A FUNDRAISING couple played Father Christmas to ill youngsters yesterday when they delivered a stack of toys to the hospital which saved their son’s life.

Ivan and Nadine Hollingsworth won thousands of pounds worth of toys on ITV’s Text Santa after being singled out for a special surprise on the Christmas Eve show by North favourites Ant and Dec.

They believed they just had free tickets to sit in the audience – but Ant and Dec plucked them out of their seats in front of millions of viewers to reveal how they have raised more than £170,000 for the Children’s Heart Unit Fund (CHUF) at Newcastle’s Freeman Hospital, where medics saved their son Sebastian.

Sebastian was born in January 2009 with the complex heart condition Tetralogy of Fallot, and had life-saving surgery when he was just 16 weeks old.

To show their gratitude, the couple have since devoted their energies to raising funds through a series of events, including a coast-to-coast challenge which saw Ivan run back to Tyneside from Cumbria in five days.

After playing several games on the TV show – and embarrassing Ivan with a picture of him skiing in a Mankini – the cameras switched to their home in Whitley Bay, North Tyneside, to reveal a sleigh in the middle of their dining room, piled high with toys for the children’s heart unit.

Ivan, 35, and Nadine, 34, also won a trip to Disneyland and a mini sports car for Sebastian.

Yesterday, together with two-year-old Sebastian, they delivered the gifts to the heart unit, based at Ward 23, including a pile of soft toys to seven-month-old Llana Qazi, of North Shields, North Tyneside.

Llana has been in hospital for several months awaiting a heart transplant, and she loved her Mickey and Minnie Mouse toys.