There have been more complaints about ITV’s scheduling of the Champions League games, but are we really surprised by that anymore? Apparently, the decision was taken after much deliberation - my hairy chin - it was taken by those grey men in suits with about as much knowledge of football as my granny.

So Manchester United’s game at home to Marseilles was showing all over London while our away game in that sleepy backwater of European football, Barcelona, was hidden away on OnDigital. I can imagine the meeting now - a table of TV gurus chewing their biros trying to justify the unjustifiable. Had they only asked my opinion I could have saved them some time by presenting several of the more salient facts.

Which are namely that Marseilles is an average-sized footballing city best known for Bernard Tapie’s unusual business practices, but hardly a giant of European football that would get the chattering football classes, well, chattering. The tie was in Manchester, thereby allowing some 52,000 United fans to see it. Arsenal were playing possibly the biggest team in Europe, a team expected to go the distance in this year’s Champions Farce. We were given less than 2,000 tickets for the tie. We were away. We are a London team. Carlton is the London station. End of argument.

Now I have never been one of the more knowledgeable people when it comes to the inner workings of television - I’ve barely got to grips with the telephone and the internal combustion engine yet - but squeezing tons of channels down your TV aerial strikes me as the ideal way to watch yet more telly with the minimum of effort on my part. Fascinated by this prospect, I found myself dialling the OnDigital hotline with images of a glorious unbeaten path to the final, all on my own telly in my comfy flat.

Anyway, I needed some logic to persuade my feeble self that it was worth a tenner a month. My mind raced off immediately. It’s just the price of a quarter of an Arsenal shirt a month. Four pints of beer. That’s a home and away shirt plus a couple of pairs of shorts a year. My brain was performing miracles of justification within seconds.

If you’re desperate enough to watch your team play you’ll pay for it, thought I. It’s a philosophy much abused by teams since the inception of the Premier league and it’s one we’re all getting used to. Nice reasoning Jim - and it gets better - if we are to pay the top players and compete with Europe’s finest, then we have to expect to pay for it somehow. A capacity of 38,000 sure isn’t going to do it, and the old blunderbuss of a stadium, Wembley, will fortunately be razed to the ground next year leaving us even shorter of moneymaking methods. The arguments were convincing enough -- I had myself persuaded in seconds.

Taken in by my incredible logic I parted with my invisible cash and bit the bullet. And you know what - it’s not all that bad an investment, and I even say that after the initial excitement has long since died down.

Basically, it’s perfect for a sad twat like me. During the weeks when there are Champions League fixtures each Tuesday and Wednesday, OnDigital gears up to market its biggest asset like you’ve never seen. Not only are the games involving all the British teams on live, but they’re on several thousand times after too. Roll in from the pub a couple of weeks after the game and you can guarantee they’ve sneaked in another repeat. Then there’s the panel of experts covering all the goals several thousand times. Millions and millions of little men with balls, all for ten quid.

And when the football dies down for a few weeks you can finally start doing what you really wanted to do with all those surplus stations - channel hop. I can’t tell you how much fun it is to watch absolutely everything never.

Of course, there are the downsides. There is some inordinately dull TV out there, including hours of puffy-faced housewives desperately trying to lop a slab or two of fat off in exercise classes, some smarmy git trying to sell you an alarm clock, plus reruns of series that were never palatable the first time the public was forced to watch them.

The final straw for some has to be that the flagship football channel - Channel 99 - has taken to moonlighting in its spare time. Emmerdale On 99 is the end result, and by God am I looking forward to that.

To go here...