New name for family business

The music and entertainment venues new name is all thanks to local resident Dave Valentine, who came up with 'The Reel Deal'.

His suggestion proved to be the winning entry in a competition, which proprietor Linda Donoghue had been running for the past few weeks.

Dave, who lives in Bexhill, received his prize of one hundred pounds worth of goods from proprietor Linda Donoghue for winning the competition

Celebrating the re-launch of the shops new name, staff donned fancy dress for the occasion and handed out sweets and balloons to children.

Linda said she ran the competition to find a new name for her shop, which has been a family run business for the past seventeen years as, after giving the premises a re-vamp, she felt it needed a new name, and that 'Old N' Gold' was a bit out-dated.

Over one hundred and forty people entered the competition, including one person from New York, who emailed his suggestion after reading about the competition in the Bexhill Observer on-line, but it was Dave's entry that came up trumps.

Dave, 31, is a regular customer of Linda's and said The Reel Deal came about after he'd played around with different combinations of words and puns.

Dave said: "I tried to think of a name that was easy to remember and which also captured the character of the shop."

Insurance claim assessor Dave said the day Old N' Gold first opened seventeen years ago will be forever ingrained in his memory:

"I've always loved the shop and remember the first day it opened very well indeed because my dad blew the housekeeping money on nine videos that day and got into a lot of trouble at home!"

Linda said the competition was a great success and she had a lot of support from customers:

"The customers absolutely loved the competition, we had some brilliant suggestions, and it's been really nice to get so much support from our customers."

Some of the entries included, "Seen N' heard', 'Miss Multimedia' and one six year olds suggestion was 'The Big DVD shop'.