Wipe this Nose
Gone with the winds
OH boy. I’ve seen some Red Nose Days in my time – but never anything like this.
Half-naked Greg Davies in a hot tub on the roof of the O2 arena “for absolutely no reason”.
Miranda Hart dressed as a tea lady, gate-crashing (ruining) everyone’s scenes. Smack The Pony, still not being funny. The much-hyped showpiece, of course, was the Love Actually reboot.
A mystery, to my mind. A poor man’s Four Weddings and a Funeral that delivered precisely nothing.
But Comic Relief is Richard Curtis’s baby. So what he says goes. And no one can dispute that its cause is good.
The highlight was Ed Sheeran rescuing a bunch of Liberian street kids from physical and sexual abuse when the crew were about to abandon them to a thug.
Heroic. But, alas, completely out of kilter with the rest of the night.
The serious point being, howow on earth can viewers donate if they’ve ve already switched off? I can’t blame them because it was an utter shambles.
Some echoey, unsuitable building in the O2. Dreadful links. Technical gremlins all over the shop. But worst of all, a crowd that just wanted to be on telly.
Sir Lenny Henry had to actually go over to one particularly chattery section and plead: “Can you shut up over there, please? You have to be quiet. We’re trying to make television over here. Shut up.”
Exposed
But I don’t blame the audience for making their own entertainment.
The supposed talents of the “trendy” comics booked, like Joe Lycett and Luisa Omielan (somewhere a Blue Peter episode is missing its sticky-back plastic creative), were brutally exposed.
The entire first three hours felt like late-night fringe comedy, despite some notable bookings.
C4’s Toast. Vic and Bob wheeling out the never- missed Stotts to interview Susanna Reid. Micky Flanagan throwing a pizza to Pat Sharp. Two grown men laughing out mouths of water in each other’s faces at the word “willy”.
It wasn’t until 10.35pm that I realised why it felt so cheap.
BBC1 had saved the entire two-hour, post-news slot for Graham Norton and his massive sofa. Good thinking, I thought, until he tried to talk to guest number 35, who was in another time zone.
Red Nose Day didn’t truly shoot itself in the foot, however, until after Richard Osman’s World Cup of Biscuits semi-final: “Are the Chocolate Digestives going through or the controversial Jaffa Cakes?”
A sombre Lenny Henry piped up: “I just wanted to take a moment to talk about the terrible famine in the news.
“More than half of the population of Yemen are hungry.”
So do dig deep. Any unwanted biscuits welcome. #TeamChocolateHobnobs. JANUARY 10, This Morning, weather guru Dave King: “I’m confident spring will start on March 22 because March 21 is a quarter day and where the wind blows on a quarter day it stays for the next 90 days.” Fast forward to Thursday, March 23, Good Morning Britain weathergirl Laura Tobin, left: “The wind direction has changed to an easterly wind which will make it feel colder.” For “90 days”, read “two”.