Over £200 has been donated online and another £100 or so has been pledged, and we are in the process of encouraging and collecting further donations. Having agreed to take part and finalised our participation on the Friday we then had until Tuesday to arrange and advertise our event.
I created a 'Just-Giving' account for online donations and then we proceeded to plaster this link all over Facebook in a bid to rally support. We never really had a target in mind for a total, and whilst we're overwhelmed by the amount donated to charity on the basis of us sitting in a room for a day playing a playstation game, we wouldn't want to put a ceiling on people's generosity and therefore encourage you to donate if you haven't yet. There are many reasons to donate, but I think my favourite one is the smug feeling you can have when watching the show on BBC 1 tonight knowing you've done your bit to enjoy the entertainment, I know I had that feeling when watching the concert in Manchester last night!
For anyone that watched any of the 21 hours we managed to stream live on the Internet, (Virgin Media can take the blame for the lack of 2-3 hours when they failed to provide us an Internet Connection), I thank you, and hope you found it in some way entertaining, and apologise for our rather post watershed language choice.
Most importantly to everyone that has donated, thank you very much. The money is obviously not for us, but we have developed an attachment to the cause we gave 24 hours to, and whatever we have achieved feels that bit better every time we see another donation, whether that's £1, £8.07 [Thanks Mitch ;)], or £20. So on the other side of the coin, cheer me up that little bit more with a donation of some kind if you haven't yet!
The legacy of this comes in 3 parts.
In the short term, I feel rather ill and I'm pretty sure being awake for 39 hours all told has quite a lot to do with that.
In the medium term, £300 plus can do a lot of good to all those individuals and groups funded by Children In Need, so we, and more importantly YOU can feel proud of ourselves. We had the idea and gave some time, you had the generosity to make it worth while. Thank You.
And finally, in the long term, I find it very hard to believe that I'll be playing Fifa any time soon...
Richard
