If you’re not familiar with his sinister work then listen up.

Channel 890, the default station your cable box resets to after it has been switched off, is essentially a continually-running pat on the back for Telewest.

The looped advert, obviously hoping to capture the family market, features a father, mother and 2.4 children (note they’re taking the opposite approach to BT — no step-families working through their initial difficulties to become a functional, if non-conventional, unit here) whose lives are changed forever when this man I was telling you about suddenly appears before them.

No sufficient explanation is given as to who this mysterious character is, why he’s appeared from nowhere to deliver a sales pitch about the wonders of cable, or how this broadband-pushing Mary Poppins could possibly know so much about Telewest.

We’re led through a series of lame family scenarios in which the genie in the wireless router solves all the individual family member’s problems by the Power of Greyskull, or, in this case, Power of Blueyonder (arf, arf!).

He’s not really that helpful, though.

When the son inquires whether this stranger will be able to make him a dot.com millionare he is met with a “ah, you cheeky scamp” type answer when he should have told the young lad that particular bubble burst years ago and property’s gonna go the same way soon.

It works like this. You come home from work deadbeat and collapse on the settee. You switch on the TV and you are met with 890 and this creep is forcing himself on the poor family once more.

You look for the cable remote and realise it’s on the other side of the room. You turn to the screen and the Broadband Beelzebub is hypnotising you with talk of anti-virus software and spyware.

You’re drawn in momentarily, too tired to cross the room for the remote, and think you can handle a few moments of him.

Very quickly he becomes more irritating than an itch in a spacesuit and yet you’re still incapable of fetching the remote. But … it’s so cheesy, his voice is grating, the plot is ridiculous, the dialogue is as painful as the actors’ grins, it’s like having your eyelids prized open and being forced to watch endless debt consolidation adverts whilst bound and gagged. Losing…the…will…to… live.

Eventually it all becomes too much and you break free of your sloth, reclaim the buttons and exorcise your demons by mindlessly channel hopping and wondering why, what with cable being so bleedin’ great and all, there nothing on.

That’s not an entirely accurate synopsis of this infomercial.

Maybe if I ever managed to sit through the whole beastly thing then the identity of the cable crusader will be revealed and other loose ends will be tied up, but that’s never going to happen.

The man and his Satanic loop broadcast infuriate me. Don’t switch off your box — it’s not worth it.