You might know that Neil is an ambassador for the National Council for One Parent Families, the charity for which he raised funds on "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire".  Here is an extract from their website which you can visit at www.oneparentfamilies.org.uk , please check it out as it is a very worthy cause.

---

Neil Pearson is that rare combination: a highly acclaimed and busy working actor, working in theatre, TV and film. Many will remember first seeing him in the role of smoothie, womanising reporter, Dave Charnley, in the hugely successful comedy series, 'Drop the Dead Donkey'. Later, Neil played the the lead in the TV police drama, 'Between the Lines,' More recently, he played the part of his friend, the brilliant journalist and newspaper columnist John Diamond, in 'A Lump in My Throat', which appeared shortly after John's death.

Neil has agreed to become an Ambassador for One Parent Families, but he's actually been doing the job for a while now! With help from Fast Show star Charlie Higson, Neil raised £32,000 on 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire' for the charity. Believe it or not for someone so used to performing, Neil was extremely nervous. Neil also wrote a piece for us a couple of years ago in which he talked about his own experience of life in a one-parent family:

'In 1964, when I was five, my family tree was struck by lightning. That was the year my household stopped being a perfectly normal family unit headed by two parents and became instead a perfectly normal family unit headed by one. The shift from normal to normal was not without upheaval and trauma, of course - perfectly normal upheaval and trauma - but having undergone it my family (mother, me, sister, brother) settled down once more to the perfectly normal family routines of worrying about money (mother) and making space stations out of squeezy bottles (me, sister, brother).'

Neil feels strongly about the way in which lone parents are so often stereotyped and stigmatised:

'My childhood was a very happy one, and I spent it unaware that in the eyes of some my background was somehow second best. It was only in my late teens (that traditional time to be struck by the fact that the world is run by idiots) I began to realise there were people out there - complete strangers, all of them - who were insulting my mother.'

Despite the fact that many of Neil's TV characters wouldn't be seen dead reading a book, one of Neil's greatest passions, along with football, is literature.

'The stigmatising of lone parents (by which everyone invariably means lone mothers) has a long history. If you find yourself pregnant and husbandless in Act Three of any Jacobean drama' you don't want to know what happens to you in Act Five.

According to Neil, this was how lone parents were treated in literature, until George Moore published Esther Waters in 1894, 'a book about a maid who is seduced and made pregnant . . . and shows resourcefulness and determination and courage and successfully brings up her child alone. She doesn't get garrotted, and she doesn't get burned alive. She struggles, and she prevails. A new century was about to dawn, and the mould was breaking.'

This personal and historical perspective makes Neil scathing about those in politics and the media who still cynically choose to blame lone parents for society's ills.

Neil wants to do what he can to put the record straight, and to help fundraise for our campaigns and services for lone parents who he sees as an 'overworked and undervalued sector of society.' As this very busy man puts it:
'They're busy. I'm happy to help out.'

---