MORE than 25 years ago, I discovered something in my eye right at the end of watching E.T.

From the moment the lights went up in the cinema and I made my way through the crowds of mums, dads, youngsters and couples to the exit, I struggled with this mysterious foreign object that had entered at the precise moment the extra-terrestrial said goodbye to his little friend Elliott.

Coincidentally, there seemed to be lots of other blokes suffering the same kind of ocular distress and some were affected so badly that they had bravely disguise their personal anguish by slyly dabbing at their watering eyes with their sleeves.

Crying at films has never been a problem for me.

In fact, I'm very good at it and to this day cannot watch Kevin Costner in Field Of Dreams without a box of tissues and an empty house.

But E.T. broke the mould for my generation, being the only film where it was actually acceptable to shed a tear at the denouement of this wonderful film.

But I would like to thanks ITV - or rather my Freeview box - for helping to ruin the magic this Christmas.

For unless I am mistaken - and it has to be said that festive intake may have blurred the precise statistics - I managed to watch E.T. a total of five times over a period of about 48 hours.

Don't ask me how - perhaps Santa set the DVD recorder on repeat record - but over that period I changed from cheering the little's fella's reincarnation to wishing he'd pegged it.

At least that would have spared me sitting through the final half hour of what had been transformed from a magical cinematic gem to a mawkish, overwrought melodrama.

I'm all for giving busy people the chance to see programmes they've missed.

Indeed, ITV2's later showings have often come to my rescue when I have forgotten to record episodes of Coronation Street.

But I now have ITV2 +1 which shows programmes that I may already have seen twice again an hour later.

And don't get me started on friends boasting about being able to freeze' live programmes with their precious SkyPlus boxes.

As far as I am concerned, it's nothing more than dark arts and as a film lover, I have always been warned of the dangers of meddling with the space-time continuum.

As for E.T., his departure from this planet is now a blessed relief, although his interminable concerns over telephone communications with his native planet should have prepared us for dealing with the nightmare of teenage daughters and mobile phones.