Inspector Gadget here. Help! My home is being taken over by handy, time-saving devices which should make life easier but which are just driving me to the verge of a nervous breakdown.

We have a special coffee table now just for the remote control units in the lounge - seemingly hundreds of them. My daughter's bedroom has an even more bewildering array.

Every new piece of electronic equipment these days comes with a remote control.

I confess, I'm not a high-tech person - I've no idea what an MP3 player is - but I don't want to fall too far behind the neighbours. I'd be laughed out of the village pub if I could not boast about my new DVD player.

So the shiny, new player came with a remote control, to sit alongside the similar, but oh-so-different, remotes for the telly, the video player, the stereo set and the gin and tonic dispenser.

We did resist a remote controlled wood-burning stove. I swear it's true, there's a handset to control the draught into the stove. Instead, I chose to get up off the sofa every so often to adjust the heat with a simple lever.

Every remote control is different and confusing. Sometimes we leave the cordless phone on that table and I've often tried to phone out on the video control, apart from trying to record tonight's showing of Bored Housewives with the phone.

It's like cars. No two seem to have similar controls. Many's the time I've wanted to give an angry toot at some idiot and finished up squirting the windscreen. And I've never seen the point of having a flash car with satellite navigation for mum to deliver young Oliver to school half a mile away.

The whole point is, all this equipment is like the brain - we use only about ten per cent of the capacity.

We are constantly being seduced by the persuasive advertisements to upgrade to the latest model. We haven't yet worked out how to get the best of the old model (which is outmoded before you get it out of the shop). I mean, how many times have you used the surround stadium sound, split screen, multi-view, superwide, slow-motion, freeze-frame mode on the telly? Yet you must have the new model because it offers one-touch record while you watch; because it will resume the programme where you left off to go and make a cup of tea - and because John up the road has one.

Each new gadget comes with an instruction manual the size and complexity of a scientific journal and you need a degree in astrophysics to be able to absorb it. After an hour of intensive study, you finally learn how to switch the damn thing on. Then a child walks in, takes one peep at the remote control and pilots the equipment as if he's just completed three years at a national aeronautics establishment.

A couple of years ago I was invited to look round a pioneering new 'smart' house. Now that house was smart.

On the way home from a busy day at the office, you only had to get on your mobile phone - not while driving of course - and give the house its orders. Long before you get to the street, the house will close the curtains, turn up the lights and heating, set dinner cooking and boil a kettle. It will run a bath to the correct temperature and open the garage doors when it detects your car pulling into the drive.

Once you are safely inside your snug smart home, you need not answer the door to uninvited guests. It has a camera guarding the door which shows you - after a small alarm has sounded - on a computer screen who is calling round at this time of night.

Just speak out a command and the lights will go off so they think no-one is at home.

That's clever when I remember being brought up in a house in which the most advanced electrical items were an iron and a Bakelite wireless.

We had no phone of course. If you didn't know anyone posh enough to have one, you had to walk to the end of the street with a few massive, old pennies, and wrestle with the complexities of pressing button 'A' once you got through.

The nice red phone box always smelled of urine and was draughty as hell because some youth's idea of fun was to kick in the glass panels. At least some things never change.

Updated: 10:59 Tuesday, October 26, 2004