All together for Telethon

Press, 2 July 1979, Page 16

All together for Telethon

South Pacific Telethon has sung, cajoled, pushed, pulled and joked through another 24 hours of fund-raising good fun. A lot of people have done a lot of dotty things; many others have poured their time or talent into entertaining, or into taking some dollarextracting eccentricity to excess. Throughout Saturday night and most of yesterday the money poured in to the television studios for causes connected with the International Year of the Child.

Unlike previous Telethon campaigns, this one worked for a very broad cause and it was not possible to focus sharply on what it was all about. But now everything is more or less normal again and the people and organisations that can expect to receive

grants from the Telethon fund can put their minds all the more enthusiastically to the job of improving the welfare of youngsters.

The future of this national midwinter party is uncertain; but Telethon and its organisers can take credit for doing rather more than raising money. They have managed, as before, to haul attention away from the mundane, routine and personal activities. On an otherwise dreary day for most of the country, Telethon pulled a great part of the population together and declared a kind of national festival, a kind of Christmas stripped of its excesses and for which the giving was not selfindulgent. In spite of its prime purpose, no-one could say that Telethon was only for children.