Graham and his team their due, his series features some of the world’s biggest movie stars – as well as some I wouldn’t recognise if they bit me on the leg.

Not knowing Ryan Reynolds from Ryan Gosling is an age thing, I admit it.

But the show is basically a 45-minute commercial allowing Tom Cruise or Matt Damon to sell us their new films – and for Ed Sheeran to plug his new album and tour.

Chat shows exist to persuade viewers to hand over their cash just as furniture stores and breakfast cereal manufactures do in their commercials.

Must go. The 1996 Christmas “Only Fools and Horses” is just starting . . .