Please help! It’s for charity! No really. It is. Sort of.

Settle down. Get a cup of tea. I’m going to have an embittered rant about what I regard as a less than appealing attempt by some (happily small) parts of the Public Relations industry to work the charity angle in the service of their clients.

But first, some background. If you have a public profile eventually you are likely to be approached by the charitable sector looking for help with their cause. This makes sense: people are more likely to get involved with a campaign if a person they recognise is also involved. Sometimes they don't even have to like them. If they've seen them on the telly that will do. Different well-known people deal with this in different ways. Some decide they’d rather not make their charitable work public, which is their right. In my case I was getting so many requests from so many equally deserving causes, big and small, I decided the best way forward was to find one charity – in my case the brilliant foodchain.org; please do click on the link – and dedicate almost all the time I have for fundraising to them. You will see me tweeting about them regularly.

In my experience, direct approaches by charities are always above board, the intentions and motives completely transparent.

But there is another kind of approach, by Public Relations companies on behalf of their clients (businesses rather than charities) which are far less so. It is an attempt to use a charity angle as a means of getting free ‘celebrity’ involvement with an activity and thus, in turn, generating cheap PR for a client.

A couple of example of approaches I've had: a new restaurant app is being launched. Will I come and host a charity auction at the launch? Obviously, as the auction is for charity, I will not get a fee. That way they’ve got the involvement of a ‘face’ – not a very pretty one, to be fair; god knows who'd already said no – for free, and they can shift PR pictures to the media which otherwise they would not get. The launch of the app is mentioned in the coverage. Hurrah!

On another occasion I was approached by a lap dancing club. Yes, really. Would I host a dinner at said lap dancing club for a hunger charity, so they could send out lots of PR pics from the event? The charity knew nothing about it and wanted nothing to do with it. Neither did I. Frankly I wouldn't want to sit down in one of those places, let alone eat off the tables.

And then today, another one. I am approached by the agency for a major UK group of shopping centres. They are asking baggy-arsed celebs like me to come down to one of their sites to take part in a skating competition on the rink that is always installed there at this time of year. The winners get to make a donation to the charity of their choice. And because the people involved are recognisable there will be lots of PR opportunities which will happen to include the shopping centre where the skate off is taking place. Who are of course the agency’s client.

Now then why would a shopping centre want cheap PR, involving famous faces, in the run up to Christmas? Incidentally in their pitch to me the agency did not say what sum would be paid to the charity of my choice. Well of course not, because this notion didn’t start with the charity angle did it. It started with the PR angle. And I wonder: how much will the agency be getting for running the campaign?

Businesses have long been involved in making donations to the charitable sector and so they should. A robust Corporate Social Responsibility policy is an important part of any reputable business’s involvement with society. But they shouldn’t be doing it because it’s good PR. Or at the very least they shouldn’t be doing it with the PR angle first and foremost in their minds. They should be doing it because it’s the right thing to do. The vast majority of PR companies recognise this. They understand what constitutes reasonable behaviour.

But too many do not. So here it is: trying to strong arm people with a public profile into involvement with a campaign because there's a small pay off for charidee is just plain cheap.