I'm sure everyone is just fascinated by my travails with this upgrade so here's an update:
Upgraded here in NG7 as of yesterday.
I guess I should have counted 24 working hours rather than expecting it to be done on a weekend or Bank Holiday.
One problemo - only achieving speeds of 3.3mb max. It turns out the NTL Home 100 modem won't support 10mb (despite VM website saying the modem was fine for 10mb when I registered). A nice man called Abi (sp?) in India said he'd get a new one sent to me pronto, free of charge.