Lee McQueen to sell ad space for digital billboards

You may have thought the Amstrad E-mailer had gone the way of the pterodactyl but Lee McQueen will now be trying to bring both back to life.

The reverse pterodactyl screech will no doubt be heard by a few employees in the Sugar empire but the technology for the E-mailer is back in a new Sugar venture.

The unlamented Amstrad E-mailer displayed digital ads to a screen on the top which long-suffering owners found blinking at them in their living room.

Sir Alan boasted: "The Amstrad phones were an electronic billboard in the home. At its peak we had over 400,000 units in homes and we could send adverts to people who could not miss them. The screen was always on, so when people awoke in the morning it was in their face, with several adverts running throughout the day."

Now Sir Alan will be using the same technology to send ads to TV screens which will replace billboards in the London Underground or by the road - to people who certainly would never have been seen dead buying any Amstrad equipment. And Lee McQueen will collect £100,000 in return for selling the digital ads for a year.

No doubt Sir Alan Sugar will want to place the digital ads on busy streets - and if they start distracting too many people they will probably soon be blamed for causing road accidents.

And what about all the blokes who get paid for ripping down old posters and pasting up new ones? Will they all be lining up to appear in series five of The Apprentice so they can also get a job selling the new-fangled electronic ads?

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