Don't ask me to wear a red nose

To imply that you find the charity juggernaut of Comic Relief nauseating is as heretical as saying you enjoy wearing fur

You'll be able to spot me very easily tomorrow. I'll be the curmudgeonly old cow not wearing a piece of red plastic on my nose. I won't be sporting a funny hairstyle, a badge or a tee shirt. In fact, I won't be listening to any of the BBC radio stations, or watching any of their television channels. For 24 hours, 33p of my licence fee has been hi-jacked to fund a pollutant known as Comic Relief.

You'll be able to spot me very easily tomorrow. I'll be the curmudgeonly old cow not wearing a piece of red plastic on my nose. I won't be sporting a funny hairstyle, a badge or a tee shirt. In fact, I won't be listening to any of the BBC radio stations, or watching any of their television channels. For 24 hours, 33p of my licence fee has been hi-jacked to fund a pollutant known as Comic Relief.

I haven't been given any choice, my opinions have not been taken into account, and even writing this politically incorrect statement is going to bring me hate mail from the army of Red Nose Day fans up and down the country. To imply that you find the charity juggernaut of Comic Relief nauseatingly patronising is as heretical as saying you approve of testing shampoo on dolphins and enjoy wearing a fur coat made from the skins of lamb embryos. In short, Comic Relief is like Bono and his crusade to end world debt, something so obviously beyond criticism, so transparently a Good Thing, that no one dare raise even a whisper of disagreement.

Consider this extraordinary fact. Britain surely has the most combative, stimulating, argumentative and varied popular culture in the world, from the visual arts to the press, from poetry to architecture. Funny, then, how the very mention of Comic Relief causes a verbose and stroppy bunch of people to all sing from the same hymn sheet.

There has been a conspicuous silence from the world of showbusiness: from pop bands to actors, everyone signs up or shuts up. In the world of the arts you won't find Damien Hirst or Grayson Perry stepping out of line. Even our pet bad boy Pete Doherty knows better than to trash the holy grail of RND, as the BBC website now irritatingly calls it.

Of course I heartily applaud the important work carried out in Africa and in this country by the hundreds of charities who have received over £337m from Comic Relief. The British are generous when confronted with social injustice and need, and the people who earn the least donate the most. The British Social Attitudes Survey reveals that 72 per cent of people who earn between £12,000 and £20,000 a year donate regularly to charity, and that figure drops to just 14 per cent when people earn between £20,000 and £56,000.

When the Disasters Emergency Committee closed the tsunami appeal at the end of February, we'd donated more than £300m, and an NOP survey carried out for the Charities Aid Foundation showed that a record number of Britons, 81 per cent of all adults, had made a donation. But the foundation also found out that those in the top 10 per cent income bracket give just 0.7 per cent of their household expenditure regularly to charity, while that figure rises to 3 per cent in the bottom 10 per cent of wage earners.

Comic Relief doesn't just clog up our television and radio channels for one day - for several weeks now hundreds of hours of BBC output has been allocated to drumming up interest. We've had endless trails and on-air promotions on all channels, a huge range of programming ranging from hour-long specials about Africa on BBC1 to prime-time dramas about elder abuse starring Richard Briers to special editions of Panorama last Sunday, to Woman's Hour on Radio 4 and Steve Wright on Radio 2.

The young are particularly targeted, with special editions Newsround and Dick and Dom in da Bungalow. Every day this week we've endured a special edition of The Archers written by Victoria Wood, with a "celebrity plea" broadcast slap in the middle of Today on Radio 4 at breakfast time. Even Radio 3 is not Comic Relief-free.

And on your screens on Friday night will be the logos of a large number of British businesses only too pleased to make a donation to a worthy cause in return for an on-air plug on BBC1 in prime time. All those BBC guidelines on logos and on-screen branding will be mysteriously relaxed in the name of charidee. But of course the people who will be giving the most time and money to Comic Relief over the coming day or two will be the people who can least afford it, well-meaning ordinary men and women, and parents driven to distraction by the pester power of their children fuelled by weeks of BBC harassment.

Let's remember the tsunami appeal. As the columnist Jonathan Freeland pointed out, when Vodaphone donated £1m, they were actually giving less than an hour's profit out of the astonishing £10bn they amassed in the year up to May 2004. Likewise, the pitiful £1m donated by the Premier League cost each club £50,000 - less than a week's wages for any of the top players. What about Tesco's donation of £100,000? They made over £2bn pre-tax profits in the year to February 2005, and now receive £1 out of every £8 spent in British shops, controlling 29 per cent of the grocery market. I don't think their donation reflected that level of wealth at all.

Another high-street fixture, Abbey National, made £273m profit in the year to last February - and I fully expect to see them proudly donating a measly sum to this year's RND appeal, along with Marks and Spencer, Sainsbury's and Asda - and I promise you it will be something less than the bonuses they pay their CEOs and certainly short of the profits they make in a single day.

The enthusiastic participants in Comic Relief are performers and singers with brands to maintain, records, DVDs and books to sell, profiles to keep polished. There's nought wrong with a free appearance in front of 10 million viewers on our most widely watched TV channel - it's a win-win situation. You help a good cause and your record mysteriously edges up the charts.

This isn't sour grapes; television is simply the most powerful medium there is. When I appeared in I'm a Celebrity ..., a proportion of all the money raised by phone voting for me was sent to a charity of my choice, raising almost £90,000. I regularly give money to charity when I want, in private, without sticking a ribbon on my lapel or a bit of string around my wrist. But supporting those less fortunate than ourselves has been hijacked by Comic Relief and turned into a grisly team effort, directed at exactly the people who will be digging into their pockets anyway because they always do.

I put it to Dawn, Lenny and their mates that they should stop shouting the same message at us, funded by the licence fee, and focus their attention on the fat cats in business who give so very little. Of course the BBC has a remit to unite the nation, produce programming that reflects common interests, raises our spirits and celebrates our diversity. But it also has a duty to allow people to be different, not to be part of the ebullient RND club, and who might want to support charitable causes quietly without wearing anything red and plastic.

Or will the BBC set aside £1 from every licence fee it receives next year, covered by making a few cuts in the fees they pay their senior staff and management consultants, to fund a range of charities, not just those ones approved by Comic Relief? Perhaps they could re-allocate the £1m they are said to be spending on re-launching Radio Times, and cut back on all those annoying on-screen trailers promoting themselves telling us they make sports programmes and so on. That would get the money rolling in.