NEXT time you see someone stagger into work bleary eyed, chances are they haven’t been out on the tiles all night.

They’re far more likely to have succumbed to the new craze that sweeps the nation.

I refer, of course, to binge watching television shows into the wee small hours.

The habit is booming, with video on demand services such as Netflix now claiming about four million UK users.

The craze mainly affects viewers of American TV shows, the kind where everything builds to an irresistible cliffhanger.

There’s even a sense of achievement when you have survived something like the 47-hour, 32-minute endurance test which it takes to get to the end of the series Breaking Bad.

To put this in perspective, it took 102 hours and 45 minutes for Apollo 11 to fly to the moon.

By which time you could easily have watched Breaking Bad twice, while taking intervals to work out what to binge on next.

In a qualitative research report prepared for Ofcom earlier this year one young man is quoted as saying he binge watches “30 episodes a day”.

Can you imagine the effect that watching 30 episodes of Last of the Summer Wine could have on you?

I’ve binged on these US shows myself and it’s not all bad.

For instance I only know as much as I do today about Middle Eastern terrorist organisations because of the 72 hours I spent watching the thriller 24, in which Kiefer Sutherland repeatedly rescues Los Angeles from more nuclear attacks than you could shake a stick at.

I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that binge watching is actually good for you, as a University of Oklahoma report recently did.

But as bingeing goes it has to be better than binge drinking, or binge eating.

You manage to combine all three, in which case you have the basis of what I would consider to be a fantastic night in.

Naturally not everyone who subscribes to these services will binge irresponsibly.

After a day at work staring at a computer screen, and a journey home staring at the screen of your telephone, you might fancy a break for fear your life will be overtaken by screens, and they’ll have to switch you back on in the morning by pressing a button on the back of your head.

I cancelled the subscription service I used about a year ago. Not because binge watching was diverting me from worthy activities Not for the laudable reason that binge watching was diverting me from more worthy activities I could be pursuing with in my free evenings, but simply because I had run out of trash to fill them with. I was faced with a choice.