Charity TV shows 'bizarre and grubby'
Howard Lake | 1 December 2008 | News
Newspaper columnists in the Irish Times and Sunday Tribune have rounded on charity TV shows, describing them as bizarre and grubby.
‘These shows give us a bizarre and grubby nightly routine in which celebrities use a few seconds to effectively ask the viewer to weigh up the merits of sick kids against, say, the plight of the homeless. It means that viewers who tune in for a bit of escapist rubbish are instead handed a deeply troubling philosophical conundrum to which there is no answer other than to vote for them all,’ wrote Shane Hegarty in the Irish Times.
Hegarty says the success of the voting is down to charities getting the vote out and this may influence the celebrity when they nominate a charity, according to Hegarty.
Hegarty says an unseemly row broke out this week over just when the charities nominated by Fáilte Towers contestants would get their money, and the size of the cheques they would receive. Don Baker, a participant in the show, complained that his nominated charity had not seen its cash yet, three months on, while other celebrities said that the sums raised were far less than expected.
For its part, RTÉ – which donated its revenues from the phone calls to the charities – says that the show raised €169,000 for good causes and that it would be handing over that money during the next couple of weeks. After the phone operators were accused of profiting from previous shows, for this series they covered only their costs, giving any profits to the charities. Nevertheless, RTÉ won’t release details of how many calls it logged, saying that it is commercially sensitive information. This is not the case for British programmes.
The Sunday Tribune’s Justine McCarthy has reported that some of the charities are unhappy at the rewards compared to the effort they have to put in. They mobilise people, print T-shirts and distribute flyers, so that some of the money raised can be needed to offset the cost of being involved in the first place.
In 2006, Green TD Dan Boyle expressed his disappointment at the amount of money raised when he sang on Charity You’re A Star, and wondered if some of the mobile phone companies had made more out of it than the charities. Actor Una Crawford O’Brien claimed that the money raised for the National Children’s Hospital didn’t even cover the cost of the T-shirts and flyers printed in order to drum up a vote.
Hegarty commented that some of the charities do quite well out of these programmes. Temple Street Children’s Hospital got €130,000 thanks to actor David Mitchell’s participation in You’re a Star.
www.irishtimes.com
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.