TOGs Calendar has
been around now for quite a few years, well as a business partnership it's relatively new, but in its original form it was started in 2000. Previously in
1999 Hugh Again and Mick Sturbs had produced and sold a small calendar out
of the St Andrews TOG Convention. With nothing taking shape for the
following year, Hellen Bach picked up the baton and queued at a book
signing in Bournemouth to ask Sir Terry if she could carry on and produce
a calendar. His reply of "If you are daft enough to risk your time
and money on it, go ahead" led to the start of a very successful
venture. Hells first produced a small Black and White calendar of the TOGs
Newsletter Front Covers and following a meeting the following year with
what was to become the core of the "Calendar Crew", the TOGs
Celebrity Calendar, in support of BBC Children in Need, was born.
The
first TOGs Celebrity Calendar raised just over £23,000, and, with our merchandise sales as well, we passed the £1/2Million mark in 2006. Hellen had the wonderful idea of producing a CD of songs from a bygone era, BANDAGED - with a little help from my friends, and with quite exceptional sales, and a spin-off No 3 single in the charts for Sir Terry and Aled Jones, the 2008 total of £400,871 meant that we reached the £1MILLION mark for donations to the BBC Children in Need Appeal. That has now grown to over £1.25Million!
Well TOGs Calendar has
evolved beyond even our imagination of where it was going, what with the
introduction of more and more merchandise. The evolutionary starting point was
when our dearly missed Pauly Walters said to Hells "We are thinking of doing a Janet
& John CD for Children in Need, will you sell it on your
website?" A few years
later and here we are, having raised over £3.5MILLION pounds for BBC Children in Need from the sales of over 500,000 Janet & John CDs!
One landmark of note, in 2006 the Chancellor of the day (one Gordon Brown) finally gave in to Sir Terry's on-air pressure, and
millions of TOG letters, well quite a lot anyway, and a cheque for £299,364
was paid into the BBC Children in Need Appeal appeal as a "One-off exceptional donation", equivalent to the VAT paid on the J&J CD and TOGs
Calendar sales for that year! TOG Power at work.
Charity
Goods was created so we could take on the sale of
official BBC Children in Need Merchandise, side by side with TOGs
Calendar Merchandise , and our total fundraising has now topped £4.75MILLION
None of this would have been possible without that core Calendar Crew, our volunteers, the continued support of Sir Terry Wogan, the celebrities who agree to appear in our calendar and on our BANDAGED CDs, and the helping hands of BBC Radio 2 and BBC Children in Need.
So what now, 2009 was a tough year for everyone, but we still managed to raise a phenomenal amount of money for BBC Children in Need. We will continue our fundraising with BBC Children in Need, under the auspices of our greatest inspiration, Sir Terry Wogan, but 2010 sees us also take another step along the way, and we will be working with Barnardo's on the "Young Songwriters Competition" for full time UK students aged between 12 and 18! Barnardo's have shown great faith and enthusiasm in us to fundraise with them through this project, and we will do our best to meet their expectations.
We hope you like our website, if you have any problems, or find any errors, please email Norman (Tude) Here
Norman & Hells