For years, the annual Children in Need malarkey has annoyed me - nope I am not even going to give it a link.
Hard pressed citizens are urged to get out and do their bit to help the BBC raise money for Children in Need - and who could resist? For there are so many in our country to choose from! Children living in poverty, with incurable diseases, who miss out on their childhoods for a whole range of reasons, whom society is leaving behind.
Yep a worthy cause indeed. But frankly no amount of dressing up and rattling cans and quizzes and bizarre events and challenges is ever going to solve the conundrum of Children in Need on its own. Cos we don't earn enough to raise enough.
Yet we will be treated to a cornucopia of TV celebs. music "stars" and the like making fools of themselves (and ourselves) for hours on our screens tonight to persuade us to dig deep and keep on giving.
I reckon it would be far more entertaining to watch all of them line up to hand over a tithe of their overblown undeserved salaries - oh how the tally would rise then! To end the programme we could have the Prime Minister and Chancellor do a double act of revealing the new proportionate tax rate for top earners, how much it would raise in a year, and how the UK Government proposes to use the cash to reduce the number of children in need. They could even persuade Terry Wogan to hand over his appearance fee!
The whole show would be over in an hour. And much more entertaining TV - like the class acts lined up for Later with Jools tonight, the Low Anthem and the Decembrists - could fill our screens instead. A longterm solution to reducing the numbers of children in need in our society AND better Friday night TV. That's what I call a result!
