This often happens to me - I'm watching TV just surfing, flipping from one channel to the next till I find something that momentarily engages my attention. No sooner do I find said attraction, however, than *pop* it's time for the ad break (commercial break for our American cousins).
Since I'm quite
sensibly averse to watching ads, I take this as my cue to resume flipping, the idea being to pass the time of the break by checking out the other channels.
The trouble is, above a certain number of channels, it doesn't take me long to forget what channel I was interested in. So I end up going round and round, or get into something else, or come back to it too late.
What I need is an 'ad break' button on the remote control. Say I'm watching 'Planet Earth' on channel 205 and totally getting into the whole nature thing, but then *ding* ad-break ! No problem - I hit the button and it simply remembers what channel I'm on. I then go surfing the other channels; but the clever television will wait a set number of minutes (the average duration of an ad-break) and then remind me what channel I was watching.
I can then decide whether I want to go back to the enchanting Mr. Attenborough, or whether the all-night infomercial on channel 475 about the exercise machine that "goes side-to-side as well as up and down!" is just too enthralling for me to miss.