[Kerry]

Words Fail Me......

A charity worker who "crawled" the London marathon dressed as a snail has been sacked because the marathon ended up costing him more than the donations he received.

Lloyd Scott, who has collected more than £5 million in charity since recovering from leukaemia 20 years ago, is famed for his wacky stunts for charity, but his plan to compete in the marathon dressed as Brian the Snail from the Magic Roundabout backfired due to a lack of donations.

Scott, 49, took a month to compete the marathon for disabled children's charity Action For Kids, as he pulled himself and his heavy costume along on a trolley at a rate of a mile a day.

However, while he did manage to raise £19,500 for the charity, the suit cost him £16,000 and he spent thousands more on a PR campaign.

He had hoped to raise £200,000 for the charity, but after coming up well short, bosses at Action For Kids relieved him from his position as their director of fundraising.

"I had worked for them for 10 months or so and wanted to stay until the end of my contract to get in as much money as I could, but they gave me four weeks' notice instead," Scott is quoted as saying in the Sunday Mirror.

"I wasn't happy with the way they went about it. When I worked for them they had their best-ever Christmas appeal and we were opening up new sources of donations all the time."

Scott's more successful stunts included: walking from Land's End to John O'Groats in a T-Rex costume; raising £310,000 for children's cancer charity CLIC by cycling 2,000 miles across Australia on a penny farthing; and completing an underwater marathon in Loch Ness while wearing a lead-booted diving suit.

However, he admits that his style of fundraising may have lost its appeal with the public.

"My kind of fundraising is coming to a natural conclusion. The team around me were incredible but the money just wasn't there," he said.

The charity's founder Sally Bishop said: "Due to limited resources, like all charities, Action For Kids must make sure that we make the best possible use of our limited funds. Our priority is always to our donors, and the children and families we support. So it is with regret we had to take this decision."

Some of Lloyd Scott's other charity campaigns -

Cycling a penny farthing 12 hours a day for 50 days to cover the approximately 4,500 km (2,800 miles) from Perth to Sydney.