Tim Shaw was famous as Tim the Demtel Man in the early 1990s.
These days, he’s a radio presenter.
WATCH HIS FAMOUS AD BELOW!
WHO IS HE?
In the early 1990s, it was hard to avoid Tim Shaw – aka Tim the Demtel Man – and his infomercials. He was famous for the catchphrase, “But wait, there’s more”.
His TV ads made him an accidental star.
“I was on television more often than Ray Martin [then host of A Current Affair],” Tim tells New Idea.
HOW DID HE GET HIS START?
Tim, who grew up on Sydney’s northern beaches, was ‘plucked from obscurity’ to front a TV ad for pedometers in 1992.
“My first commercial was crap,” Tim concedes. “I was wooden as all b—–y.”
But his ad was spied by a representative of US company Demtel (short for demonstration television), which needed an Aussie salesman for their ads.
WHERE DID HIS CATCHPHRASE COME FROM?
So popular was Tim’s, “But wait there’s more” catchphrase that it entered the Australian vernacular. But he didn’t invent the line. “It had come out of the ’60s and ’70s in America, but we just put an Australian face on it,” he says. In the three years he was with Demtel, Tim helped the company shift one million knives and 600,000 classical CDs.
WHAT DOES HE DO THESE DAYS?
When his days with Demtel ended in 1995, Tim took up a career in radio at 2UE. He now hosts Canberra’s 2CC Breakfast and is a regular at the National Press Club. But he will forever be recognised as Tim the Demtel man. “I’ll be walking down the street and someone will say, ‘Mate, did you bring any knives today,’” he says. “You can’t change history, it’s what you do with it.”
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