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The Charity Fun Runner

Were the pen truly mightier than the sword, the penchant for marathon runners wearing fancy dress in the alleged interests of charity would not have survived that glorious scene in The Office in which, on Comic Relief day, David Brent is sacked while dressed as a comedy ostrich. Scything though it was, Ricky Gervais’s satire of the exhibitionist dullard claiming to be motivated by the plight of starving Africans when driven solely by the craving for attention had no effect. Every year several thousand people continue to run the London Marathon dressed as superheroes, cuddly animals, ballerinas, vampires, and in one memorable instance a Rubik’s Cube.

This is by no means an event screaming out for additional reasons to ignore it. As one of Gervais’s own comedy heroes, Jerry Seinfeld, put it in his eponymous sitcom about nothing, when invited to a friend’s friend’s apartment to watch the New York version, ‘What’s to see? A woman from Norway, a guy from Kenya, and 20,000 losers.’

The particularly pernicious thing about fun runners, more even than how they plunder the event of its inherent nobility, is the hint their costumes offer about the callousness of their sponsors – the implicit suggestion that had they asked for donations to run in shorts and a vest, they would have been brusquely dismissed. Can it really be that, as the determinedly zany do the rounds of their locals, they often hear the words ‘I’ll give you 50p per mile, and gladly so, but only if you dress as Virgil Tracy. If you won’t do it dressed as the pilot of Thunderbird 2, the local hospice can go hang’?