Not a specific dvd boxset, you understand — no, that wouldn't be nearly all-consuming enough — but the dvd boxset as a concept.

I am eternally bound to the fold-out cardboard casing, the slippy sleeve it goes in, the alluring smell of fresh possibility and nights spent up til 3am in a darkened room shrieking "die, damn you! Die soon and release me from this hell of HBO's making!" at a flickering laptop screen.

I am currently wading through my father's Seinfeld collection at such a hungry rate that I fall asleep with it on and dream I'm a Jewish comedian wearing a 90s blazer-and-jeans combo*.

A few weeks ago I was ploughing through five seasons of the L Word, announcing more resoundingly with each new episode that the writing makes Holby City look like Henry James, but never did I stop watching.

And before that I have only misty memories of the glorious moment that all six series of Sex and the City arrived in our flat (packaged in a shoebox just to reinforce a few more stereotypes).

It's been a tough term.

Don't worry about my soul though, I think I got a pretty good deal.

It's on a long-term lease until such time when all sitcom/drama storylines have been exhausted and we are forced to sit around for 50 years waiting for mankind to evolve some new habits for potential TV material, or my eyeballs have melted away and dripped out through my ears.

But I get to borrow it back temporarily my six-hour Chaucer exam in May (ironically the most soul-draining activity on my calendar for the next 10 months anyway, excluding Eurovision).

You see, the dvd boxset has a seductive power superior to any other facet of the entertainment technology spectrum.

For one, they're massive.

Their sheer colossal bulk overrides all concerns of taste and quality — it may be a bad, schmaltzy drama about an American mechanic/model who can talk to ghosts, but look how much you're getting.

That's a whole day and a half of boxset alone time.

Maybe you could stay in your pyjamas throughout.

It's merely another area in which society is being supersized.

As our appetite for the bacon double deep-fried cream egg lard surprise grows, so does our appetite for media distraction.

What's the good of one, skimpy half-hour programme? It's a garden salad.

If it's an hour-long jobby then fine, it's a beefy salad with sundried tomatoes and some kind of sweet chilli dressing, but it's still a salad. It's a time-wasting lightweight.

It barely provides the procrastination equivalent to lining up all your pens along the top of your desk, cracking your knuckles and saying "down to work" in your most convincing voice.

The boxset is in a whole different league.

It's the 16oz steak they give you free if you can actually finish it (with roughly the same after-effects of nausea and copious sweating).

The challenge is just too tempting.

And yet while it's true that a console game would provide an even greater source of life-sucking, nerve-deadening distraction, the boxset has the sneaky upper hand.

For computer games require completion. They demand dedication.

They make no effort to hide the fact that they want you reduced to a state of such empty vegetation that you are forced to give up work, move into your parents' spare room and wear stonewashed denim with faded t-shirts from sci-fi expos you never even left the sofa to go to.

With my chum the boxset, however, there is the wonderful notion that you might ration your consumption like a superbeing, watching only an episode or two a night.

Because you have a real, functioning life.

You might pause for toilet and tea breaks, instead of rocking back and forth playing bladder jenga and eating things you find under the sofa cushions. You might.

You won't, but that's the beauty of the deception. Once the boxset has your soul, you believe anything is possible.

Incidentally, the latest episode in the story I like to call "My Mother Deserves Her Own Sitcom" is that she's started eating cheese just before bed, specifically in order to have weird, lurid dreams.

"Some of them are really good," she assures me, "and it's safer than drugs…".

Just say Stilton, kids.

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