Comic Relief. (Do something funny for money)

[elisi]

So, Red Nose Day, What’s It All About?

(Official video. It won't embed, but it's a brilliant encapsulation of what Red Nose Day is, and the general feel of the whole thing. You spend a whole evening alternating between laughing and crying. And then you donate as much money as you can. Oh and during the day you might have participated in some fund raising event, and your children went to school dressed in red (or some kind of fun costume), wearing their red noses, bearing money to give to the good cause. It is, literally, a nationwide event.)

And here's another vid, which contains a lot of sobering and harrowing facts about the world we live in (plus rays of sunshine and hope):

Click to view

Half of the world's children live in poverty. Every three seconds a child dies. On Red Nose Day, we get introduced some of those children, and I am still haunted, and I still remember appeals from years past.

Steven Moffat 'did something funny for money'. He spent time and effort putting together something that hopefully made more people watch Comic Relief, in order to raise money! Now I've tried to look for some of the appeals, but apart from David Tennant's (it costs £125 to save a child's sight. £34 to save an adult's. £5 buys a mosquito net. etc) they don't appear to be on youtube, and my words don't really have the same impact as the videos. But here goes:

There was one about a 15 year old girl in the UK who was her severely disabled mother's main carer. There was one about a 9 year old girl whose mother died from AIDS, and she was now the sole carer for her baby sister. There was one about an elderly man (again in the UK) caring for his wife who suffered from dementia. There was one about children dying from malnutrition, and one about malaria. There was one about a boy who lived on the streets because his mother died and his stepmother had thrown him out of the house. There was one about a 16 year old boy who lived in a filthy mud hut on the edge of a dump with his four younger siblings, doing his best to look after them (both parents had died/been killed), and Lenny Henry (who's been to Africa with Comic Relief more times than anyone can count) broke down completely over this family's plight. And then he bought them a house (with his own money, as far as I could tell), because he quite simply wasn't prepared to wait until 'official help' could reach them.

And there was the one about the young mother who was too malnourished to feed her baby. They both died.

And what is LJ (fandom) talking about? Doctor bloody Who and Amy's skirt and the possible offensiveness of a 5 minute sketch. Not the real doctor in an African hospital who had three ventilators and four dying babies. If I sound angry, it's because I am. Sorry, but I can't help it.

HERE IS WHERE YOU DONATE!

(ETA: Please feel free to link to this post.)