It’s Comic Relief Day tomorrow - fantastic! Not only do we get a day of skiving and messing around at work for charity (this year, the theme is “Big Hair” so we’re going to shave peoples’ heads - wild! amazing!), but we get a whole evening of quality television. Lenny Henry and Jonathan Ross jumping around a studio set, finding exciting new ways to raise money - brilliant! Wacky sketches involving the cast of Casualty! Zany crossover editions of Eastenders and whatever the BBC’s latest hilarious sitcom is! Take the phone off the hook, I don’t want to be Disturbed!

Honestly, I can’t believe the entertainers involved provide their time and extraordinary talent like this for FREE! Thank ghod for charity, eh?

For my sins, I was once involved in a sixth form revue at school. You know the kind of thing: little skits of TV programmes, dressing up like Queen (the band), dressing up like queens (in drag), humiliating small first years, being generally amateurish, etc. Excited by the prospect, I wrote a whole stack of scripts that were universally well-received. Overstimulated by this (rare) acclaim, I incautiously boasted to someone that without my sterling efforts, the show would never have got off the ground. Word got back to the “director” and, as a means of providing a gentle lesson in the value of humility, he immediately dropped all my work from the production (citing its lack of originality to rub it in - as if we were some radical fringe theatre company) and wrote his own material. (The fucker. Rick - you fucker!) But despite that, even the stuff they used instead was funnier than anything in Comic Relief!