Charity Goods incorporating TOGs Calendar.

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 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 £5MILLION

None of this would have been possible without that core Calendar Crew, our volunteers, the continued support of Sir Terry Wogan, Phil Hughes and the BBC Radio 2 crews and the celebrities who agree to appear in our calendar.

2010 turned out to be the challenging year we expected but, with the help of Cunard and the TOGs Voyage and an unexpected bonus from a DVD we sold on behalf of BBC Yorkshire, 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 also saw us take another step along the way, and we are 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 HERE

Norman & Hells