BBC Big C
Keystone were asked, at very short notice, to organise the warm up event for the BBC 3 ‘Big C Concert’.
The Big C was an on air campaign to inform 18 to 25 year olds about cancer, culminating in The ‘Big C Concert’ which was held at Alexander Palace and broadcast on BBC 3 featured a range of artists including Travis, Goldy Looking Chain, Lost Prophets, Razor Light, Lemar, Delta Goodram and Brian McFadden. Guests included several actors from East Enders; a scattering of Radio 1 DJs including Chris Moyles and Emma B; and other ‘celebs’ such as June Sarpong and Martin Freeman.
Our role was to ‘warm up’ the audience while, at the same time, giving them key messages about cancer and how it might effect them. This was quite a challenging brief and we had a very short (3 week) planning period and a very tight budget.
We sourced a comedian who had recovered from kidney cancer and did a stand up routine around his experiences. He was our ‘warm up’ artist and he interviewed a range of guests such as Lemar who talked about his experiences of his Mum’s cancer and Delta Goodram who had cancer herself. Each guest was given a scratch card with a ‘key fact about cancer’ on it. A selection of scratch cards had ‘lucky’ numbers that could be exchanged for goodies given out from the stage when they were announced.
We also produced a beautifully designed ‘collectors’ set of postcards featuring celebrities involved in the Big C. Amongst these were 50 that had been signed by the artists. Guests had to complete a short questionnaire in order to get their copy and almost 80% of guests did this.