Comic Relief

Comic Relief TV Highlights

There's only one place to be on Red Nose Night - right in front of a TV screen for the main event.

Comic Relief 2011: What your money might raise....

All the money raised through Red Nose Day is spent by Comic Relief to help extremely poor, vulnerable and disadvantaged people at home in the UK and across Africa.

Lara Stone poses as Monroe to launch Red Nose Day

Lara Stone looks a bit of all white as Marilyn Monroe launching this year's effort to get Red Nose Day in the black.

Video: Jack Dee - Maypole dancing with Boyle and Hague?

Jack Dee joined BBC Breakfast today to help launch the 2011 Comic Relief campaign: Do Something Funny for Money.

The comedian explains why his idea of maypole dancing with William Hague and Frankie Boyle was turned down!

Comic Relief's Red Nose Day is on the 18 March 2011.

2009 Comic Relief Review

It's a box-ticking, event-telly-by-numbers mentality, made for the most tedious and unsatisfying Comic Relief Night since... the last one. These jamborees are not getting any better as they get older.

Andy Hamilton & Guy Jenkin Interview

The Independent meets Andy Hamilton & Guy Jenkin. If a show has ever made you laugh, these two probably wrote the script. They gave us a rare interview for Red Nose Day, which this year includes an episode of their hit comedy Outnumbered.

Stand-up at Radio 4? You must be joking

Comic Relief has persuaded BBC presenters to try to make us laugh for charity - with mixed results.

As happens on every Comic Relief Night, though, a moment to cherish did make it onto the air. You had to wait till gone 2am, mind, and it only lasted around four seconds. But the sight of Dick and Dom In Das Boot, with the eponymous twosome squashed in the trunk of a car rambling in cod-German about submarines, was priceless.

Heat magazine (yeah, yeah) reports this week that the centrepiece for next year's Comic Relief will be, oh God, Fame Academy again. It's quite remarkable given that, by the time it comes around, it'll have been four years since the last proper series of the show, but seemingly such is the dearth of ideas for Comic Relief, it's being allowed to live on purely in its celebrity version forever. Indeed I'm not sure how the BBC are happy with this flop continuing - what next, Celebrity Eldorado?

Comic Relief is now the only kind of TV, Children in Need aside, where people come on screen to do a turn then go off again. Maybe there's simply not many around who know how to do this anymore, or at the very least do it well, hence the way the last few years have seen a slide into more heavily-scripted, event-based shows.