So the first Sport Relief was born, although not without a few pangs. On the night of the inaugural show in 2002, the England and Wales Cricket Board had promised to deliver the entire England cricket team to the studio in Shepherd’s Bush. Unfortunately, they suffered a crushing one-day international defeat at Lord’s that same afternoon, and only Alec Stewart showed up. Meanwhile, there was a varied response from the football teams that Cahill had approached as a source of direct funding.
“I’d had this idea, it was called Pay to Play,” he remembers, “which meant I wanted all the Premier League players to pay to play football on a given weekend. Chelsea raised £25,000” – mainly through the tireless prompting of Graeme Le Saux – “but otherwise it wasn’t a king’s ransom. One club did a whip-round in the dressing-room and there was 120 quid in the bucket. What we learned is that you can either ask people to give you money or time, and for most of the big names it’s better for them to do something.”
Over the last 14 years, Cahill has talked dozens of those big names – from David Beckham to Andy Murray, Kelly Holmes to Jessica Ennis – into participating in Sport Relief skits, often involving his go-to comedian James Corden. But Sport Relief hasn’t just been about superstar athletes. The next key moment in the show’s evolution was David Walliams’s cross-Channel swim of 2006. If sportsmen could have a crack at comedy, why couldn’t comedians have a crack at sport?
“Little Britain was at its height then, and I took David and Matt Lucas to Ethiopia to see the work,” recalls Cahill. “We were talking on the way back, and I was saying ‘Have you ever been sporty?’ David said ‘I always hated sport at school but weirdly I was quite good at swimming, and I’ve always had this notion that I might one day swim the channel.’ And a light goes on in my head.”