At our place, it's bad form to watch Below Deck Mediterranean alone.

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Should my wife or one of our teenage kids attempt a sneaky solo viewing of the latest adventures of Captain Sandy and her mostly merry crew of stews, deckhands and put-upon chefs, they are quickly found out and their punishment shall be to rewatch the episode in the lounge room with the other four of us. And no spoilers.

Not quite keelhauling, but nasty enough to keep potential mutineers in check.

For us, in this era of diasporic streaming, the Bravo reality TV series screening here on Binge is one of the very few shows better consumed as a group and not, in the kids' case, on a laptop, in a double-, sometimes triple-screened bedroom marathon from which the participants can emerge bleary-eyed, strung-out and mumbling incoherently about Hal Jordan, Hawkeye Pierce or Cathy Earnshaw.

Despite my predilection for a round-the-clock diet of Jeopardy! and Antiques Roadshow (actually possible given the number of free-to-air repeats - and is there anything more embarrassing than getting the same Final Jeopardy question wrong three times in six weeks?) there are a couple of other shows with the siren song of family appeal. The Great Pottery Throw Down and Gogglebox come to mind, the latter especially enjoyable because we recognise ourselves in those folk who love nothing better than to veg out in front of the flatscreen after another increasingly unfeasible 21st-century day of work, school and whatever the........

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