Voyages with my Sky remote

The little blue button is your friend. If you own a Sky satellite telly box, you'll know this.

It's the button you press to jump effortlessly from one "favourite" channel to the next. Well, I say effortlessly, because the blue button only jumps forwards, and for for some reason Sky didn't see fit to provide a button that jumps backwards through your favourites, meaning most of the time you end up doing a complete circuit of all your favourites just to get back to the one bloody channel you actually wanted to watch.

So these days when I go on that age-old search for "something good on telly", it mostly consists of jabbing the blue button until my thumb turns a similar colour.

Very occasionally though I decide to find out what's on all the other channels I'm paying for. It's easy to forget sometimes that between the blue-button oases there are vast tracts of unexplored territory. Featuring channels with exotic names like "xleague.tv", "Zone Romantica" and "S4C".

Last night, armed with a flask of tea and some Kendal mint cake I set out on an expedition to chart the complete passage between 101: BBC ONE and the furthest outpost of the blue-button, 0131: BBC Radio 7.

After leaving behind the familiar sights of the "terrestrial" channels and their various offspring, I came across the first oddity. 144: Sumo TV seemed to the television equivalent of YouTube, showing back-to-back amateur videos shot on wobbly camcorders and webcams.

I stopped for a while to watch a crippled house fly buzzing crazily across a desk, to the delight of the two young American guys taping it ("Dude! It's like totally spazzing out!") before deciding to see if there was anything slightly more intellectually challenging out there.

My next port of call was 191: Peace TV, which seemed to consist entirely of a very long shots of some kind of religious ceremony/festival with flashing messages about prayer. I moved on.

Then I alighted at 194: BEN, which was showing adverts for a record by an African band I'd never heard of (although admittedly I'm not really hot on African music). The advert suggested that it was the best album of it's kind ever, which seemed slightly incongruous as it seemed to be only available by visiting a single shop in North London.

But BEN seemed to be filling a niche, and I went online to find out exactly what that niche was. The "Bentelevision" site had a most helpful FAQ:

Is Bentelevision a Nigerian Channel?
Well it will not be totally correct to admit that Bentelevision is a Nigerian station, although founded by a Nigerian businessman, the station represents all ethnic minority groups.

In essence, Bentelevision is an Afro - Caribbean channel (Africa/Caribbean). True to it's ethos, Bentelevision is out to Bridge the Gap between all communities while glamorizing London as a city to the whole wide world.

I wasn't sure if I was looking for glamour, so I moved on again.

277: Wedding TV was the next channel to catch my eye, for predicable reasons. I was expecting similar fluff to the type you get in the wedding magazines, i.e. "Which colour sugared almonds are best to put in wedding favours? In-depth report!" Instead I was treated to "Prenup Challenge", a reality game-show in which three presenters dressed as judges (I have no idea if they were actually judges) forced three couples to hammer out pre-nuptial contracts, apparently as a test of the strength of their future marriage!

I couldn't believe there'd be any audience for this at all, so I flicked to the next channel.

Which was 278: Wedding TV + 1, showing an episode of Prenup Challenge from an hour earlier

This is a common feature I've begun to notice: even the most niche and obscure channels seemed to merit a sister "+1" channel. Quite how they find the audience to support one channel, let alone two, is beyond me.

280: Horse & Country was disappointly showing neither horses nor countryside, preferring instead to air badly-shot Handycam footage of a dog show in Birmingham (no not Crufts, another one).

By now I was tired and bewildered. It was late, and I'd not yet left the two-hundreds in my trek through the channels. I decided to take a new approach and tap random numbers into the remote.

Aptly, this technique took me to 875: Roulette TV, live roulette on the telly! And it wasn't the only one, there were a slew of imitators, all offering "the genuine Casino experience in your own home". Some seemed to be a bit more "live" than others, ranging from one that featured a real live presenter and a real live dollybird croupier with a real roulette wheel, all the way down to a show that seemed to consist of random clips of pre-recorded roulette spins interspersed with pre-recorded snippets of helpful advice from the presenter.

At last, I'd found something truly entertaining and informative! And, judging by the stacks of virtual chips appearing on the roulette table from people phoning-in their bets from home, I wasn't alone in thinking so! I wasn't confident enough to phone in myself and take part in a game that obviously demands huge amounts of skill, but I was in awe of the presenter. He was clearly an expert in roulette, and was willing to share his knowledge with me! In a few minutes I'd been treated to such nuggets of advice as:

"Betting on the first 12 covers all the numbers from 1 to 12, so if you think the next number is going to be low, this is where to bet!"

"We tell you where the previous balls have landed, so you might want to avoid these numbers!"

A cunning plan was starting to form in my mind... wait for the roulette ball to use up all the numbers except one, then place a huge bet on that last number and make a killing!

But, by now it was gone midnight and I was very tired. My scheme for breaking the bank at Roulette TV, along with my plans to explore the flesh-pots beyond channel 900, would have to wait for another night.