Afternoon TV

Watching Deal or No Deal at the mo. Have you got a system? Yes, I’m a big Liverpool fan Noel – so I’ll be opening the boxes in the order of the Istanbul penalty takers. First up, number 9, Djibril Cisse. £100k. Oh dear. Second number 16, Did Hamann. £50k. Ah, I didn’t know this show could be so entertaining.

Everybody knows a bloke…

According to without doubt the most annoying advert on telly at the moment, everybody knows a bloke like Mickey. Mickey is a super-sexy male model who is shown in various agreeable situations with an array of leggy blonde and brunette stunnahs, each time with a fabulous appropriate hairstyle to match his mood.

Mickey’s secret is Head and Shoulders, see, which of course is bollocks because my secret is also Head and Shoulders and I started to go bald at 17 and I’ve had the same girlfriend/wife for 11 years (not that the second of these dissimilarities is a bad thing I might add!).

Whoever thought of this must be living on another planet, because Mickey comes across as an absolute c*ck and I am a customer of theirs but looking at my friends I absolutely don’t know anyone remotely like this, and I don’t know of anybody that does. I’ve never known an ad completely misjudge its customer base quite like this.

Anyway, you know when you’re watching telly and you go to 101 and it’s crap so you keep pressing the up button and it goes past Emmerdale and Bones, and about half a dozen “up”s later it finds a channel that’s showing Top Gear or Question of Sport or Catherine Tate and you think “yeah, that’ll do”?

Well there are ten million people (apparantly) who do exactly that, so the channel is really really popular… but nobody knows what it’s called. In marketing speak it has “low brand awareness”.

So, they’re going to call the channel “Dave”, because unlike Mickey, everybody really does know a Dave (just the one?), and unlike the Head and Shoulders ad, this is pure marketing genius.

Look out for the Dave channel, coming soon to a goggle-box near you…

Lost Connections

If, like me, you’re a bit of a Lost fan, then you’ll like this clever little widget from ABC. You can explore all the links between the different characters, backed up by video clips and photos. Did you know that the CIA agent who freed Sayid was also originally in the hatch with Desmond..?

Open Lost Connections