Physical Fundraising

I'm now well into the Summer of 2004 and I stumbled across a VHS which had various bits of the 2004 Sport Relief appeal as shown on BBC 1 on Saturday the 10th of July that year.

It happened to be the dreaded weekend I returned to cleaning the tables in the poorly refurbished cesspit, sorry customer restaurant at ASDA and changes were certainly not for the better.

We ended up moving the clearing down area to nearer the door where the sink was behind as opposed to someone's orginal bright idea of having it right in the middle, behind a table for christ's sake.

Not good at all.

Also on the same night Channel 4 showed their documentary "Who Killed Saturday Night TV" which I've watched at least once a year from then onwards and was a rather dark programme inspired by the excellent articles from "Off The Telly" on the subject, but the programme itself didn't quite match it, in terms of how it could have been.

It should have really been a three part series as opposed to a 2 hour one off programme but it was still a good watch.

Anyway, Sport Relief and the first half of the nights proceedings was with Gary Lineker and Gaby Logan who had hot footed it from ITV specially for the night.

Although she would later join the BBC permanently due to ITV not letting her take part in Strictly Come Dancing which inevitably happened along with her partner Kenny in 2007, where Gaby was controversially booted out early in the series in favour of Kate Garraway.

On that subject the 3 of the couples from the first series including winner Natasha Kaplinsky made an appearance performing a special routine set to a medley of sports themes such as Ski Sunday, Superstars, Wimbledon, and Grandstand.

This was followed by an appearance from Bruce to present the check of all the money raised from the phone votes in aid of Sports Relief but not before doing a joke about Jonathan Ross completing the Sport Relief mile by shouting "I've Won! I've Won!" although what he actually said was "I've Run!"

The official single that year was Rachel Stevens and one of her better hits "Some Girls" and there were other performances from Lionel Richie, and Badly Drawn Boy who many thought was past his best by 2004.

Dick And Dom presided over a stunt which involved Ray Stubbs being swung into a large bag of manure if they were to raise over a million pounds. I can remember writing on this very site that if anyone was up for that sort of treatment, it had to be Ron Atkinson.

Stephen Fry hosted "They Think It's All A Question Of Sport" which had been done in the 2002 show as well, although this time round the finale was a Gladiators obstacle course, the obstacles being the Gladiators themselves that is.
Stephen took on the role of John Anderson, but commentary as ever was provided by Big John Sachs.

The second half of the show was presented by Jamie Theakston and Tess Daly where items included a Rugby Vs Football contest refereed by Eammon Holmes, and the obligatory celebrity boxing match were Sid Owen was defeated by "Posh" Ben Fogle.

From 2008 onwards they moved Sport Relief to earlier on in the year in March and had the live show broadcast on the Friday night to complement Comic Relief in the same way, swapping each year.
I didn't actually see it however due to all the chaos, which towards the end ended up as boredom, of the Smoke Radio Marathon.

Anyway, another of the events introduced in 2004 was the Sport Relief Mile and they had quite a lot of runners making an apperance in the studio, one of them being a blink and you'll miss it appearance from Richard Herring on possibly his first sighting on the BBC in five years.

This leads onto tonight's third edition of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle which this week looked at political correctness "gone mad".
Some of it was actually very relevant in terms of the new SU president as his idea of banning alcohol from the SU bars so as not to offend muslims defines the subject perfectly.

I'll say it again in case he happens to be reading, if you don't like alcohol, rather than make pointless measures to ban it, it would save a lot of time if you just made the decision not to go to the fucking bar!

Back to Stewart Lee and I rather like the jolly nature of the opening titles in contrast to the rather dark nature of the show. The music in the titles themselves being a version of "Tom Hark" which was later made famous by the Pirahnas and is still very popular on the football terraces.

I'm about to head downstairs to watch the Wire on BBC 2 although whether Dad will still be awake, I have no idea.