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And that means the USA. Although the list of available channels on your service probably includes options from all over the world, do you find yourself attracted to what’s on in Russia, France or Spain? Naturally I like to keep up with what’s happening where I come from, so there’s a bit of BBC and Sky on the agenda for the news and sport, but for general entertainment it’s the US networks that have the most to offer.

They also have the best selection of unintentionally amusing adverts (or as they would say, “commercials”).

That’s not to say the adverts on local TV aren’t funny — also often unintentionally — but on the smaller operations there is a major source of irritation: too few ads, too many slots.

That means you get the same ones every 20 minutes, and even the best are only a hair’s breadth away from annoying after two or three exposures.

It’s mainly to do with money. TV films don’t have the same “production values” as Hollywood movies.

That is to say they generally don’t have big-name actors or directors, the locations aren’t so exotic and the whole package is usually unambitious because the producer can’t afford to bring fancy ideas to life.

TV ads suffer from the same lack of funds.

The great screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men etc) pointed out in a book about writing for films that the reason no movie ever opened with 50 camels coming over a hill in Central Park was not down to lack of imagination, but practicalities.

Where are you going to get 50 tame camels? What about import licences and insurance? What they can do in smaller, less sophisticated territories, is get away with claims that wouldn’t be allowed in the great metropolises of our time.

Fifty years ago the world was full of adverts proclaiming that “Guinness is good for you”, whereas now in most places you can’t say that, because it’s an alcoholic drink, and all alcoholic drinks are evil.

Even earlier than that, in the golden age of smoking, when a surgeon in a film could be shown with a Marlboro dangling from his lips while he stitched someone’s oesophagus, the spin merchants tried to persuade the public that a smoker’s cough was actually their wonderful brand of cigarettes getting rid of that pesky mucous that had been there all along. But in 21st century America, a country besieged by Big Brother-like bodies peering over everybody’s shoulder, advertisers have to watch their step, and one can’t help but feel sorry for the people selling medicines.

The powers-that-be have decreed that they can only spend the first 20 seconds or so of their one-minute slots extolling the virtues of their products before some motormouth voice-over artist launches into auctioneer- style overdrive to give us a gruesome I-wouldn’t-if-I-wereyou catalogue of side effects that always seems to include headaches and upset stomach.

Do Americans feel safer for being told there are more bad points to this stuff than good? Do they go to bed feeling grateful that although they still have their medical condition, at least they don’t feel nauseous? Probably not. But it’s a country where litigation is almost a national sport, as the advert that follows is quite likely to illustrate.

Did your legs fall off after you used this particular decongestant? Are your eyes now the colours of camouflage since you worked at the top of a dockside crane? If so, there’s a firm of ambulance-chasing lawyers that wants to look at your case and try to get you – and itself – some compensation.

It’s a question of what you’re used to, I suppose, and British broadcasters tend to be a little more reserved than most. Perhaps the most extreme form of over-the-top reaction in sports broadcasting is that habit South American football commentators have of shouting “Gooooooooooool” when somebody scores. It was mildly amusing the first time we heard it, but for goodness sake give it a rest, amigos.

We know it was a goal and we’re about to watch it 17 times from every conceivable angle. We get the flaming picture.

During the brief passages of actual programmes that fill the time between commercial breaks, you can catch over-enthusiastic news anchors trying to sound excited about things that are actually rather mundane.

As one who likes to give people credit for a bit of intelligence, perhaps it is na?ve to see this approach as quite insulting to the general public.

But really, we’re not all 95-yearsold, desp e r a t e l y lonely and hard of hearing – and even if we were, would we really like to be spoken too in that way?