God am I not a happy bunny at the moment!

I have been recording the Channel 4 at 25 programmes on More4, but when the ad break came in the middle of Countdown the bloody thing wouldn't let me pause the recording! When I pressed Pause, an error message "Operation not allowed during recording" displayed.

Is it possible to make a pause in a recording with this machine? Or have Sony colluded with the broadcasting industry to make such pauses during manual recordings impossible so you have to sit through the ads/sponsorship bumpers? Grrr...

Presumably you were doing a timed recording rather than a manual one?. You wouldn't expect to be able to pause during a timed recording.

No, I was definitely doing a manual recording!