The BBC iPlayer has, in the last two weeks, re-arranged my life. Up til now it has passed me by but once I found out how to turn the subtitles on I've watched more TV on my laptop than I have on the proper set. Lucky because depsite paying £48 a month for Sky Everything, I never get to watch what I want anyway. If Spongebob isn't on then Hannah Montana, the worst of both worlds, or the thing with the twins in a hotel getting progressively fatter faces gets second priority.  Then it'll be Phineas and Ferb until Zoe gets her go and we have to endure The Hills or Project Catwalk until another country decides it needs a Next Top Model.

After that it's time for my wife to take the controls and we enjoy someone fixing up a house three years ago, or Housewives made Desperate by the fact the plot ran out two series ago but they're carrying on regardless.

Should I take the remote from the kids social services will be called, so it suits me to watch on my own computer and I don't have to decamp to the upstairs, out of range of the kettle. The thing I find with having programmes on demand is that I'm more selective about what I watch, in the past I might have sat and watched something just because it was on, and became interested in how Billy Rae Cyrus would react to his daughter going out when he sure told her to stay in, but now I only download a programme if I really want to watch it. Dave Gorman's Genius, for example, and Stewart Lee are two from this week.

Waterloo Road, which I enjoy despite myself, and Horizon helped pass some time over the weekend, and that was it apart from rugby on the normal TV on saturday. That's six hours of tv in a week, compared to before when I might watch that in a day. I tried watching Doctors, a programme I've occasionally watched since Ray Peacock was on it, online and it just seemed like a waste of time, same for most of the soaps.

That's the thing I like about the iPlayer making the missable much more missable. Cutting out a major sourse of timewasting has been valuable, and left me much more room to go on Facebook and Twitter.