If you are one of those people who falls asleep in front of the telly in the evenings, then I have some breaking news. Or should that be breaking snooze?

If struggling to stay conscious during Downton Abbey or waking up to the screams of childbirth on Call the Midwife is proof of one thing, it’s the onset of middle age.

For the first 30 or 40 years of your life, you probably didn’t miss a single minute of telly through dozing off, but you soon find yourself choosing your programmes not according to how interesting or entertaining they might be, but how likely it is that you will be able to keep your eyelids open for the duration.

For years it seemed a bit silly that inventors spent so long bringing us colour, flat screens, ever-bigger screens, stereo and surround sound, cable and satellite, 3D, TiVo/Sky Boxes, fancy remote controls, video, then DVD and other hi-tech recording formats, and now the ability to watch hundreds of channels through our computers – when all the time it didn’t matter to half the population because they were probably in the armchair, snoring.

In fact, the only real aid for the snoozers was the doubling of the volume for adverts and trailers to wake us up in time for the next programme.

I suspect the people responsible for EastEnders and other miserable soaps have their characters shouting at each other every two minutes for the same reason.

Now I am glad to say that Virgin have finally come up with a device that can detect whether you are asleep or awake by using something called a pulse oximeter. You wear it on your wrist.

One option for those who are found to be nodding off could have been to wake them up with an alarm or maybe (for the entertainment of others in the room) a small electric shock, but instead the inventors have gone for pausing the TV or recording it when you drop off, so you can catch up when you get back from the land of nod.

Amazingly, the device has been invented by 14- and 15-year-old schoolchildren, and Virgin must have got kids to name it, too, because KipstR sounds too trendy for something that will be aimed at the older generation.

It’s an overdue and no doubt impressive device, but it will only be required by around half of the armchair snoring population of the country, by my estimation, if our house is anything to go by.

That’s because my wife and I have entirely different strategies for combating the problem.

When my eyelids get heavy, I realise that resistance is useless and stop watching, catching up with it at a later date if I’m really that interested. I’ll either go off somewhere else for a nap or find an alternative activity that isn’t going to send me to sleep. But my wife hasn’t thought of doing that.

Instead she fights it, never realising that it is always a losing battle, even though she only ever sees fragments of programmes that she has to try to make sense of. I am not exaggerating when I say I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of films she has watched in their entirety during the last 10 years.

Worse still – she sleeps through programmes on the sofa, at bedtime, which she never intended to watch anyway, instead of surrendering completely and going upstairs.

Hopefully you managed to stay awake all the way down to here. I’m pleased to get here too, because by this time, normally, I am feeling pretty drowzzzzzzzzzz