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Columnist Chris Britcher remembers the rush for the last Teletubbies dolls but is unable to get his head around the current craze for a certain energy drink.

I am sure I am not the only one who has been utterly bamboozled by the stampede created by the desire for the colourful bottles of Prime.

The 'hydrating' beverage (aren't they all?), is a product of the modern age and one which flies so far above the heads of those of us of a certain vintage it is barely visible with the naked eye.

For the uninitiated, it is a soft 'sports' drink, in a colourful bottle, which promises to deliver what plenty of other soft 'sports' drinks in colourful bottles vow to do - namely not only quench your thirst but give you some antioxidants and electrolytes too (apparently).

There is, in short, nothing particularly new here.

So what, you may ask is the secret ingredient? What makes young folk so desire these bottles of pop that they descend on supermarket stocks like a swarm of locusts?

The answer, as so many things seem to be these days, lies in the power of YouTube - and some of its leading content creators.

Where once we just had to make do with the best TV personalities the four channels we had could serve up, now any Tom, Dick or Logan Paul is a media brand with a following running into the millions.

Prime is a product which is championed by YouTubers Logan Paul, from the US, and Britain's very own KSI. They are, I'm reliably informed, very famous indeed among those who don't only use YouTube to find an old pop video or, more recently in my case, a Christmas Woolworths advert from the mid 1980s which, for reasons I cannot fathom, had stuck vaguely in my memory.

They were the duo who, you may remember, had a much publicised boxing match - beamed as a pay-per-view event and which netted both many millions. They could both, in truth, walk past me in the street and I'd be none the wiser.

For the older generation, I can only assume it was like watching Terry Wogan slug it out with Michael Parkinson. Which, in retrospect, would probably have been worth paying for.

I cannot, however, quite imagine the two chat show hosts then going on to launch a 'healthy' Ribena, for example. Or maybe they did, but I just missed it.

Either way, it certainly did not generate the excitement around Prime.

Not since mothers and grandparents brawled in the aisles of the now defunct Toys R Us for the last Teletubbies cuddly toy can I remember such a craze. But at least with a Tinky Winky you knew the pleasure it would give would last longer than the 20 minutes it takes to neck a bottle of Prime. Unless, of course, your child of choice wanted a Dipsy.

Looking further back, the New Year sales used to always generate plenty of ludicrous scenes as people queued all night in a bid to get into the big Oxford Street department stores

The Harrods sale, I seem to remember, was always one to see the hoards rush through its hallowed doors in a bid, one can only assume, to buy something not so ludicrously priced for once and nab that all important branded carrier bag.

In this era of internet shopping the need to queue up is dramatically reduced. Not to mention the fact that where once the best deals were only up for grabs on Boxing Day or New Year's Day, now sales season starts at the end of November when retailers hijack America's post Thanksgiving shopping spree with Black Friday.

Indeed, such is the competition now, the sales season seems to last pretty much 12 months of the year.

'I can only assume it was like watching Terry Wogan slug it out with Michael Parkinson. Which, in retrospect, would probably have been worth paying for...'

Instead of having to queue up for hours and then rush to grab a bargain, we have swapped it for the anxiety of getting your goods actually delivered amid strikes and hapless delivery companies.

So perhaps making a fuss over a bottled drink; something so irrelevant, so short-lived and, frankly, so derivative, is, in this day and age, simply an excuse to get excited about something.

All I know is that given bottles of Prime are being sold on eBay for many times their value, on my last visit to Arsenal (which has a deal in place for the drink) I really should not have baulked at the £4 price tag for a bottle and nabbed a few.

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