We now have a little bit of press coverage for the Dave Walker/SPCK story from outside the blogsphere – Private Eye has picked up on the story, plus the general ridiculousness around the bankruptcy.
Thanks to David Keen, Sam Norton and SPCK/SSG News Blog for highlighting the Private Eye story.
So there we were, sitting watching the TV, when I hear a weird noise from outside. Stepping out into the garden, this is what we saw, a Virgin hot air balloon coming down rather quickly. These pictures show the view as it went over and came to rest on the garrison sports field, amazingly coming down in the relatively small space between the tree lined road and the rugby posts. Considering that a few metres short on the other side of the road he would have been coming down onto the Penrose Park housing estate, and the rest of the sports field has regularly spaced rugby posts along it’s length, it was a pretty impressive bit of piloting.
This weekend, as well as being my parents fortieth wedding anniversary, it is also the fortieth anniversary of classic comedy Dad’s Army – ironic since my Dad has pretty well every episode of the series on DVD.
As part of the celebrations, the BBC has published a lot of archive material relating to the show. Most interesting amongst those are the documents, including some hand-written letters from the cast. The collection includes a fascinating internal discussion over the titles where the controller of BBC1 demanded changes to the original montage resulting in the now familiar titles we know and love.
By way of a little tribute, here is a montage that includes perhaps the best known scene of the entire series…
Things have progressed a little with the Dave Walker/SPCK story overnight with the publication of a great document by Matt Wardman. The document brings together copies of the original seventy-five posts from CartoonChurch, along with subsequent relevant posts and comment from other blogs, such that the document runs to a pretty epic 130 pages. However as an overview of the whole story it is invaluable. The document is downloadable from The Wardman Wire, and as it covers the same material as I have had published on my Evernote account, I’ll be removing those in favour of Matt’s document.
Over the past few days I’ve tweaked the settings on the Dave Walker/SPCK Friend Feed room, such that it is now running with eleven feeds from various search terms that are pretty consistently picking up all relevant posts within a short time of them appearing online (the last time I manually added anything was Wednesday). In theory it should be de-duping between the feeds (although there have been a couple of hiccups) so it should be a fairly good way of keeping track. You can also hook up to a feed from the room which gives you a good way to have an overview of what everybody is saying.
Outside of that there are a few interesting posts that have appeared. Firstly some of the others who were on the receiving end of cease and desist’s have broken cover, have a read of this post from Unicorn Tree Books and this one from the SPCK/SSG blog. There is also this one from SPCKWatch challenging Brewer to send a cease and desist to him, and including a couple of points from Brewers page that don’t appear to be exactly gospel truth.
Certainly what happens next is going to be interesting. SPCKWatch quoted an e-mail from a staff member saying:
Why why why is this not being took on by the media more!!
Sadly widespread media coverage has been sadly lacking up to now, and certainly over the past couple of weeks the media has been far more interested in a game of spot the schism… Fingers crossed that this will change now – certainly there are a couple of well known names who have either signed up to the Facebook group, or blogged in support of Dave. Whilst the removal of the posts was the catalyst, the more one digs into the story the more interesting it becomes, especially when you consider that some of our church buildings are ending up in the hands of these guys along with the SPCK shops.