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If you're like most people, you probably have to juggle between two and four remote control units before you can even get your home theatre setup to show you a movie. It’s a ritual that’s become so routine that you barely have to think about it anymore: You cue up the lobby shootout from The Matrix with one hand. The other tries to grab a second remote as it slips down the side of the couch.

Upon retrieving the errant hunk of plastic, you sit down on a third remote, accidentally changing the channel to a Jonas Brothers concert and cranking the volume up to maximum.

Of course, you could simplify the process by buying a universal remote. But then, you'd lose the power of being the only person who understands the sequence of buttons to press in order to make the moving pictures appear on the magic box. If there's only one clicker, your houseguests are more likely to try and grab it every time one of their cell-phones rings. Don't you hate that? That's your clicker, and some bozo is getting hand cooties all over it! Plus, they'll probably press the wrong button and skip straight to the end of the show, spoiling the ending by revealing that the ghost was actually old man Johnson in disguise this whole time. I knew it!

With a big pile of remote controls on the coffee table, everybody just sits back and leaves the clicking to the guy who actually installed the system. Sure, they want to mess with the clicker, but what if they choose the remote control unit that doesn't do anything? They'd die of shame, that's what. Nobody shrugs and picks up the next clicker after that. And you definitely don't have to worry about people actually standing up and pushing buttons on the TV itself. That’s something best left to cavemen and serial killers.

But if you must spring for a universal remote control, for God's sake, don't get one with a touch screen. The whole point of having a remote control is so you can be a complete slob — it’s all about channel surfing from the couch, shoving Maltesers into your face and dropping the clicker into your huge bowl of buttered popcorn. Sure, that touch screen interface looks cool and high tech right now. But how is it going to look three weeks down the road, all scratched up and covered in a film of finger grease, Mountain Dew and Cheeto dust? Plus, having a smooth surface interface is a terrible idea; you want to be able to pick this thing up in the dark and use it without looking at it. For that, you need a familiar pattern of buttons under your thumb.

The gigantic, tea tray-sized remotes are even worse. They’re supposed to be too large to lose — that’s their gimmick — but that just makes it twice as embarrassing when you do lose it. And believe me, you will. It's still a remote, after all. The clumsy thing is impossible to use one-handed and you have to look at it to operate it properly. By the time you finally locate the pause button, Halle Berry has already put her clothes back on. Gyp!

Which brings us to video game consoles. In addition to playing games and connecting to the Internet, most also play DVDs and Blu-ray discs. As many gamers have found out, game controllers are fine for shooting aliens, but they make for lousy clickers. The Xbox 360’s new Kinect controller — a webcam-like device that sits on your television set, translating your physical movements into computerized instructions — has no buttons at all. Will we be able to use this contraption to watch movies? Imagine fast-forwarding through Ben-Hur by repeatedly throwing punches in the air. Then you'd yawn and stretch, accidentally changing the film’s default language to Spanish. In a panic, you'd lunge for the television and trip over a table leg, a movement-command the machine would surely interpret as “erase everything on the hard drive.”

Let's face it. We don’t actually want a remote control, we want a magic wand. We can hear it now: “This show sucks. Kill the TV with lightning!” Zap! “Replace it with a 60-inch plasma screen.” Zap! “Now find me a show featuring dinosaurs on motorbikes!” Zap! “Change everybody in the entire cast into Salma Hayek.” Zap! “Now make them mud wrestle!” Zap!