"Comic" "Relief"

Comic Relief, eh? What sort of person would want to say anything nasty about Comic Relief? 'A soulless, android-brained monster,' I hear you say. 'That's who, and we'd rip the legs off this cold-hearted, terrifying creature and use them to beat it senseless with the bloody ends if he came anywhere near us.' Fair enough. Comic Relief makes loads of money for loads of charities. That's a good thing. Not only that, but it makes a concerted effort to explain where and how the money which gets raised will be spent. Also a good thing. A cavalcade of comedy personalities get together, ask you to donate some cash, and then perform to display their gratitude, and all without any pay. Yeah, I'd say that sounds like a pretty good thing too, as things go. Okay, everyone knows it gets pretty gooey, with its light entertainment stylings and endless Westlife-backed tragic interludes, but that's all fish-in-the-barrel detail. Comic Relief can do whatever utter shit it wants to because it's got the biggest cock in the cash-raising men's room.

Or rather, this is how I try to think of Comic Relief. But then I watched it. The whole thing - I actually watched the whole thing. And it was bad. Almost unforgivably bad. It was the televisual equivalent of being stuck in a lift with a schizophrenic office joker who keeps reeling off awful one-liners and then weeps while he shows you photos of his sick children and asks for some spare change. I feel bad saying this. Comic Relief is built upon the very best of intentions and results, but it's also a fetid bog of entertainment bum-sludge.

Things got off to a disappointing start before the actual night of hilarity itself kicked off. A bunch of celebs (hand picked, it would seem, due to my own personal severe aversion to them all) were sent up Kilimanjaro with a film crew. To my dismay not only did Gary Barlow fail to become trapped under some collapsed snow-boulder, thus turning the remainder of the show into footage of him slowly expiring, but also Ronan Keating did not find himself separated from the group and sport-hunted by crossbow-wielding mountain cannibals, and the remainder of the group did not turn on waddling knacker-sack Chris Moyles in a Lord-of-the-Flies-esque blood carnival, breaking open his head with stones, gorging themselves on the hot brainy contents and then dancing beneath mountain moonlight wearing his flayed skin as some kind of ceremonial robe for their new high-altitude-madness-induced religion. No, they all survived, made it to the top and then splashed out on a private jet to carry them home.

'Still,' I hear you bemoan 'surely this bitter pill would be sweetened by the night of comedy which awaited you, you miserable scum-dribbler'. Again, no. Most of Comic Relief was just bad as this pointless televised hike. Not awful or horrible or worthy of a comparison with, say, unnecessary anal surgery. Saturday night TV style host banter, audiences mindlessly clapping along to a girl-band yowl-along cover-massacre of a previously likeable tune, and more reminders that there was 'plenty of stuff coming up' than there was actual stuff to come up - there was lashings of these sorts of things. It settled into an 'easygoing entertainment hell' kind of groove: not the worst experience you've ever had, but there's always that creeping feeling that at any moment things are going to wildly escalate into some uncharted, cringe-heavy family TV twilight zone: Noel Edmonds might pop up, Gordon Brown might try and do a Blair, Jim Davidson might jog onscreen to more mindless applause, shouting 'Come on! Let's give some money for the shirtlifters in Wogland! They've got gay-plague, y'know!' Thankfully the farthest we sunk into Primetime Abyss was when Fern Britton, the Princess of the Daytime Darkness Vortex herself, took Davina McCall's place, alongside Alan Carr, who spent the entire night chanelling the innuendo-riddled soul of Frankie Howerd. But no, in general, the hosting aspect was okay: unfunny, bland, entirely predictable.

It was in the sketches themselves that things went off at a strange, occasionally nightmarish angle. This weirdness crept in right at the beginning, when Al Murray kicked things off with a bizarre, truncated skit about Simon Le Bon. The sketch, inexplicably loaded with a bunch of semi-celebs doing silent background cameos, involves Murray asking two long pub quiz questions before getting knocked out by a Simon Le Bon lookalike. And that's it. I've watched it about eight times now on the internet and I'm still not completely sure I know what's going on. After this I watched Armstrong and Miller join forces with Mitchell and Webb to stitch together some equally baffling sketches, thus cancelling out all memories of Robert Webb's Comic Relief Flashdance performance, the hilarious Yin to Moyles et al's Yang of unremitting pointlessness. Then, strangest and most terrifying of all, Little Britain roped in Robbie Williams for a sketch so freakish, so entirely without meaning, I assumed it was improvised according to some set of rules which remained undisclosed. David Walliams is a mother, Matt Lucas is her daughter and has a sleepover party with her friend, Williams, who is briefly possessed by Satan. And that's truly it. I didn't get it, but I'm willing to accept that as my problem, not the rest of the world: the witnessing audience laughed heartily at sketch, much like those whose laughter is recorded on episodes of Little Britain, all of them seemingly confusing impeccable delivery, sets and costumes for content, invention and wit.

To be fair to the whole Comic Relief enterprise (Friday night's show being a mere Night of the Long Knives in a much broader campaign of 'fun'), there were some good bits. Geoffrey Palmer, who I'm ashamed to say I'd assumed was dead, popped up to do his usual military official schtick, Ricky Gervais ratched his 'Ego Monster Gervais' character up a couple of notches. And nothing - you hear me, nothing! - can ruin the magic of watching Ronnie Corbett cackling manically whilst unzipping his face and then shucking his skin off. Even so, for some reason after about an hour it became impossible to tell whether or not whatever you were watching was actually funny at all. Maybe it was Moyles Contamination, maybe it was the intense video-clips-of-total-misery-and-despair-driven guilt systematically lowering my comedy-mojo standards with each depressing depiction of famine, abuse or illness.

The balance redressed itself slightly when James Corden and Matt Horne appeared: I split my sides. By which I mean I began self harming. I phoned up the number on the screen and paid vast sums of money in the hope that the two of them would agree to go away. When they said 'Funny for Money' I didn't realise they meant they'd only start being amusing when a cash-target was met. (Ironically, this is the level of humour displayed throughout the show).

At one point Simon Cowell popped up in one of the bitesize misery-vids from Africa, tenderly bemoaning the plight of the kids he met who spent their days on a mountain of Westerners' litter, 'scraping together a living in the company of pigs and vultures'. Obviously, like pretty much everyone else in the country, I screamed 'You can talk, you pop-junk prick!' at my screen. And then, to keep on-message just in case anyone was listening: 'You earn more than £50 million a year, Cowell! You give them some money, you smarmy cock-sniffer!' I then paused to think: I only hate Simon Cowell because I've been told to, really. He gives a lot of money to different charities and he lives in this country and pays its taxes, unlike other similarly-salaried types. He's not so bad. But then I though: Yeah, but he is a cock cheddar, isn't he?

This is what's called 'the Bono Effect' - an otherwise entirely worthwhile cause is made to seem pointless due to its being touted out by high-earning celebrities - (or if like me you're just enough of a fan of 'New Year's Day, it can be called 'the Geldof Effect'). Whatever genuine emotion there is to be had is baby-ized and heavily glazed with sugar-puke schmaltz. They give you a few slo-mo shots of a celebrity crying in a village, play some syruppy million-selling boy band, and then start waving their silk-gloved, bejeweled, gold-plated hands in your face for your cash: it all seems a bit wrong. It's this crassly-imagined plebby mindset that really annoys the living tits of me, I think. I realise I'm starting to sound a bit Melanie Phillips now, so I'll quietly mention that I did give money to Comic Relief - I really, genuinely did - and, in an effort to stave off the crippling first-world guilt in my regular day-to-day life, I even give money to non-Comic Relief charities. See, I'm a good person really, aren't I? Aren't I? Yeah? Really? Yeah?

Anyway, almost concurrently to this televised mirth-doldrums there was an epoch-making interview going on in America. Jon Stewart, who lots of people in England haven't heard of, talked with Jim Cramer, who pretty much no-one in England had heard of until this interview, about Wall Street. Sounds thrilling doesn't it? Ostensibly a discussion about how the host of a comedy show (Stewart) had allegedly mis-represented the displayed non-acumen of the host of a populist show about financial markets (Cramer), this interview slowly expanded into a truly gripping analysis of the weak-minded, rose-tinted media reporting that dominates in America, with Stewart using Cramer as a conduit through which to vent his and his nation's anger at the cavalier investors who've ruined the economy. It's deeply uncomfortable viewing, in a dramatic sense. Whereas watching Alan Carr gurning out 'looks like his Red Nose has slipped' style lines is merely uncomfortable in the 'Oh Christ I'm cringing so much I think I'm about to have a stroke' sense.

Oh no, I think I've written an opinion piece. To balance out the pseudy seriousness above and to reward whatever poor bugger's waded through this river of arse-vomit to get this far, here's some ideas for things which, I'm sure you'd agree, would make Comic Relief genuinely worth blobbing down in front of to watch.

The Sunday Night Project Does The Apprentice
In the time honoured Comic Relief tradition of jamming two unlikely shows together, Justin Lee Collins, Alan Carr and special celebrity guest host James Corden all vie for a place on Sir Alan Sugar's workforce. Being Comic Relief the tasks Sir Alan sets for them are, of course, fiendishly tricky, deeply humiliating and utterly hilarious, such as hitting each other with sticks until one of them starts crying; being told by Sir Alan 'Don't not not eat this carrier bag filled with turds and broken glass - well go on, don't not not do it!' and then being laughed at in angry disgust by all present, whatever the contestant's actions are; being sent out into the streets of London to give suck-jobs to toothless bottle-toting tramps whilst the camera-crew look on. In the end, after all the contestants are thoroughly exhausted with shame, it turns out to all have been a hysterical jape played on our three comedians by Sir Alan and they're all fired. By which I mean they're lined up, loaded into a cannon and shot point-blank into a rough brick wall. Watch their blood, skin and organ-matter spatter out the total amount raised to rapturous applause.

The Cast Of The Chris Moyles Show Do A Thunderbird Sketch
In which Moyles, Rachel, Aled, Comedy Dave and special celebrity guest James Corden awake in the middle of the night to find they've all somehow metmorphosised into human flesh puppets with veins pulled taut out of their arms, legs and neck, much like what happens in a scene from A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 3: The Dream Warriors. Towering above them, controlling their every agonizing move, and giggling dementedly, an enormous spectral Terry Wogan makes them walk into, hit and kiss one another before leading them all to the top of Broadcasting House where they are made to perform a little jig after which Giant Wogan snips the blood-strings and they all plummet to their doom. Watch as the resulting explosion of jawbones, teeth fragments and fingernails miraculously scatter together to spell out the total amount of cash raised. To rapturous applause.

Tearfully Docking With Horse Cocks Under The Watchful Eye Of A Sniper Whilst Begging For Mercy
Sort of speaks for itself. Starring James Corden.