For those Gentle Readers who don’t keep track of that sort of thing, today is Red Nose Day. For those Gentle Readers who really don’t keep track of that sort of thing, Red Nose Day is a fund-raiser for Comic Relief UK (not the US Comic Relief, which was focused on homelessness), which takes over the BBC (among other things) for a day. They combine standard telethon stuff—singers, dancers, celebrity appeals, public acknowledgments of big donors, etc, etc—with the signature stuff, authorized skits on BBC shows, using the actual sets and actors. The most famous (I think) is the Doctor Who and the Curse of the Fatal Death episode from a few years ago, although the previous year’s Prime Cracker is supposed to have been hilarious, and the Vicar of Ballykissangel was also evidently brilliant. This year there’s another Vicar of Dibley, with Sting visiting the village (Vicar: Let’s pretend that Sting isn’t here at our parish meeting./David: Excellent. Now, does anybody have anything they want to say before we begin?/Hugh: I would like to express how disappointed I am that Sting couldn’t make it to our parish meeting./Owen: I’m glad he didn’t come. I can’t stand the man or his music./Jim: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no good at all!), which is supposed to be the Very Last Episode.
Why doesn’t some American network manage to do something like that for a telethon? I know it’s far more complicated, with the networks buying shows from production companies (some of which they own), but surely for a good cause, that could be dealt with. For Katrina, or for the 9/11 families, or for the tsunami, or something else that people generally feel is a Good Cause, surely one network could get half-a-dozen shows together. I would think that getting the cast of 30 Rock, for instance, to wind up in Boston at the Cheers bar for fifteen minutes, would be fairly easy to arrange, and would get tens of millions of people to tune in. Or get Jack Klugman to guest in a spoof of CSI. The network would get a massive amount of good publicity, would raise a lot of money for charity, and I suspect it wouldn’t cost all that much money, since many actors and writers would donate their time, right?
But then, there’s some basic cultural (and financial) difference between US and UK television, which allows Ms. Saunders to make half-a-dozen episodes of AbFab whenever she has an idea for half-a-dozen episodes. Even with the Prime Time Season breaking up a bit over the last ten years, we can’t manage to do things like that.
Actually, now that I think about it, either HBO or Showtime could do it, put it for free on the basic package (they do free weekends every now and then, so the technology exists), and not only make a ton of money but advertise their shows to subscribers pretty effectively, too. I’m sure it’s been suggested to them, so there must be a good reason they don’t do it, but really, shouldn’t they?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.