Smeg 662EB how does it work? It keeps stopping after each cycle?

We are renting a furnished apartment that has a smeg 662EB, and we dont have any user manual. We start the machine and turn the dial to 1, but once it gets round to 2, it stops, we then need to manually turn it round to just after 2 before it starts again.. The same thing happens when the 2 cycle is finished, we need to manually turn the dial to 3 etc etc, so basically I cannot go to bed at night and wake up to find the machine done, please help