Band Aid at 40: how the problematic Christmas hit changed the charity sector

By Colin Alexander, Senior Lecturer in Political Communications, Nottingham Trent University

In November 1984, BBC journalist Michael Buerk presented a series of dispatches from the small town of Korem in northern Ethiopia. He described the scenes he encountered as a famine of “biblical proportions” and that aid workers in the region had told him it was “the closest thing to hell on earth”.

The broadcasts had a profound emotional effect upon viewers in the UK, many of whom had not seen full colour images of a famine before. They inspired two popstars – The Boom Town Rats’ Bob Geldof and Ultravox’s Midge…

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