Charity begins with a good
idea as JM Barrie,
Buerk and Geldorf prove
CHARITY in these islands is a multi-billion pound business. Something of
the order of £20 billion. And anybody who has satellite or cable television
will know that appeals by charity have now gone far beyond the quarter-page
advertisements you used to see in the broadsheets.
Heart-rending pictures of victims – usually children or animals – are
paraded on screen to persuade you to commit a sum of money each month. Many
people wonder just how much of their donation actually ends up benefiting
the victims, and how much goes in costs.
Figures produced by charities have to adhere to guidelines laid down by
the Charity Commissioners but as in company accounts presentation is
everything.
As a body charities are always banging on the door of government for more
and this lends an unwelcome political edge to the industry. Some charities
have blamed a fall in individual contributions on the fact that people
believe that the vast sums generated by the lottery take their place.
Possibly.
What is more certain is that much of the use to which lottery funding is
put is a bigger turn-off.
When it comes to charity few have matched the idea of the author of
Peter Pan, Sir James Barrie.
When asked to join a committee to raise funds for the Great Ormond
Street Hospital for Children he declined but then, with typical Scottish
financial perception, he generously granted the copyright of his play
Peter Pan to the hospital. No middlemen, no cut to professional
fundraisers or their ilk, all proceeds direct to the hospital with the
minimum of administration.
This has, no doubt, enabled Great Ormond Street to become a byword for
excellence in treating severely sick children.
Can I commend the idea to other authors? Rather than set up a fund to
provide another prize, perhaps one for a novel written by somebody under the
age of 23 and a half in Sheffield on the second Tuesday in May, why not pick
a hospice, or something like Great Ormond Street and bequeath worthwhile
rights to it? And get one of London’s leading law firms to act without fees
to administer it.
Which brings me to Michael Buerk’s autobiography, The Road Taken.
Buerk describes in graphic detail how a combination of a reporter’s will
and a camera can have a profound effect for good.
He was in Ethiopia 20 years ago reporting on a famine of biblical
proportions. Let me quote him direct for I cannot improve on his words.
It is difficult for a decent person to be a journalist in the middle of a
disaster . . . . for you are not there to help. Often you hinder. You may
try to convince yourself that by bringing this suffering to the attention of
a wider world you may eventually play a small part in relieving it but you
don’t believe that at the time.
Not when you are aiming a camera into the face of a dying old man or in
my case hunting through the legions of the lost looking for pain and grief
at its most graphic for your cameraman’s next sequence.
You don’t like what you are doing. You don’t like yourself. And you don’t
like the audience of overfed first-world couch potatoes whose taste for
sensation you are trying so hard to gratify.
He goes on to describe the horrors of Korem and then the return to the
Hilton Hotel in Addis Ababa.
I was grateful for the luxuries – the swimming pool and the gardens – but
resented them. I was overwrought and full of disgust.
The Hilton was really a UN hostel, a club for aid industry fat cats. Many
probably did good and selfless jobs but the UN agencies had a reputation for
high living and low work rate . . . Their much vaunted early warning system
was a shambles.
Buerk’s report on the famine echoed round the world. leading to Bob
Geldorf’s Band Aid and millions of dollars in donations and support for
Ethiopia. It’s given to few reporters to make the impact that Buerk did and
given his chance he took it brilliantly.
John Jenkins, Publisher
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The book itself, The Road Taken, is published by Hutchinson at £20
and is a superb read and inspiration to any young journalist.
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Flabbergasted – weight watch
Once again, The Washington Post published its yearly contest in
which readers are asked to supply alternative meanings for various words.
The winners are:
Coffee – a person who is coughed upon.
Flabbergasted – appalled over how much weight you have gained.
Abdicate – to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
Esplanade – to attempt an explanation while drunk.
Willy-nilly – impotent.
Negligent – describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer
the door in your nightgown.
Lymph – to walk with a lisp.
Gargoyle – an olive-flavoured mouthwash.
Flatulence – the emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are
run over by a steamroller
Balderdash – a rapidly receding hairline.
Testicle – a humorous question on an exam.
Frisbeetarianism – the belief that, when you die, your soul goes up
on the roof and gets stuck there.
Circumvent – the opening in the front of boxer shorts.
