On the 8th March, Sarah joined 2,000 other participants at The SSE Arena, Wembley, to take part in the first ever Comic Relief Danceathon, which saw her dance non-stop for six hours to raise nearly £300 for Red Nose Day 2015.
The event, which was attended by a host of famous faces including: Claudia Winkleman, Arlene Phillips, Rachel Riley, Rufus Hound, Chelsee Healey, Adam Garcia, Kimberly Wyatt, Zoe Ball and Jo Whiley (among many more!), was led by a group dance teachers who gave guidance to participants on a range of styles including – everything from Bashment to 90s dance anthems.
The event was the perfect fundraising opportunity for Sarah, who already attends dance lessons outside of her work at Mackman. It also gave her the opportunity to invest in a new leopard-print bum bag, which we know she was very proud of.
Sarah said “I had an amazing time. My overriding memories of the day included learning a dance called “Bashment”, which I turned out to be quite good at, dancing en masse to Thriller, and realising that I was standing only a few feet away from Richard Curtis! Despite a small hitch (comedian Rufus Hound had to lead the dancers after an instructors microphone broke), I was really proud to have been involved in the event.”
The Danceathon was just one element of this year’s Red Nose Day celebrations, which also included support from The Comic Relief Bake Off, a charity single by Sam Smith and Jon Legend, a tour by the cast of Phoenix Nights, fundraisers up and down the country as well as the traditional evening of televisual entertainment (is anyone ever going to forget the Stephen Hawking transformer?).
As well as raising just over £78million, Red Nose Day 2015 also reached a landmark moment in the history of Comic Relief, as the total amount raised by the UK public over the last 30 years hit the £1 billion mark.
Richard Curtis, founder and vice chair of Comic Relief, said: “This is a genuinely moving moment for me. When a bunch of comedians got together all those years ago we never imagined the extent to which the British public would embrace the idea of helping millions of others who they will never meet. It’s an extraordinary thing that we do in Britain and I’m enormously proud to be part of it.”