Hey-ho! Woopty woopty – its BBC Children in Need time! Yes, that’s right everybody; boys, girls, men and woman alike, its time to dig deep into those pockets and throw all your loose change at the TV! Go on! Do it! Grab a handful of shrapnel and lob it at Wogans chirpy little face while he tells you a yarn! Go on; go on cos it’s for charity! It’s for charity! Come on! Where’s your charitable spirit?!

–          I transcribed the above from a BBC Children in Need leaflet I picked up in WHSmith a few years ago.

When I first scanned the leaflet, I didn’t even second glance the above paragraph. Perhaps because it was on the first page, and so was partially obscured by my left thumb, or perhaps it was because I wasn’t really reading it, but flicking through it in a vague attempt to make the girl at the checkout think I was sweet.

But I ran across the passage a few days later when I was using the leaflet as a napkin for a croissant I’d bought. For some reason, I’ve always maintained the belief that leaflets or magazines that sit in racks being fondled by curious members of the public for weeks; even months, are more sanitary than my own lap.

My first reaction to the paragraph was one of indifference; it didn’t seem too out of place. It was only when I started contemplating hurling coins at my flat-screen TV that I started seeing its flaws.

It wasn’t the first time I had thought about throwing things at Terry Wogan. A friend and I used to sit in Science class thinking up ways of unsettling the establishment; swapping round the prices in shoe shops, tying a tow-rope between two parked cars, mailing dead mice to Partick Kielty… quite how we expected a lot of them to achieve anything eludes me now – but we were quite serious at the time. At the top of the agenda however, in what came to be known as our ‘Anarkhists Almanac’ (sic) was an operation entitled ‘Throwing Small Objects at Terry Wogan’.

We believed that if we could, for just one moment, provoke him in a way that would cause him to lose his temper in public, then it would trigger a chain of events that would send ripples through the facades of everyday western society – exposing the hypocrisies and lies embedded in our everyday values. Or something like that.

(Note – though we never achieved our goal, an effect of sorts was achieved inadvertently in 2004 on the set of ‘Eurovision – Making your mind up’ when Gaby Roslin, in an ill-conceived ploy­­­ to become ‘pally’ with Wogan, called him a felchy fuck weasel. Wogan had to be restrained and was eventually sent home. When the world’s markets opened in the morning, the FTSE had dropped 87 points overnight. Gabby Roslin, it’s said, should’ve known better.)

Though throwing coins at Wogan could have its debatable pros and cons, throwing them at an LCD image of the man seemed entirely futile. Everybody knows you can’t give to charity like that; “Stupid idea” I thought to myself. “it would probably scratch the TV too!”.

Also, the message as a whole seemed a little too chirpy for my liking. I re-read it eleven times and still it didn’t sit right with me. It felt too direct, too jumpy and too lively. Then I recognised the man in the photograph below – it was popular TV chef Jamie Oliver, with his arm around a down-syndrome sufferer’s neck, giving him a noogie. The text was in a speech bubble coming from his big, gurning gob; I pictured Jamie Oliver yelling it word-for-word in my face, prodding me in the chest-bone repeatedly with his forefinger until I complied. The sentences that I’d read, twelve times now, were etched into my psyche as now was the image of Oliver shouting them at me. None of this juxtaposed well with the images of crying orphans on the adjacent page, but then I thought to myself, what does?

It did however sit nicely accompanied by the image of Dermot O’Leary on a BMX with a leukaemia patient, which was on the front cover. I know this because I flicked between the two pages quickly a few times and I felt a bit better. Jamie Oliver was still there though; and I feared he would be for quite some time now.

Later that week, I bumped into my former co-conspirator in Sainsburys and told him about the leaflet – mostly about the bit involving Terry Wogan. He responded excitedly and asked to see it. But when I took him back to mine, it was nowhere to be found. I searched and searched but it had vanished. We went to WH Smith full of hope to get another copy, went to the very counter where I’d made a vague attempt to attract the attentions of a check-out girl – and it wasn’t there either. The girl even denied all knowledge of it ever existing in their shop.

“You probably got them somewhere else.” my friend said to me, shaking his head.

“No! It was here – right here!” I insisted “Where is it?!”

The girl stared at me blankly, like you’d expect a seventeen year-old like her to do. I grew impatient;

“Give me a leaflet you ham-handed whore!” I demanded

But the leaflet never came, and once I’d apologised to the supervising manager for making the girl cry I was left feeling very sheepish indeed.

“You’re full of shit man.” My friend informed me, disappointed.

I reaffirmed everything that I’d told him and assured him that I wasn’t lying or mental, but he shook his head and walked off. I never saw him again after that.

To this day I’m adamant of what I saw and read – Dermot, the crying orphans, the coin throwing and a down-syndrome sufferer suffering a noogie. Although the transcribed paragraph is from memory, I did read it twelve times – so I’m sure it’s more or less verbatim. In any case, I have Jamie Oliver yelling it at me every day so it’s hard to forget. Nonetheless, if anyone has a copy of this leaflet in their possession, I’m offering £50 and my extreme gratitude in exchange for it. I maintain that it’s a stupid idea to throw coins at a TV screen, but the jury’s still out on throwing them at Terry Wogan.