IT won't be long before Comic Relief, or Red Nose Day as it is known, is upon us and with it the marathon telecast which features legions of showbiz personalities doing their bit in the name of fund-raising.

Across the UK, ordinary people will be taking part in extraordinary individual and collective acts, some bordering on lunacy but all with the same objective: raising cash for charity.

Annually, millions of pounds are raised on Red Nose Day. There is widespread enthusiasm for its aims, primarily to help millions of people in Africa who endure appalling conditions every day of their lives, with starvation never far away. Highly-emotive television newsreel pictures of emaciated children and adults stricken with disease are used to emphasise the message that the money is desperately needed.

I've no doubt that it is and only the flint-hearted and selfish refuse to give whatever they can afford to a very worthy charity. However, niggling doubts have long lingered in the recesses of my mind; yours, too, if truth be told. The United Nations is supposed to be the Planet's law; it's Wyatt Earp if you will. But as well as trying, not very successfully, to keep certain countries from tearing each other to shreds, is there NOTHING it can do about the world's starving?

It can't be coincidence that the inhabitants of three of the countries suffering disease and/or famine, namely Iraq, North Korea and Zimbabwe, are run by tyrannical dictators.

Iraq would no doubt be anything but poor were sanctions lifted and Saddam Hussein allowed to sell his oil on the open market. That's unlikely to happen until the Americans "liberate" Iraq, which Tony Blair tells us is the object of the current exercise. I don't think North Korea has oil to sell; nuclear energy possibly, but they are threatening to export theirs sealed in bombs.

And Robert Mugabe has managed to turn Zimbabwe from a hugely prosperous farming country into a wasteland. Its inhabitants, many of whom are starving, are unlikely to benefit from Comic Relief as any money despatched to Zimbabwe will almost certainly be pocketed by its ruling Hitler-lookalike.

I have certain misgivings about Comic Relief. I don't question the dedication and zeal of its organisers, nor their aims. And I can't be labelled uncaring as I send a few quid each month to help educate a young boy in India through an international aid agency.

However, I believe a lot of Africa's problems are self-made. Bloody civil wars, corrupt politicians, military leaders spending millions on arms instead of food. Who lets that happen and why doesn't the UN do something positive about it?

Are we to accept that a bunch of well-meaning entertainers in the UK care more about the world's starving than does the UN? Apparently so. That's the salient point I will have in mind come Red Rose Day. It will override the doubts. It always does.

, set up to tackle poverty and deprivation

, more importantly,

, some famous, others nearly-famous,