The publicity surrounding Chris Tarrant's marriage breakdown has led to a surge in sales for Nintendo's DS Lite console, for which the television presenter is advertising spots that include him forgetting his wedding anniversary.
Nintendo UK today said it had no plans to pull the £1m television campaign, which promotes the Dr Kawashima's Brain Training game, which has another three weeks to run.

A spokeswoman confirmed sales "jumped dramatically" last week at the height of the publicity surrounding the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? presenter's alleged extramarital affair.

"We have got no plans to change our Tarrant campaign," she said. "Sales jumped dramatically last week and we are very pleased with how the campaign is performing."

Tarrant yesterday confirmed he and his wife Ingrid had split. A statement from Mrs Tarrant is expected today.

The advert featuring Tarrant forgetting his wedding anniversary sees the presenter kicked out of the marital bedroom by his wife. He then uses the Nintendo console to help build his memory power.

Three other TV adverts with variations on the memory theme, created by agency Leo Burnett, are also playing across the main terrestrial and multichannel outlets in both daytime and prime time.

A print campaign featuring Tarrant looking thoughtful as he uses the console has finished.

A source said Nintendo had been kept aware of the situation regarding Tarrant's private life and was "very relaxed" about the situation.

"If I was Nintendo, I would be ecstatic that its profile had been raised by this," the source said.

In his statement, Tarrant said he was "deeply sorry" for the hurt he had caused his wife and children, and asked the media to give his family some privacy.

As promised here is another lot of pictures from our manufacturing department of the X-ray inspection, showing the level of quality control the device is going through as well as some pictures of the final panels ready for break up and assembly into their cases.

"As part of our standard and ongoing process of analyzing repair data, we recently noticed a higher than usual number of units coming in for repair. Upon further investigation, it was further discovered that the bulk of the units were isolated to a group that was part of the initial manufacturing run of the console. Returns for repair are coming in for a variety reasons and it's a higher rate than we are satisfied with. We've made the decision to comp repairs for consoles manufactured before January 1, 2006, and provide refunds to the small group of customers who have already paid for repairs."

"What I've read widely and what I've heard from MS is, 'Yeah, we got beat last generation but that's because we were late to market and came out a year after PS2 did and that's why we got defeated and that's not going to happen again.' Yes, the PS2 was beating the Xbox 5 or 6 years ago, but now the PS2 is beating the Xbox 360... Year-to-date we've sold more hardware than they have and this past month we've sold more hardware," Tretton boasted. "So we beat them in their last generation machine and we're beating them in their current generation machine. And if I were Microsoft, the big concern I'd have is... Xbox 360 is actually doing worse than the original Xbox did."

He continued, "I think obviously our competition, the handheld devices from Nintendo and specifically in the case of the DS, we really feel like they're appealing to the same audience that Game Boy has always appealed to. And if you look at the adoption rate of the DS over the first 17 months, not only does it trail the PSP but it also trails their other platforms... They're potentially losing some of their core audience and they're not really expanding beyond that and we think we're expanding into a completely new audience as we did with PlayStation. And we'll do just what we did on PlayStation; we'll dip down to the younger consumer eventually and we'll ultimately appeal to that vastly Earth wide audience we carved out with the original PlayStation."

We queried Tretton about Nintendo's approach to broaden the market and "touch" the so-called "grey gamers" in addition to appealing to the younger set, and while it's hard to imagine a PSP in the hands of a 60-year-old for instance, Tretton believes there are more middle aged and young people playing PlayStation systems than one might think. "I think it's a good premise, but I would tell you for a fact that there are much more people in their 50s and 60s playing PlayStation platforms in terms of console, than there are playing Nintendo platforms. So I think it's conceivable just as we did with the PS1 and PS2 that we could bring in that audience."