Scene: a Stanley Baxter ITV Christmas special in the mid 1980s. The expensive film parody is The Jewel in the Crown. Posh Old Empire Duffer (Stanley Baxter) confronts an Indian mystic (Stanley Baxter, plus dubbin). “I say, what’s your name?” “Please sir, my name is Page!” “Page? Odd name for a soothsayer, what?” “Oh, yes. I am Page the Oracle!” That’s how far the advertising slogan of ITV’s Ceefax-beating text service had penetrated popular consciousness. Paging the Oracle (the name supposedly stood for Optional Reception of Announcements by Coded Line Electronics, but if that’s not a classic case of retro-fitting words into a nice-sounding acronym we don’t know what is) brought you the wonders of magazine show Live at Five, teen section Buzz (featuring Debbie’s Diary!) and the semi-legendary endless text soap opera Park Avenue. Oh, and endless flashing double-height captions urging you to book a Thomas Cook holiday while places last. Until, that is, it was canned at the end of 1992 to make way for the imaginatively titled ITV Teletext.

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In an age of supposedly sophisticated ‘viral’ marketing that counts itself successful if it makes half a dozen people look at an elaborately-crafted hoax website for thirty seconds each, here’s an example of old school advertising achieving maximum bang for its buck. An unprepossessing TV and video sales and rental showroom in the Lea Bridge Road, Hackney, OTV achieved near national notoriety by spotting that, with the nascent Channel Four being crippled by an actor’s boycott of its advertising slots, the way was clear for its Tony Aitken-esque brown-suited manager to slip in front of the camera himself, and flog his humble electronic wares to the populace at a knock-down price. And so he did. On average, at least twice per commercial break. Every commercial break. Without fail. Soon he’d expanded to a second premises in Stockwell, but then the strike was resolved, ‘proper’ ads starring Rosalyn Landor and Nick Hancock returned to the Channel, and the rates shot up far beyond OTV’s grasp. But we remember. Wonder if he did Betamax?

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