This year the British Comedy Awards announced that the Cystic Fibrosis Trust is its exclusive charity partner. Cystic Fibrosis is an inherited disease caused by a faulty gene which causes the lungs and digestive system to become clogged with mucus, making breathing and digesting food difficult.
One in 25 people in the UK carry the gene and there is currently no cure for cystic fibrosis, although there are treatments to help people manage it through physiotherapy, exercise, medication and nutrition. Five babies a week are born with the disease and two people die from it.
The trust has entered the world of comedy through comedy agent Hannah Begbie and her comedy writer husband Tom Edge (‘Scrotal Recall’, ‘Pramface’), their one year old son has cystic fibrosis: “We were 31 when we got married, the UK average. Like one in four people, Tom is short-sighted. Like one in two people, I failed my driving test the first time. Our son Jack had the second most-common boy’s name. These were our family’s numbers. Benignly average,” Begbie said.
“Then in October 2013 we learned that all our lives we had unwittingly lived with another statistic. Like 1 in 25 Britons (that’s 2.5 million people) we were both carriers of a mutated copy of the CFTR gene. But when our second child inherited that mutated gene from each of us he was born with cystic fibrosis (a one in four chance) and family life abruptly stopped being average. There is no cure and the average age of death this year is just 28 years old.”
Oli Lewington, engagement director at the Cystic Fibrosis Trust said: “We’re using this exclusive charity partnership to thank comedians for the laughter they bring to people’s lives – especially those who are ill.
You can learn more about Cystic Fibrosis in this short film written by Tom Edge and Hannah Begbie, based on their experience.
