I've been with Wanadoo/Orange for a long time now, and i mainly use my internet for gaming, recently in the summer I experienced cut offs at 8 pm-ish, and orange failed to do anything about it until early September when after a numerous amount of phone calls it was fixed. but recently I've been getting terrible latency at peak times, which is a real problem for me. I live in a village, 2km away from an exchange point, is there anything i can do which doesn't involve moving house?

You can contact BT and ask them to adjust the settings for the phone line. It is worth deleting your temporary internet files, cookies, etc.. You can also try a different provider (perhaps test them for just one month before switching) and a different modem. It's normal for connections to be worse around 9pm but it's still quite possible that you could get an acceptable connection without moving. If one of the mobile phone providers has decent coverage for your house, mobile broadband is another option to consider.