The British are the biggest television addicts in Europe, spending 25 hours a week watching the box - second only to the United States. We spend only five hours a week reading newspapers, magazines and books, preferring nothing more than curling up to watch our favourite soaps, reality shows and the latest American series.

The importance of television in British culture is best illustrated by the huge popularity of listings magazines, the sales of which have stayed surprisingly strong in a wider market that has been so badly hit by the internet. Their performance is mirrored in the United States, where titles such as TV Guide dominate magazine sales.

Since deregulation in 1991, which ended the duopoly where Radio Times carried only programmes on BBC channels while TV Times listed ITV and Channel 4, the industry has continued to predict the downfall of the TV weekly.

While the sector has become increasingly competitive in the past 16 years, with eight titles now vying for a place on Britain’s coffee tables, the market has stayed at or around the 5 million mark. It has held up against a number of challenges, from the emergence of free weekly supplements in 1996, to electronic programme guides (EPGs), to the internet.

Stevie Spring, the chief executive of Future, the magazine publisher, said: “There is a much lower penetration of broadband in lower-income families, which is surely why a lot of people still buy TV listings magazines.”

While Ms Spring’s point may provide some insight into why the majority of TV Choice, TV Quick and What’s on TV readers fit the C2DE - or working-class – profile, it does not explain why 73.8 per cent of Radio Timesreaders, 50 per cent of TV & Satellite Week and 46 per cent of listing magazine readers in general fit the ABC1 profile.

David Goodchild, managing director of H Bauer UK, whose TV Choice magazine gained 8.1 per cent to 1,391,774 readers in the latest ABC circulation figures in August, said: “The TV listings market is resilient, as there is established purchasing behaviour.

“Research has shown that people who have grown up with television weeklies in the house continue to buy one when they move home. They are not seen as luxury items, unlike most other magazines, and are often picked up with the weekly shop.

“Families don’t watch TV together any more. The free supplement goes upstairs and the paid-for listings magazine stays downstairs. There is greater demand than ever for listings information,” added Mr Goodchild. “Using an EPG or even a wireless laptop to plan what to watch over the weekend is simply too time-consuming and people prefer to sit on the sofa and read a magazine.”

Kathy Day, the publisher of the BBC’s Radio Times, agrees that those who have grown up with listings magazines will more often than not continue to buy one when they leave home.

“The appetite for listings magazines is often driven by habit. People know which colour each day in a magazine represents. If you change a colour, you would not believe how many people complain.”

In a country where television is most people’s main source of entertainment, planning what to watch is often an important weekly routine. Forty per cent of listings magazines are bought on a Tuesday when they hit the newsstands, as people map out their weekly viewing. “Some of our readers buy the magazine purely for guidance on what to watch, as some buy downmarket TV weeklies for soap gossip,” said Ms Day.

Listings weeklies are a part of Britain’s staple diet, thrown in the basket with the bread, milk and tea bags. And at Christmas, as television becomes for many the only way to survive the holiday, sales of the specially pumped-up magazines double as they jostle for space with the dates, figs and nuts in the already groaning shopping trolley.

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