Television glorious television - with a side order of carbs

Amid the eruption of attention on second-screen viewing habits, it’s easy to forget one great thing about iPads: they make excellent trays.

When it comes to doing other stuff while watching television, tweeting is a much less popular pastime than eating. A recent Ipsos MRBI study suggested that 10 per cent of the time we are watching TV we are also stuffing food in our mouths, while just 3 per cent of the time we are social networking. Hashtags and emoticons are all very well, but you can’t grill them with cheese.

There was a time – let’s call it the 1980s – when talking-head types lamented the existence of “TV dinners”, a shorthand for ready-meals they regarded not just as nutritionally lacking, but morally suspect. You don’t hear the phrase “TV dinner” much anymore, perhaps because it seems like such a grammatical redundancy.

There is simply eating out and there is eating in, and within, ahem, certain households, the latter involves televised entertainment as a matter of course. Satiate all five senses efficiently in the precious little leisure time available to us? It sounds, looks, tastes, smells and feels like a marvellous plan.

But the gods of grocery marketing did not create all sofa meals the same. At a basic level, there is the television we choose to watch while we’re eating, and then there’s the food we choose to consume while we’re watching television.

The first category is the show we stick on once the pasta has been drained and the stir-in sauce stirred in. This can't be just any television programme. News channels are a particularly bad option at this point in the evening due to their unpredictable tone – it seems disrespectful to feast on carbohydrates while other people's misery is dissected in bulletin form. Despite regular tweet exclamations of "popcorn!" as Tonight with Vincent Browne looms, anything current affairs-y is problematic, as an angry meal is not a good meal – it just tastes of rage.

Imported US dramas can also prove a tricky dinner companion. I defy any couch diner not to queasily drop their fork at least once while attempting to watch an episode of True Blood . Kudos to any vegetarians who ingest during Game of Thrones , a show so carnivorous that would-be queen Daenerys Targaryen ceremoniously eats horse – not just wimpy supermarket-style "horse DNA", you understand, but a full horse's heart complete with dripping entrails.

The other type of TV food consumption is the kind that is of interest to the snack food industry – the extra, comfort-food calories we enjoy during our stint in front of the small screen. No “event” is too lame to qualify as “event television” in this economic gloom, and marketers have adjusted their focuses accordingly.

The great performer in the confectionery market of late has been the “sharing bag” category. We can’t get enough of these really big bags of chocolate that are for sharing, definitely for sharing. With confectioners pouring new product development cash into these resealable beauties, there’s a new emphasis in the messages we’re being sold. The (comically) sensuous solo Flake bath ads of old, for example, have been displaced by the kind of sofa-bound ads that talk up the inherent sociability of the average Malteser.

Much TV-ritual food marketing takes place in-store when we're in a position to anticipate our prime-time needs, rather than via on-screen campaigns. But occasionally there's a programme-affiliation, such as Domino's former sponsorship of The X Factor on TV3, that hammers home the point. In that case, the point being hammered was that Saturday night is takeaway night, and here's an oily, bloated shiny-floor show to distract you from any residual self-disgust.

TV-related gorging may not be every marketer’s dream. Psychologists at the University of Birmingham have found that people who eat in front of the television, or indeed do anything that distracts them from their meal, are less able to form “food memories” and so are more likely to carry on snacking afterwards.

That’s great news for the snack food sellers that trade on treat-gluttony, but it could be more of a challenge for a marketer attempting to establish a more sophisticated, less volume-based relationship between consumers and food. Our meal memories may be compromised by our televisual habits, and vice versa.

Happily, some television shows suggest perfect accompaniments without requiring any intervention by marketers whatsoever. Thursday night at around 9pm is when I frequently ask myself WWAFD (What Would Alicia Florrick Do)? The answer, as anyone who watches The Good Wife will know, is invariably crack open a bottle of red. More4 has scheduled it well.