The spectacularization of suffering: an analysis of the use of celebrities in ‘Comic Relief’ UK’s charity fundraising campaigns

Abstract

In this paper, we engage with recent charity fundraising campaigns in the UK such as ‘Sport Relief’ and ‘Red Nose Day’, both of which are organised by Comic Relief, an operating British charity. These campaigns are increasingly extreme spectacles of celebrity-suffering that concentrate public attention on the spectacle image itself rather than on the charities these spectacles espouse. Drawing upon Guy Debord’s critique of spectacle and celebrity in The Society of the Spectacle, we contend that the phenomenon of celebrity fundraising in this context is interesting not only because of its voyeuristic dimensions (as argued by a number of scholars on celebrity humanitarianism) but also because it raises issues about how the use of highly visual and visceral images of celebrities’ suffering has banalised the charitable causes to which they lend their names, often erasing them altogether. Celebrities’ suffering in this context is framed by the media both as mega-spectacles of entertainment and as lavishly staged journeys of heroism and suffering set apart from the material and social abundance celebrities represent. We demonstrate using a range of empirical sources from news reports and live TV coverage that when celebrities submit to these extreme journeys of physical suffering, it raises new questions about the moral limits of the marketisation of emotion and the commodification of the charitable journey itself.

Keywords:

• spectacle
• charity
• celebrity
• hero
• Guy Debord
• Comic Relief

Notes

¹ An exception is the British World Champion triple jumper Phillips Idowu who took part to the 2013 ‘Hell and High Water’ Red Nose challenge.

² We owe this insight to an anonymous reviewer.

³ We owe this insight to another anonymous reviewer.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ming Lim

Ming Lim is based at the University of Leicester School of Management, focusing on critical marketing, consumer marketing, international marketing, and global brand management. Her research has been published in the Journal of Marketing Management, Business Ethics: A European Review, the Journal of Industrial Marketing and Management, and most recently in the Routledge Handbook on Digital Consumption (2013) and The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Consumption and Consumer Studies (2014).

Mona Moufahim

Mona Moufahim is a lecturer in marketing at Durham University Business School. Her current research interests include religion, politics, consumption, marketing, and identity. Her broad research interests include critical marketing, political marketing, Islamic marketing and organization studies. Her research has been published in Organization Studies, the Journal of Marketing Management, Consumption, Markets & Culture, and Marketing Theory.