The first telethon, a 16-hour event broadcast by NBC and hosted by Milton Berle in 1949, raised $1.1 million for the Damon Runyan Memorial Cancer Fund. Berle's pioneering effort set the tone for years to follow: a big-name star at the fore; a battery of telephone operators to collect pledges; and stage, film, and TV personalities appearing among impassioned pleas for donations. Jerry Lewis was one of the personalities to appear with Berle during the first telethon.

     Telethons began showing their age in the early 1990s. as various groups representing the disabled argued that telethons. with their accent on cures, paint a helpless and pathetic picture of people with disabilities. Lewis, a fervent campaigner for finding a cure for muscular dystrophy. has dismissed such complaints and continues his traditional approach. The MDA telethon has raised over $1.5 billion for muscular dystrophy, receiving $56.8 million in pledges in 2001.

     In addition to the MDA event, other annual telethons in the United States include those for Easter Seals. the Arthritis Foundation, United Cerebral Palsy, and the United Negro College Fund. On the local level, U.S. public television stations have borrowed from the form to raise money during their viewer pledge drives.

     On September 21, 2001, a telethon became the focal point for an unprecedented instance of cooperation in the television industry. That evening, ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, PBS, and two dozen U.S. cable channels all simulcast the two-hour, commercial-free telethon America: A Tribute to Heroes, which raised millions of dollars for a United Way-administered relief effort for the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States. The telethon was also broadcast live in 150 other nations. with an estimated audience of 60 million viewers, and it has been released on video, CD, and DVD.

     In the United Kingdom, the two most durable telethons have been the annual Children in Need Appeal (since 1980). and the more irregular Comic Relief Day (since 1988), both broadcast on the BBC. Rather than appealing for individual causes, both these events raise money for a large coalition of  charities-Children in Need for medical, educational, and social­ program charities working with children, and Comic Relief splitting its funds between agricultural and sanitation projects in the developing world and disability and poverty-alleviation work in the United Kingdom.

     Both telethons show events from around the country that have been locally organized to raise money by individual sponsorship (often with an element of the ridiculous, such as people getting their friends to sponsor them to sit in a bath of custard). These spots are interspersed in the program with appearances by celebrities, who generally perform rather than make direct appeals for money themselves. Comic Relief is fronted by comedians, who often produce elaborate original material for broadcast during the event. The third element in the programming are short films showing the people around the world on whom the money is spent, always carefully emphasizing their dignity and resilience in the face of adversity rather than portraying them as helpless. Children in Need raised £26 million ($47 million) in 2002, while the Comic Relief event in March 2003 raised more than £61 million ($110 million).

     Perhaps the most spectacular one-off telethon was Live Aid, broadcast on July 13, 1985, comprising two overlapping concerts, one from Wembley Stadium in London, the other from JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, which together formed a continuous 16-hour event featuring many of the world's most famous bands of the time. Worldwide viewing figures were estimated at 1.5 billion, and pledges received during and after the concert totaled about $100 million.