Laughter and tears

Released 13/03/2009

Matthew Jane looks at acting the fool, raising money and how lucky we are

It's a day when school children go to school looking like tomatoes, when sane people bathe in baked beans and when workers around the country don clown noses and rattle buckets trying to raise cash.

Comic Relief is a great time when people club together to raise funds for a plethora of different projects, both at home and abroad.

The BBC aired a programme last night which followed a range of celebrity figures as they pushed themselves to breaking point by climbing Mount Kilimanjaro for the appeal.

During this moving programme, there were clips of the celebrities meeting with malaria sufferers in impoverished African villages, where medical care is so far removed from what we are accustomed to it is hard to believe this plight still goes on in the 21st century.

In one of the clips, Strictly Come Dancing winner Alesha Dixon visited a family whose life had been ripped apart by malaria, a woman whose husband had died and whose six children were suffering from the disease.

All these children wanted was for a normal life, a normal education and a bit of fun that their situation cruelly denies them. Too often in this country we hear negativity around our education system. But children around the world would give anything for the chances afforded in our schools.

Don't forget Comic Relief - it's for a very worthy cause. Not everyone has an education system as advanced as ours, but if we all help and are all aware of the struggles of others, perhaps their goal of building a similar model to ours could become that little more achievable.

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