Well thank goodness we can now settle down to watching what we want to watch on television without changing channels every few minutes.

I greatly enjoyed watching the Olympics and was delighted that our national broadcaster the BBC carried all the programming so that it was advertising free and celebrated the totality of the action in Brazil and not just our opportunities to medal – unlike the case in many other countries, apparently).

I was in America, for instance, back when Ovett and Coe were battling for either the 1,500 or 800 metres final and it wasn’t broadcast live as there were no USA medal opportunities, so the basketball was on.

And I thought the animated promo film was inspired and beautifully put together.

But given the number of channels available to the BBC why, oh why, did we have to constantly flip between them to watch a particular event from beginning to end?

I began to feel sorry for poor Clare Balding who had the earpiece of doom constantly telling her to order us to switch channels to carry on watching the hockey, the rugby, etc. Would the world have imploded if people who usually expect a particular programme to be on a particular channel had been told that all non-Olympic regular programming would be on either BBC One or BBC Two throughout the Olympics?

Yes I am sure “Disgusted of Leighton Buzzard” might have voiced their irritation, but millions upon millions of us had to struggle out of our armchairs in search of the remote when Clare – not a woman to brook disobedience, I suspect – ordered us to switch yet again at the crucial moment.

Add to that the cat on your lap that objects to being dislodged and you can see why the BBC needs to rethink its major event scheduling to something more user-friendly.

I know they will say that there are some things like the News at Ten or Ten O’Clock News or whatever they call it now that are sacrosanct and viewers have a right to expect them to be in the same place at the same time every night, but occasionally they did go to the news late so why not remove that possibility by separating scheduling completely?

Mind you next time it will all be early morning from Tokyo, so no-one will care.

It will all be over at lunchtime each day.