I did a viral video last week. It terms of the virus aspect of 'viral' it was more a hot flush than an Ebola but it did the job. Ted Williams, the 'Golden Voiced homeless man' was taking the net by storm. An iPhone mock-up positively demanded to be made.

The initial idea was to re-create the Ted video using the singers from various early '90s' bands. I had a vision of the streets of Dublin awash with the band's singers willing to sing a quick chorus in the window of your car for a handful of change.

You can imagine my shock when we discovered this to be an actual reality. When approached, they could see neither irony nor humour in this being filmed for YouTube. Mind you, two of them did say that for €20 I could fiddle them if I wanted.

And so it became just me. Originality, I knew, would be the key, and realising that only three of the other four rival national radio shows were ahead of me in the queue at the homeless guy shop, I knew I was onto a winner. Sadly, with their enormous crews, they soon gobbled up all the available 'homeless guy coats' in Dublin and I was left snookered.

Success would hinge on the coat. It needed to look lived in, worn out in parts and threadbare in others. It needed dodgy stains, stains that suggested nights spent sleeping outdoors, bodily fluids, open wounds and the possibility the coat had been taken from a dead person.

So people suggested my own!

I was horrified: Old Greeny! My designer parka jacket! An exact replica of the jacket my mum made me wear when I started secondary school. Back then, she bought it in Guiney's for 11d. I paid a king's ransom for the designer replica in BT3 – that special part of BT2 that only I and Eddie Irvine shop in.

I remember when I used to wear it first. "That looks like a cheap parka jacket," people would say, "it must have cost millions!" And it did, because, these were Celtic Tiger days, and if you weren't buying property, you had to get rid of the wonga somehow.

And now Greeny is a recession coat. It looks good in soup queues. To complete the illusion of homelessness, all I had to do was pull up the hood.

And the moment I did a journalist I hadn't seen in years walked past. I waved to him and he waved back. Then he took in my appearance, noted my handwritten sign and walked on, torn between wondering whether to give me money or buy me a sandwich. You only normally see pity like that in the bedroom.

The video went viral. Last time I looked it had 32,000 hits. My actions have been championed by YouTube fans the world over. "At least he's helping himself," they say. Only people who knew me saw the joke. I became part of the worldwide perception of Ireland: broke, busted and singing at traffic lights.

It's a different story with the coat. So far, it's been invited onto The Early Show on CNN and Late Show with Conan O'Brien. Piers Morgan is interested and Oprah is rumoured to be sniffing around. I hope she doesn't sniff too hard.