February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Andrew Bushe
DUBLIN — Former Boomtown Rat and Live Aid organizer Bob Geldof is set to make about £5 million from the sale of the Planet 24 TV production company he started seven years ago.
Planet 24, which makes Channel 4’s "The Big Breakfast," has been bought by the London-based Carlton Communications group.
Geldof and his partners, Lord Waheen Alli and Charlie Parsons, are believed to be sharing about £15 million.
Their company is regarded as a "talent factory, an ideas factory" by the new owners.
Blackrock-born Geldof said he was as proud of Planet 24 "as anything else I’ve done."
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"This one company managed to shift the way television looked, so that nowadays our screens are awash with Planet 24 ‘wannabe’ programming," he said in a statement.
Plans by Geldof for a new Irish music TV channel head-quartered in Dublin remain unfulfilled.
He recently met Arts Minister Sile de Valera and complained that he was being frustrated by officialdom.
He had planned that the station would be broadcasting within six months and create 50 jobs. It was to have been a "single-issue, cable, subscription, niche interest station" taking on MTV.
In the meantime, Geldof has plans to set up a deckchair next month — his new plan for people with computers to get easy access to the cheapest flights.
He is launching an Internet website business to be called deckchair.com after he had a frustrating time last September trying to find the cheapest flights for a trip to Florida with his children.
Geldof said the website will be as simple as possible.
"You just type in wherever you want to go, when, when you are returning, how many people are travelling and then press for the cheapest flight. Your tickets will arrive in two days."
He revealed his new plan on a St Patrick’s visit to Dublin, where he helped organise the Skyfest fireworks extravaganza, which kicked off the festival weekend in the city.