The real thing | 5 March 2011

I had prepared myself for another rant at Comic Relief, a grisly occasion on BBC1 in which every year parades of slebs preen themselves on their good works. What made my teeth curl was the way some comedian would announce that the Twistelton Lions had held a pram race through the town (with the mayor dressed as a baby!) and took £1,459, a fraction of what the sleb expects for a single performance. Last year we saw Jonathan Ross congratulating all those people who had climbed Kilimanjaro, so raising one-20th of Ross’s annual salary. Couldn’t he have saved them the trouble by writing a cheque? As Jeremy Hardy used to say, if you were collecting door-to-door what would you think if someone said, ‘Yes, I’ll give £10 for cancer research. But only if you climb Ben Nevis dressed as a penguin’?

And I was going to point out that the money would be far better spent on reforming governments than on artesian wells and mosquito nets. ‘Just remember, every penny you raise will help pay for a crack squad of mercenaries to storm the presidential palace and relieve these suffering people from decades of tyranny and squalor!’ I was particularly incensed by the notion of Rich, Famous and in the Slums with Comic Relief (BBC1, Thursday), which looked like a distillation of every grim Comic Relief moment. The Radio Times picture of four slebs — Angela Rippon, Lenny Henry, Samantha Womack and a disc jockey called Reggie Yates — posing in red noses against the Kibera slum in Kenya where they were to spend a week — was particularly aggravating.