Updated And so we found ourselves in a pub called The King of Corsica, in Berwick Street, Soho, London W1 talking to the executive chairman of Victoria Real, who was singing like a berserk canary might about how Intel was helping out the famous C4 Big Brother Site.

Richard Daws, the executive chairman, and en route to First Tuesday, whatever that is, claimed that Intel was behind the idea of a Big Brother site - something we didn't find difficult to believe in the slightest.

And then Daws started to complain about how Intel technology had let Victoria Real down.

We stopped him there.

As Intel had funded the entire idea, and even come up with the idea, said Daws, on his way to a First Tuesday gig, we felt it was incumbent on us to ask where the technology went wrong.

At this point, he went off on one, and we were scribbling furiously, but his PR geezer stopped us from telling the whole story.

Some questions, do, however, remain. Why, if as Daws claims, Intel came up with the idea, we don't have an official press release from Intel in Santa Clara?

We mean, if Intel came up with the idea of Big Brother, why isn't it telling us officially? And why also is Daws complaining about the servers?

We feel the whole world should be told. Don't we?

Update

From Paul Munford, Media communications manager, Victoria Real.

'Intel is the company that hosts the Big Brother site and the service has broken all UK internet records. We're happy to have worked with them and the comments reported by The Register this morning were taken completely out of context.

Unfortunately if you ever have a beer with Mike Magee you enter the twilight zone where things are not quite what they seem. Besides, a journalist filing copy at 10pm after one too many drinks is not likely to know where the keyboard is, let alone what and what not was said in a Soho pub five hours earlier.' ®