Do Something Funny for Money!

Mario Failla gets involved with Comic Relief!

Comic Relief / Red Nose Day is the biggest, most successful charity event. So when the BBC asked if anyone from the Saks Academies was free to come up to White City Studios and "do something funny for money," I jumped at the chance!

NVQ educator Clare Murphy and I teamed up and took along some of the Fast Track Beginners students to lend a hand. This would be a great experience for them and help raise some money at the same time.

We were picked up from the London Academies in Covent Garden and driven to the studios. We arrived at the stage door and signed ourselves in. Clare and I were already on the look out for celebs, we always seem to spot them when we are out and about in London so it's competition time to see who can spot the most!

Having agreed to split up (so as to cover more ground) and swap places after lunch, I left Clare and some of the students at the stage door while I headed over to the Cbeebies building to set up with the rest of the team.

We were flooded with people walking past and I grabbed anyone willing to have their hair sprayed bright red! We started createing outrageous hair to make our mark and let everyone know we were there and what we were doing.

Our money bucket filled up quickly and we were running out of red hair pieces, wigs and sprays even quicker! Anyone who was brave enough to sit in the chair was not surprised when they saw what we had done.... it was Friday 13th after all, so a weird hair day was definatley on the cards!

Lunch was a quick 10 minutes, to eat, drink and tally up how many celebs we had spotted. Clare was in the lead 5-4 but I had a feeling things were about to change. We all swapped over and there was no time to sit about and chat as word had really spread and we were filling every chair we had. We were only there till 4pm so we all worked flat out to see as many people as possible and raise as much cash as we could.

Time was running out along with all our props, so Clare and I tally up our final celebrity score and I had taken the lead by 1 point! However, Tom Jones, Davina McCall and David Tennant must be worth more than 1 point each!

We raised £520 for comic relief and I have to say it was an amazing feeling knowing that myself, Clare and all the students involved contributed towards the mammoth total raised this year!