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From The Times March 14, 2009

Diary: the actor Robert Webb on Let’s Dance for Comic Relief
The Peep Show star on leotards, Flashdancing and being whistled at by a white-van man

A couple of weeks ago I won the first heat of a charity dance competition called Let’s Dance for Comic Relief. This involved getting dressed up in a spandex leotard and giving a by no means subtle re-imagining of the audition scene at the end of Flashdance; you know the one, Irene Cara’s catchy Eighties number currently and weirdly being used to sell Gaviscon indigestion tablets. Absence of heartburn? What a feeling! (Thank God I didn’t do the voiceover for that one; it’s the kind of thing that sends internet conspiracy theorists into spasm.) Anyway, just before the curtain went up I vaguely wondered what my dad was going to make of this – his third son variously undulating and jumping around in full drag in front of seven million people. I needn’t have worried. By far the best “well-done” message after the show was from my dad. “Don’t worry that you were dressed up as a woman, boy, you looked GOOD!” Thanks mate.

Actually, getting physical compliments from heterosexual men has been one of the stranger aspects of the whole thing. I was ambling down a street recently when a white-van man wound his window down and yelled, “Nice legs, mate! Nice body!” and gave me an enthusiastic thumbs-up. I must have looked a bit freaked out because he then nodded vigorously and rebrandished the thumbs as if to reassure me that he wasn’t taking the p***. I don’t pretend that the mixed sensation of being flattered and objectified at the same time has given me some great insight into what many women have to put up with every day … I’m just saying it’s a new experience. I’ve also just learnt what women have known since the 1950s: a good pair of tights can make your legs look fantastic.

The costume was in fact the subject of some mild controversy. Such is the current climate that apparently a meeting was convened to discuss the wisdom of having a man in a leotard doing an energetic routine on live television for a family audience. Various senior executives had to be reassured that there was no prospect of a – how shall we put it? – catastrophic costume failure. I was quite keen for this not to happen too: if anyone was going to describe my performance as “ballsy”, I wanted this to be only figuratively true. But there was never going to be a problem. I was wearing a dancer’s “support garment” that acts to – again delicacy is required – de-emphasise one’s gentleman’s profile. Not exactly comfy and I’m glad to have conceived a child before putting it on, but all quite secure. Nobody had nightmares.

The point of all this is to raise a massive load of cash for charity. There have always been people willing to be cynical about Comic Relief, journalists, bloggers, even some comedians – let’s just call them twats – who think that the unavoidable queasiness of juxtaposing comic turns with worthy films about deprivation in some way negates the whole enterprise. For me, the idea of setting a minor aesthetic quibble above the unanswerable good that Comic Relief does is the act of a moral thickie. I’m well aware that charitable giving, like practical jokes, is a favourite domain of bullies. How I used to dread Rag week at university: everyone being pressured to sit in a tub of beans or go shopping in a bikini or whatever by humourless spoons in blazers because “it’s for charity”. Please. And I can also see the objection that sending aid to Africa, say, can sometimes cause more harm than good. US farmers being paid to send surplus corn over there and thereby putting local farmers out of business is, I daresay, something that we can all agree is a Bad Idea. Comic Relief, however, is very highly regarded within the charity sector in terms of its accountability and its vigilant monitoring of the real effect the various schemes are having. If you give money to Comic Relief (and that really is up to you – I’m not one of the guys in blazers, I promise) you can be confident that it will be spent with the same wisdom and care that went into choosing my special dancing pants. What a relief.

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