The Elephant Man - are his days numbered?

Say there's an entertainment or sport you enjoy very much, it's your idea of a good way to pass a few hours. Let's say cricket. You go off one day to Lord's or Edgbaston and settle down to enjoy the game. Say it's a one-day match between England and Australia. England win the toss and decide to bat. Trescothick survives six balls from Glenn McGrath and makes two runs. Then something unexpected happens.

A guy in a suit moves in front of you, blocking your view. 'Had a minor accident lately?' he wants to know. 'A fall, for example? Feel you deserve compensation?' Your jaw drops. You crane this way and that to try to see past him, but he always seems to be in your line of vision.

He moves aside just in time to let you see Brett Lee bowling the first ball of his first over; he bowls Strauss for nought. Vaughan comes in and gets four more runs by the end of the over.

Two figures now stand in front of you: a miserable-looking young man who doesn't look very well, and a cardboard box with arms but no legs. The box mixes the poor guy a Lem-Sip, then climbs up to his head, mops his brow and massages his sinuses. The patient trots off smiling by the time McGrath bowls the first ball of his second over.

When that's finished, three men put three chairs down between you and the field of play, sit in them and begin shaving with electric shavers.Two of the shavers don't seem to be working, but the guy with the one that does work has his smooth cheek brushed by the even smoother cheek of the female exam invigilator.

Between the fourth and fifth overs, a man comes along with a sort of pantomime elephant in tow, and starts chuntering about car insurance while the elephant gets into a mess with flash cards.

After that, they just come back and repeat themselves. The compensation guy in the business suit comes back seven times, the shavers nine times, the animated box eleven. And the elephant doesn't forget.

At the drinks interval, all the hucksters come along together. By this time you're seething. For some reason it's the elephant man who incenses you most, and you feel like flooring him; instead, you make a remarkably restrained gesture of protest. You stand up, take him firmly by his lapels, make eye contact, and say, 'Listen. I don't want to lose the place with you. But I just want to tell you that if you come here and bother me again, I have this big golf umbrella with me in case it rains but I will use it for a purpose for which it was never intended. The same goes for the elephant. Is that clear?'

But none of this seems to register. While you're speaking, his eyes go blank. It's as if you've pressed a still button. It's as if you're there but he isn't. As soon as you let go, he picks up on his spiel and the elephant fumbles some more cards. After the next over but one, there they are again. By this time you're too close to mental exhaustion to do anything about it. Having exceeded even the patience of a saint, well before the half-way point of the match you switch off...I mean, leave the stadium.

This is how it is when you view any commercial channel. You can't watch anything through.

Maybe it's just about tolerable to have sports coverage interrupted; sport is pretty lightweight stuff anyway. But when it's something really serious and important, commercial interruption becomes grotesque. When Mike Moore in the middle of Bowling for Columbine is cut off virtually in mid-sentence so that we can be reminded for the ten thousandth time that you don't have to be posh to be privileged, it becomes offensive. Especially if Moore has just finished taking on K-Mart over firearms and ammunition sales in their supermarkets, or Lockheed Martin over their latest WMD promotion.

There's one glib answer to such complaints that needn't detain us. You can hit the Mute button. Oh yes...and do what, to pass the time? Commercial breaks were devised by Phileas B. Sod, more infamous for his Sod's Law. They are too long to pass without annoyance, but too short to be in the slightest degree useful. You have only two choices: put up with them, with or without sound, or else don't view.

If we start to talk about banning TV advertising altogether, we find ourselves in a Catch-22. All the commercial channels would close down and we would be back to BBC 1-4 and radio. What sort of astronomical licence fee or other tax would be needed to maintain even a handful of channels in addition to BBC?

Anyway, we're not only in a Catch 22, we're in Cloud Cuckoo Land. Advertising is the raison d'etre of all these channels. They're not entertainment media which happen to carry advertising; they're advertising media that happen to carry entertainment - because it's the best decoy. The Sky channels show cricket and the Best of the Two Ronnies because nobody would watch if they showed only adverts. The generators of ongoing consumerism don't want any of this to change. The system as it is now works for them. So how can we expect to have the luxury of uninterrupted viewing?

Technically, it's possible. In fact, it has been possible for nearly a decade. The magic word is Tivo - the brand name of the Personal Video Recorder, which records up to 40 hours of your personal choice of programmes on to hard disk. And it can be programmed to skip the commercials. In the US, 90% of viewers who have Tivo boxes use them to cut out the ads - suggesting quite strongly, I would think, that people don't want to be sold stuff, at least not in the middle of their entertainment. But Tivo has had difficulties since it was introduced to the UK at the end of 2000; it's too much like a VCR, but up to four times more expensive. So far, it hasn't caught on.

If the price can ever be brought down to somewhere in the range of the average VCR, the revolution might happen at last. But wait a minute. Follow through the logic of it: say by 2015, 90% of viewers have Tivo boxes. Of these, 90% use them to skip the commercials. Suddenly there's no point in advertisers turning out this stuff, because nearly everybody is busy deleting it so they can watch the test match or Alan Titchmarsh or Michael Moore not only at a time of their own choosing, but seamless from beginning to end. The marketeers pull out of television and we're left with BBC1-4 and radio.

But I can't help feeling that's a worst-case scenario, and it won't come to that. Like the atom bomb, now Tivo has been invented it can't be uninvented. Sooner or later it will be in most homes, and advertisers will have to reach into the bottomless wells of their ingenuity and discover other ways to annoy us. Maybe Pepsi's long-cherished ambition, to project its logo on to the surface of the Moon, will be revived. The makers may offer Tivos without the ad-cutting function at low, low prices, or even give them away. In that case, I'll pay for a proper one. Ever the optimist, I hope I live to enjoy everything from one-day cricket to in-depth reports on the decline and fall of the American Empire - knowing that the clever Tivo box will give me a joined-up programme every time.