Richard Curtis plans new UK fundraiser to end extreme poverty

Comic Relief founder Richard Curtis is to create a new fundraiser to end extreme poverty.

He is calling on the BBC and commercial radio to join forces for a seven day global campaign backing a United Nations bill of rights to end poverty.

Comic Relief has become one of the country’s most successful fundraising events – raising over £1 billion and now in its 20th year.

The comedy writer, who wrote the films Four Weddings a Funeral and Notting Hill as well as TV shows Blackadder and Mr Bean, says he wants everyone who listens to UK radio to know what the Millennium Development Goals are when they are set by the United Nations in September next year.

“I got very obsessed with these new goals that are a kind of to-do list for the planet, a declaration of planetary rights,” he told a radio conference held in Salford.

“It would be an unbelievably useful thing for everyone in the world to know what they are. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if you could say to people, this is the optimistic version of the future, the first generation to live without extreme poverty and the first and last generation to live with climate change.”

A seven-day “pop-up radio station” spanning the BBC and commercial radio as well as community stations, the project will be part of a global campaign including Wikipedia, which has agreed to translate the goals into 293 languages.

Comic Relief will also launch in the US in May next year on NBC.

Curtis said it could be the first step in taking the charity brand international. “I do think there is a possibility that suddenly Comic Relief may get more international,” he said.

“It’s impossible to hide this stuff because it all goes out on the net. One Direction’s documentary last year had 63 million viewers online, 48 million from the US, but we didn’t have the payment mechanism.”

Curtis said Comic Relief’s fund-raising total would pass the £1bn mark next year “unless a horrible scandal occurs”.