Next month marks the second ever Red Nose Day USA.
The main draw of this national charity event will be a two-hour NBC telethon on May 26.
A-list celebrities and artists (as yet unnamed by NBC) will perform to raise cash to help eradicate violence and poverty in America and the wider world.
Last year’s Red Nose Day USA, featuring a range of stars including musician Nick Cannon, pictured, raised about $23 million.
This year organizers, led by British writer and director Richard Curtis – of Four Weddings And A Funeral and Notting Hill fame – are desperate to exceed that sum.
Funds raised will be distributed by Comic Relief Inc., the event’s parent charity.
But with Red Nose Day USA still in its infancy, potential donors will be interested to know more about the scandalous past of its British equivalent, also called Comic Relief, which distributes Red Nose Day UK’s funds.
Comic Relief was set up in the UK in 1985 by a group including Curtis.
Until 2013 it sped along with astonishing success, clocking up hundreds of millions of pounds in donations through various activities including, from 1988, Red Nose Day UK – the British telethon screened by the BBC.
The juggernaut came to a halt in 2013 when whispers first circulated about how Comic Relief invested its money – in arms firms, tobacco conglomerates, and alcohol companies.
The gossip turned out to be true, placing the charity squarely at odds with its central aims – and causing maximum embarrassment for Curtis.
Investigations showed that between 2007 and 2009 Comic Relief’s millions were placed in a range of managed funds which invested in ‘unethical’ businesses.
The charity had £630,000 in shares in arms giant BAE Systems, contradicting its intention to help ‘people affected by conflict’.
It also had more than £300,000 invested in shares in the alcohol industry, mainly global firm Diageo, despite claiming to be ‘working to reduce alcohol misuse and minimise alcohol related harm’.
And nearly £3m of Comic Relief money was invested in shares in tobacco companies.
An inquiry was ordered by the charity and, unsurprisingly, it was advised to stop investing in businesses which conflict with its objectives. It was also told to be more transparent in its accounting.
The episode did great reputational harm to Comic Relief, but it continues to be in the front rank of British charities having so far raised more than £1bn in the UK and easing its expansion into the US.
And what of its founder, Curtis, now based in America with his long-term partner, Emma Freud?
One London media industry figure who knows the couple but who wishes to remain anonymous is withering in his assessment.
‘The trouble with Richard Curtis is that he feels he shouldn’t be challenged about anything. He is very well connected, part of a self-defined cultural aristocracy, and his attitude is that he is a special case in all that he does. He behaves as though he is a politician but he obviously has none of the responsibilities that go with that job. He is also very sensitive to criticism. I don’t think he’s as popular as he would like to think.’
While there is no doubting the enormous good Curtis has helped to bring about through Comic Relief UK over the last 30 years, he does appear to have an irrational bias against some people which he is not afraid to voice publicly.
Objectively, this is strange from someone who has dedicated so much time to helping others.
In 2007 Curtis made a speech, when collecting a prestigious BAFTA Fellowship, which some found shocking. This event was broadcast on British TV.
Curtis said he would like to ‘go out and kill that posh bird from The Apprentice’. This was a reference to Katie Hopkins, at the time a feisty contestant in the long-running series hosted in the UK by Lord Sugar and in the US by Donald Trump.
Some saw the comment as hypocritical from the privately-educated product of Harrow School and Oxford University. Hopkins, a single mother of two who was sponsored through university by the Army, is not really ‘posh’ in the traditional sense.
Others found Curtis’s unprompted attack – which he presumably intended as a joke – deeply gratuitous. His Fellowship was awarded in part for his Comic Relief efforts raising money for the starving in Africa, after all.
More recently Curtis had a brush with the highly questionable activities of another charity in London – Kids’ Company. It was forced to close in August 2015 amid allegations of financial mismanagement and remains under investigation by the UK Charity Commission.
Financial records show that Comic Relief gave £1.4 million to Kids’ Company between 2000 and 2014. Curtis is a close friend of Kids’ Company’s chairman, Alan Yentob, who later named Curtis as a Kids Company supporter during a parliamentary inquiry into the affair.
To date, Curtis has never commented publicly on the scandal or sought to reassure Comic Relief donors how its funds were used.
Red Nose Day USA 2015 distributed its cash to 12 organizations tackling domestic and international poverty.
Curtis and his team have yet to announce how next month’s haul will be divided but American donors would presumably be upset if there is any hint of their hard-earned dollars ending up anywhere near an ‘unethical’ business.