Did you wear your red nose today? '80s Actual Towers has been fair bristling with the things! Comic Relief was, of course, launched on Christmas Day 1985 with a live report from a refugee camp in Sudan, and the first Red Nose Day was held on 5 February 1988.
Recently, Lenny Henry wrote about the first Red Nose Day back in 1988, and how it has changed since then:
"Comic Relief these days is much more in line with shiny-floor shows like The X Factor – fast, zappy, presenter-led – but we were just asking everybody to be kind and help. We had live entertainment from comedians such as the Goodies and pre-recorded films from Africa, but lots of comedians discovered it was very difficult to do live comedy with an audience that has just watched somebody die. I went to Ethiopia for one section where we filmed a row of Ethiopian men in their tribal gowns. The camera panned along them and the voice-over said, 'Please give us some money; poverty can affect somebody you might know.’ The last person on the row was me, dressed in the same tribal gown. For the first time it wasn’t just an image of a starving child with a big belly and flies crawling all over their face – it was somebody that the audience knew.
"There is a lot of fear bound up in comedy – 'How will I be funny? Am I going to be the funniest?’ – but since we were all aiming at the same target there was a bullish vibe. Everything went wrong, of course – the autocue stopped, someone tried to do some magic and it didn’t work, Frankie Howerd came on and wouldn’t stop talking – but people were really moved by the films. I thought that if I made people laugh, and donate, then maybe the kids I visited in the Kibera slum in Kenya wouldn’t have to live in a room with a sewer running down the middle of it. We raised £15 million that night, which was a big deal."
Posts
