Don't buy Sky

This will be a compact and bijou rantette.

We've been forking out steadily increasing amounts of dosh to Rupert Murdoch for some years now, until we realised that the main thing we were paying for was for Jamie to watch every single episode of 'Top Gear' on UK G2 at least five times each. My masterplan was to get some sort of digital source for every telly in the house and then ditch Sky for good.

I rang up to cancel, and after ten minutes of making me feel guilty for depriving the children of the house of their diet of pop music and cartoons, they accepted my month's notice. No problems so far, you might think. The letter came through confirming the cancellation for the 20th of May as promised. The box was still hooked up to the tv but instead of the extra month of service it went off four days later with no warning. Humph, that's rich, I thought and unplugged the digibox and sent it to the graveyard for dead technology in the garage.

Two weeks after the original cancellation a letter dropped on the mat, with unpleasant red letters and threats of dire consequences. It seems the credit card payment for the last instalment of the Sky subscription hadn't gone through so they'd cut off the service immediately and then sent a nasty letter for the outstanding amount (that took seven days to arrive from the date on the top).

I rang them up, and took twenty five minutes trying to get some sense out of a call centre drone as to why I should be expected to pay full whack for a service that I wasn't receiving and had cancelled in any case. He was thoroughly rude and inflexible and eventually hung up on me when I asked to speak to a supervisor. I had to call back to sort it out with somebody else, but it left me with a very low opinion of Sky's so-called, self styled customer service. Gits.

I call upon the power of Greyskull, er, I mean the google archive, to advise anybody thinking of signing up with Sky to get a nice Topfield box instead and still get more tv than you ever humanly watch. I rest my case.