Podcast 295: This is our Everest, Part Forty-One – Splash!
This edition of the podcast is dedicated to Katie Coxall, a bold, daring, brilliant artist and friend of ours who lost her battle with cancer earlier this week. She will be much missed and fondly remembered in equal measure.
On this week’s This Is Our Everest, Edward and Ian have been watching one of the first Channel 4 programmes, Splash! with David Wilkie from 1982, an intermediate-level instructional television programme about swimming that (seemingly) also dabbles in inadvertent softcore pornography.
Indeed, your intrepid heroes aren’t particularly interested by any of the swimming content on display, giving at least equal billing to subjects like male pattern baldness and the evolution of an accidental combover, the danger of using electronic equipment near bodies of open water, the importance of putting children in their place and pre- and post-pandemic boner etiquette.
The panel are dismissive of David’s special guest, darkly suggesting that ulterior motives unconnected to swimming were largely responsible to their star status while a far more qualified expert is relegated to a few desultory widths at the end. There’s also news of the Top of the Pops motherlode, our ongoing admiration for Bananarama and a largely tangental tale of taking a Swedish woman out to see an elderly soul legend live in concert. If you would like to watch this episode of Splash! you can find it here.
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Just a point of correction Ian, Barnet Copthall is not now the home ground of Barnet FC. It was one of two sites identified and approved by the club, supporters and Barnet Council in the late 1990s. However when the council went from NOC to Conservative in 2002 suddenly all plans for the club to move to either site were blocked continuously. Hence the Hive was built outside the borough as a training ground and subsequently the club moved there after the council forced their hand, after over a decade of the council blocking any attempts of the club to move within the borough or redevelop Underhill.
Copthall is now home to Saracens Rugby Union who, after pretty much doing for Southbury Road when they ground shared with your lot, then found Barnet Council far more welcoming to them than the football club – who had been in the borough for over century – did. Peculiar that this should be the case. After all Saracens have no connection with Barnet, they hail from Enfield. Perhaps a glance over the individuals who made up the council may shed some light. Just a thought.
Anyway, they were handed Copthall for nothing and were even given a grant from the council to help with renovations. What work has been done is minimal. New artificial pitch and stand but a lot a lot of temporary seating which I believe is still there (I won’t visit the ground on principle). The grant seems to have disappeared into the vast chasm that is Saracens finances over recent times, and that too has seen the club racking up eye watering amounts of debt since it went professional, and of course is currently plying its trade in the second tier after this was all recently uncovered and the club accepted relegation rather than have the authorities look any further. Given the sponsorship from Alliamz (since dropped), crowds of 10K, TV money, no rent and the previously mentioned council grant, I tend to wonder how much they were breaking the salary cap by – as I said before all this and the club debt continues to increase!
There’s a lot gone on at Copthall since the Splash cameras arrived for sure. There’s probably a blog post in this to be honest – Rugby Union clubs muscling in in football club territory (see also Coventry).
Yeah, I only realised that after we finished the recording