Are you living outside of the UK and miss TV shows such as Young Butcher of the Year, Cash in the Attic or So You Think You Can Dance? If so, fear no more because Expat Shield is a simple and legal ad-supported VPN software which allows you to access UK TV websites such as BBC iPlayer and ITV iPlayer when outside of the UK.

Expat Shield routes your IP address via a UK IP address as if you were still in the UK wherever you are in the world. It's therefore not only a good solution for expats missing their fix of Eastenders, Emmerdale or Coronation Street, but also those in countries where firewalls block them from accessing certain sites such as Twitter, Wikipedia and YouTube.

When you run Expat Shield, your browser will be automatically opened with a message to indicate whether Expat Shield has connected correctly or not. It usually connects quickly and you're presented with a series of random TV links below which you can ignore.

Enter the BBC website address in your browser and select the iPlayer. You should find that surfing is no different in terms of speed than surfing normally without Expat Shield. Simply select the programme you want to watch and the iPlayer starts playing as if you were in the UK. Streaming is fast and stable and you can skip and rewind instantly.

The great thing is, Expat Shield is completely free and legal to use. The only thing you have to put up with is an advertising banner at the top of your browser. You can make this disappear by clicking the "X" box although as soon as you surf another page, the banner will appear again.

Expat Shield also comes with the added bonus in that it helps to anonymize your tracks on the internet. So for example, if you use the Google box in your browser to search, Expat Surfer will ask whether you want to enable or disable Google tracking your search history and surfing.

If you want to watch UK TV including BBC and ITV outside of the UK, Expat Surfer is a brilliant free solution. Note that it's only available for Windows.