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relying solely on traditional advertising. Chime wanted to position
themselves at the forefront of this new era of digital interactivity and were
looking for an idea to take them there.

I went to the meeting armed with four A4 pages of closely typed ideas, mainly
pulled from the Idea A Day archive. Jay introduced me to David and we went
through the pages. It took about 10 minutes to find an idea we liked and
another 50 minutes to determine that it would actually work. The idea was
from Idea A Day and had been published on 13 February 2001. It was Chas
Bayfield’s idea for a television channel on which a panel of experts would
recommend to viewers what they should be watching on all the other
channels. The idea had been on the site for more than two years without
attracting any interest from anyone. Nestled amongst a thousand other
concepts of varying purposefulness and insight, it had been no more than
another clever twist of an idea - as much a neat joke as a business plan.
Singled out in a meeting with a brilliant television marketer and a PLC with
major company clients and money of its own to invest, it became quite an
exciting property indeed. Confident that we had cracked it, Jay determined to
propose the idea within Chime, David left to consider the financial viability
and the funding required and I volunteered to write a creative treatment, give
it a name and, of course, call Chas.

Flipside TV
It took about a month before the meetings I had on the project with Jay and
David began to be populated with other interested parties and for decisions to
be taken that would actually be put into practise. I had come up with the name
Flipside fairly quickly after the first meeting and Jay and I had written up
content ideas to fill hours of television. I had also asked Chas to let me run
with the idea on the understanding that I would give him half of anything I
could hold onto. Chas was happy to be a sleeping partner; he and I both had a

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