KIDS IN PERIL

It must be quite difficult to work for the BBC on the annual “Kids in Peril” day. You might very well be the most generous of folk on the quiet, but woe betide you if you fancy popping to the canteen for a cup of tea and a sticky bun. Give even the merest hint that you might wish to get your change back and a herd of young, enthusiastic broadcasters are liable to turn you onto your head and shake you up and down until you are penniless. This strange annual phenomenon is known to happen if there is even the slightest clink of a coin heard anywhere in the corridors of any BBC building anywhere in the country.

Certain Breakfast TV presenters have been known to fashion their own home-made jewellery out of old pennies and wear it especially on that day, just to make absolutely certain that this will definitely happen to them, as well as to give them yet another opportunity to talk about themselves on air later.

Even if you managed to avoid that particular grisly fate, you would still have to negotiate the vast hordes of “real people” in fancy dress roaming the corridors in search of pogo sticks and baths full of baked beans just looking for an opportunity to share with the entire world just how much “fun” they are whilst in no way seeking the golden nugget of a fleeting appearance on the Television screens of the nation and a shot at their own five milliseconds of “celebrity”.

“It’s all for charity” they’ll holler, almost convincingly, as they hike their talentless frames around the many agencies, desperately seeking out and ultimately failing to acquire that elusive contract. Later on in their miserable, feckless and self-absorbed little lives, they might very well be seen seeing out the rest of their days in a pub in Shepherd’s Bush lamenting the fact that they blew their shot at superstardom one dark Friday whilst dressed in a nappy. They’ll spend their evenings throwing peanuts at the TV and muttering to anyone who’ll listen “I was on TV once, you know…” and forever wondering why the world couldn’t recognise their genius and talent.

Oh yes, because they were a twenty stone overly hirsute man in a nappy who had nothing much else to give the world except nightmares and should have known better.

Still, that’s all okay because it’s “Kids in Peril” and you’ve got to “be a sport” and “have a bit of a laugh” as you are forced to join in with the hideous social indignity that is known to the more sane amongst us as “organised fun” just because it’s “for charity”.

The origins of “Kids in Peril” go back to the dawn of early man when we were scrabbling to survive on the African plains. The legendary leader of a small tribe of Homo Sapiens, “Wo-Garn the terrible”, wrestled a yellow bear to the ground in order to rescue two of the young of the tribe who had been trying to tame a wounded one as a pet when it turned on them. Later on, this same species of yellow bear was hunted to extinction in order to make toy yellow bears out of their hides to sell for charity.

So began the endless chain of organised “fun” events and crimes against fashion that reaches down to us throughout all recorded history and which led eventually to a large chunk of the modern society of Britons parking themselves on a sofa and watching people who really should have known better trying to prove just quite how much “fun” they can be. Afterwards, motivated by this spectacle they might well be just moved enough to fling 10p into a passing cash bucket and tell themselves how philanthropic they are.

History has been scarred by many unfortunate incidents performed in the name of “Kids in Peril”. Queen Boudicca woke up one morning with the rather sad idea that it might be “fun” to have her entire tribe paint themselves blue and go into battle with the occupying Romans with “hilarious” consequences; King Harold looked up into the sky as a volley of Norman arrows flew towards him because one of his soldiers thought he saw an amusing comedy duck fly past trailing a tapestry behind it which portrayed the antics of a particular little yellow bear throughout history; Henry VIII in 1543 spent an entire month in a bath of custard (although he later claimed it was just to ease some of his pustulating sores) and his then current wife Catherine Parr spent much of that free time gratefully making souvenir samplers to sell; Sir Francis Drake insisted that he should finish his charity bowls match and then took a “sponsor-ship” form around and people would sponsor him  for each ship he sank; Sir Walter Raleigh tried to auction off one of his cloaks, but nobody was having any of it; King Charles I mistakenly offered to sell off locks of his hair in what he thought was just a slight public trim; Oliver Cromwell cancelled Christmas and refused to allow any “fun” to happen at all for years – it was only afterwards that he claimed that it was a sponsored silence; George IV had a sponsored pie eating competition that lasted five years, and then kept all the money he claimed that he’d raised to buy himself a pie shop.

In later years, some racy young fundraisers would dress up as Highwaymen on the London to York road and raid Stagecoaches for donations, although they had limited success as an awful lot of these volunteers ended up swinging from various gibbets whilst still wearing their comedy eyemask and tricorn hat combination.

Broadcast technology first embraced “Kids in Peril” shortly after Marconi sent his first wireless message across the Atlantic in 1901. That message interfered with the instruments on the Wright Brothers’ first flight and so he was asked to switch it off, but things soon settled down and message like this one then became the norm:

-.- .. -.. …/.. -./.--. . .-. .. .-../.--. .-.. . .- … ./--. .. …- ./--. . -. . .-. --- ..- … .-.. -.--

As “Kids in Peril” grew to ever more monstrous proportions, so the fundraising antics continued. It is rumoured that one young man tried to escape from the sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic by trying to get into a lifeboat dressed as a big yellow bear, and that the First World War stopped for 90 minutes plus penalties for a charity football match. Sadly, the mascot was shot for desertion ten minutes into the half-time interval and the inter-trench “dress up as the enemy” clothes swap was also less than successful as it led to rather a lot of Courts Martial for fraternising with the enemy, which left a bitter legacy that is still felt in some quarters to this day.

Later on, after the war, the BBC gladly took over as the main fundraiser for “Kids in Peril” and it was only after the deal was done that Lord Reith realised that they would have to give the money away afterwards instead of being able to plough it into new programming. This meant that he had to introduce the Licence Fee to make up the shortfall, as well as the compulsory random upending of all staff once a year in order to take whatever loose change they had on them. It is conservatively estimated that this budget deficit delayed the start of BBC Television by some twenty years, and meant that PC George Dixon had to delay his retirement until he was 80 to get a decent pension.

The first radio appeal was given a budget of £1 15s 4d and raised a staggering 17s 6d when the strong-arm tactics favoured that year using the slogan “Give us your money or else you’ll be first against the wall when the revolution comes” failed to convince the only person in the country who actually owned a radio that it wasn’t just his servants who were expected to contribute. He very quickly reclaimed his own donation by taking a hefty chunk out of any wages that he hadn’t already passed on to them. His plaintive cries of “but I’ve already given to the poor this year by employing this lot of reprobates” were not generally well received by his staff who muttered and tutted sotto voce to themselves before continuing fearfully with their work.

The following year’s slogan added the words “We’re not just talking to the poor people, sir” and was marginally more successful, mostly because the Licence Fee holder had guests visiting that evening who shamed him into it, and so the charity fundraising evening that we recognise today was born, although the Wall Street Crash a few years later is directly attributed to the Stock Market panicking when the banks realised that ordinary people were just giving money away and none of it was heading towards them.

With the eventual (much delayed) coming of television, things got off to a shaky start for a while when, for the first time ever, a newsreader appeared without a bow tie, an event widely regarded as having been directly involved in leading to the death of the old King. Then Muffin the Mule teamed up with Bill and Ben (the Flowerpot men) to perform a charity E.P. 78 r.p.m. record version of “Ol’ Man River” and got their strings tangled up live on air because it was spinning around too fast. Finally, when the cast of “The Quatermass Experiment” tried to perform an “amusing” comic skit based upon “From Here to Eternity” the ratings dropped to zero as the only person in the country who owned a television set switched it off in disgust at having to witness such a blatant orgy of full-frontal vegetablism, and went to the pub.

Thus began a long tradition of people trying to avoid this “bloody rubbish” and heading out for the evening instead, only to be pestered by well-meaning but slightly annoying folk in fancy dress waving buckets of cash under their noses as they tried to have a quiet drink. However, the fact these well-intentioned folk seldom resort to turning people upside-down and shaking them until they’re penniless, tends to prove that less people actually work in the media than the rest of us might think.

“Kids in Peril” Please give generously.