A Comic Relief video featuring Ed Sheeran in Liberia has won the Rusty Radiator award for the fundraising video in 2017 with the worst use of stereotypes.
The award is handed out annually by a Norwegian organisation, the SAIH, which also awards a Golden Radiator campaign for the best fundraising video.
The Comic Relief video features Sheeran offering to pay for small children found sleeping rough in Liberia to be put up in a hotel room.
“This is a video is about Ed Sheeran,” the SAIH said in its commentary. “It’s literally poverty tourism. The video should be less about Ed shouldering the burden alone but rather appealing to the wider world to step in.
“Is Ed Sheeran willing to pay for the boy's housing forever? What an irresponsible thing to do, and for this video to glorify that is terrible.”
Other shortlisted videos included an appeal including Tom Hardy on the Yemen crisis for the DEC, which was described as “graphical and stereotypical” and “devoid of dignity to those suffering”, and one featuring Eddie Redmayne, also for the DEC, focusing on Africa, which was described as “close to poverty porn”.
The Rusty Radiator is awarded annually. The SAIH said the kind of video in contention “shows overly simplistic messaging, depicts individuals or issues without context, fails to describe people in terms other than suffering or using clichéd visual tropes, and/or reinforces stereotypes of either an issue, a location, or a two-dimensional depiction”.
