BC

BBQ Chip Bandits:

A slow news day turned into viral fame for CTV reporter Joe Perkins.

It all started at a weekly police presser in Victoria where Sgt. Dean Jantzen addressed the issue of the barbecue chip bandits, and Perkins dipped in with questions.

"I started rolling off the questions and he just played along with it," Perkins explains.

The bandits were two female intoxicated University of Victoria students, who allegedly grabbed a bag of barbecue flavoured chips from an open garage in Saanich, BC.

Perkins says the chips are a 'hot commodity', sold only at Zellers and the store is going out of business. This makes the $1 bag of chips even more rare because they are only available for a limited time. 

Perkins says he pitched the story to the Victoria CTV newsroom and everyone thought it was funny and bought the bag, so to speak.

Although the story may have been amusing, Perkins says he still covered all of the bases of a normal news story; who, what, where, when and why. He left no fact, clue or crumb unturned. 

"The fact is there was humour in this, but we were reporting it even though it was funny. I smile in my stand up for almost all of it and the cop laughs during the interview, but the whole thing about the Zellers' brand potato chips, that was just icing on the cake."

BBQ Chip Bandits aired on June 12, but two days ago Anderson Cooper's producers called CTV Victoria and asked to air the story for a segment on 360 titled 'The Ridiculist'.

It's unclear how the story reached the producers of Anderson Cooper's show, but Perkins says it's now viral, airing on Wednesday morning's 'The View' and on gawker.com.

"I saw the piece (on Anderson Cooper's Ridculist) and thought he did a great job, he took a couple of jabs, but hey I can take it."

Perkins says he doesn't want to be labeled as the 'BBQ Chip' guy or as we say, the reporter who left all of his chips in one bag.

The chippy journalist is glad CTV bagged a few smiles from it.

As for the BBQ bandits, they wrote a crisp letter of apology.