Will viewers dig deep without Dooley?
Stacey Dooley has been getting it in the neck after Comic Relief said it will no longer be dispatching celebrities to Africa because she ruined it.
I paraphrase. She didn’t. Her only crimes were cuddling a sweet Ugandan boy and getting emotional about the iniquities of poverty.
Comic Relief bosses have
decided there needs to be a shift in the way they portray Africa and its many peoples. Instead of shipping out sundry “white saviours” to emote, it will draw on locals to tell their own stories. That’s both laudable and progressive. But will it capture viewers’ hearts in the same way?
There’s a reason charities love a big name to front a campaign. It gets them noticed. But it must be the right person with the right profile.
With a track record of
hard-hitting investigations into child soldiers, paedophiles and drug trafficking, Dooley was a pretty darn perfect fit. We were keenly aware she was no silver-spoon celeb living a gilded existence. So when she asked us to dig deep, we did.
Sir Lenny Henry, a Comic Relief founder and its honorary life president, has said people in Africa “don’t want us to tell their stories for them”. This is, of course, true.
But as Dooley put it last year when the row broke: “Raising awareness and
bringing it to an audience that doesn’t watch Dispatches, or listen to Radio 4, or read certain papers… there is an appetite there for it. There is a demographic we reach that others don’t.”
By “we”, she meant her documentary team. But it also applies to celebrities who give up their time to do unalloyed ed good.
They are in demand, d, they can n survive without t Comic Relief. But can it survive urvive without t them?