Internet telly has sorted out Pixelsmith's viewing habits once and for all. The only problem is, he's watching far too much.

"This is the worst chowder I've ever eaten. Look at it, it's watery, it's disgusting, I wouldn't feed it to my pigs. You're clueless. You're an idiot. You're a big clueless idiot."

I'm having to paraphrase Gordon Ramsay here. For a more accurate version, pop something in the microwave for a few seconds then read the sentence aloud when the timer reaches zero. There should be enough bleeps to convey the swearing.

Gordon Ramsay is sitting in an American seafood restaurant and tearing a series of strips off a beaten looking man, in between blowing clouds of dried parsley off his dinner plate to demonstrate how over-garnished it is. Next up, he sneaks into the kitchen early in the morning to unearth a stash of gone-off meat, rotting veg and dead flies. Then he gathers the staff and gives them all an angry telling off, before redesigning the restaurant, re-doing its menu, firing the chef and ultimately bringing about a new and successful dawn for the business. It's all interspersed with clips of his willing victims exclaiming how "Chef Ramsay" saved their business, their marriage and probably their life and – if they're female – pointing out how attractive he is.

I've watched this happen five times now. You could plot the narrative arc on a graph and the only thing that would change is the location of the swear words and the levels of parsley. A normal person would be spending this sunny Saturday walking in the park or having a picnic, but I've just discovered 4OD, the internet catch-up service which pipes a bundle of Channel 4's previous month's programming onto the web and lets you watch it at your leisure. I'm four hours into a Kitchen Nightmares USA marathon and I can't stop.

I've come to this TV-on-demand thing a bit late. For years, Sky Plus and its brethren have been converting the passive viewing habits of millions into a much more selective process, squashing telly into handy little compartments to be picked, recorded and watched at the user's convenience. I can't believe I've held out for so long, because a few hours after being released from the tyranny of scheduling, the whole history of television up until this point starts to look like seven decades of darkness. Children these days are born into a fantasy dreamworld of pick 'n' mix TV, while I used to panic if my tea wasn't ready before Thundercats. What a chump – I feel like I've been taken for a ride for the last 29 years.

However, several hours after joining the 21st century, I'm beginning to spot the drawbacks. In the traditional viewing process, you can switch off after whatever you wanted to watch has finished. Chances are you won't, and instead will spend the next couple of hours having mildly entertaining soft mush spooned into your brain while you loll about on the settee eating Minstrels, but the point is that the option is there. Good programmes cease, rubbish programmes begin and the only thing between you and freedom is a spot of motivation.

Not so with internet telly. Finish one Kitchen Nightmares and there's another one right under it in the list, waiting to swallow up 40 minutes of your hard-earned spare time. Watch that one and it happens again. Some time later, Gordon Ramsay is glaring at you out of the telly and spitting out his fifth bowl of soup in as many hours. It's a good job they only keep the shows up for a month or I'd have consumed the entire back catalogue in a single sitting.

Was it worth it? Well, I now know I never want to open a restaurant, which is likely to save me hundreds of thousands of pounds I don't have. That's a fair rate of return for one lost Saturday. I've also learned that watching telly on the internet feels less like a terrible waste of time than slumping on the sofa and submitting to the whims of the schedulers.

I'll be feeling smug about that as I destroy my next weekend with seven hours of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.