I sold my soul to the gods of TV

I feel bad about giving money to Rupert Murdoch, I really do. You only need to see his guest appearance on The Simpsons to know he's not a very nice man. If only he didn't provide such excellent Premiership Football coverage in a competitively priced package with broadband, cheap phone calls and the most excellent Sky+ box. Damn him. So I've sold my soul to Sky TV.

Originally our plan was to stick with our existing phone/broadband provider when we moved house and, as the previous occupants of the house had kindly left us a dish, think about Sky in the future. Unfortunately our previous provider, Bulldog, were useless. They originally quoted us 2 weeks to move the line, which I thought was pretty crap. Nothing happened and when we called them 2 and a half weeks later it turned out they only had a record of our cancellation and no record of a new order with them. So rather than wait another two weeks, and with very little in the way of help from them, we told them where to stick it and decided to get Sky's combination package instead.

For those of you not familiar with the Sky process, the first step is to get a BT phone line connected. I phoned BT after work on Thursday and our phone line was connected by the time I got back from work on Monday. I thought that was excellent. Today I called Sky, signing up was easy and their engineer is going to come and fit the TV on Sunday afternoon. Hopefully he'll be here in time for the Super Sunday double bill of the Manchester derby and Liverpool vs Chelsea. Fingers crossed the installation will be one of the easiest the engineer has ever done. The previous inhabitants of the house have left us a Sky dish fully connected with 2 cables into the house for Sky+ so theoretically all he has to do is plug the Sky+ box into the cables and stick our card in the slot.

I will update you with how this process goes. Sky are don't have a reputation for great customer services and any of us who've dealt with big companies like this before know that it's always very easy to sign up with them but can be much more difficult to get Customer Services to resolve issues. I had absolute nightmares with NTL a few years ago

Cost wise? Well our old combination phone + broadband cost us £30 a month, the new package, which is virtually the same phone and broadband with the addition of all the Sky Digital channels and Sky Sports will be £53 a month, including the BT line rental. £17 of the extra cost is the Sky Sports Subscription.

So in summary, I'll still be watching way too much TV, but I'll have a bigger selection of crap to watch, will be able to record so much stuff that I never have time to catch up on it all and can see so much football I'll get totally sick of it. Brilliant.