Rum Doings Episode 42 begins with a story. A very special story which you can buy here.

What we’re not discussing this week is: how do we get Britain’s heathen backside heaved back onto a Christian pew? In an attempt to avoid the topic, we drink some Rum & Raisin non-alcoholic sadness.

Naturally we discuss blocked ears, botched nose operations, dancing, the self-consciousness of theatre, and torrenting. We ponder ad-busting, last names, and green visa-waiver forms. And telephone scams! And John’s accident heroics.

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As you’ll have noticed, by Episode 41 we’re not funny any more. But it’s fun to remember when we were.

You may also be wondering where episode 40 is. Well, it’s slipped out of time, and you’ll have to live with that. It might come back later.

Together we don’t discuss whether we should bring back fox hunting, but we do drink blackcurrant and rum wine. Then Nick demands that John talk about web comics. We discuss our favourite comic to hate, User Friendly. And as mentioned, here’s John’s decade-old spoof:

And then Nick makes John talk about Brian’s Guide. And banks. And FOSDEM. There’s a horrible story about the Discovery Channel, and uplifting stories about people’s generosity.

Then Mega Drives. And the future of consoles. And somehow Nick initiates this discussion. And just in case we’ve not been funny enough, we talk about speed cameras and car accidents.

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Episode 39 sees us not discussing: What can we do about Hula Hoops and comic books and their effect on the moral turpitude of the youth?

Back on creaky furniture, arguing over mead, things feel very traditional but for Nick’s peculiar quietness. We talk about times in the witch-encrusted New Forest. Nick reveals the location of Anne Frank’s remains. Nuts are put in their place.

We consider accents, shrieking families, and morris dancing. We talk with pleasure about Radio 4′s former quiz show All The Way From Memphis. There’s thoughts on Sherlock, Nick’s holidays, and John’s world exclusive weight loss programme. And Bath’s weather.

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It’s the summer, and to celebrate Nick and I are giving ourselves a break from the sickening sight of each other. So this Episode 38 is something of a “best of” I discovered while rooting around in the attic fifty years in the future. It collects together moments from episodes 1 to 10, which I’d forgotten, and you probably did too.

Don’t ignore it just because of that! It’s really good! It’s the half hour of decent bits from the first 450. In hindsight we probably should have included more decent bits. Nick sings! John doesn’t! The origin of cream teas! What an unbelievable treat.

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Sore back? Flaky skin? Difficulty sleeping at night? Why not try church?!

For a few years now there’s been a project called Back To Church Sunday. It’s the peculiar name for a day that encourages people to attend church on that one occasion (that isn’t Christmas or Easter), with the assumption implicit in the title that they simply must have been before. (Apparently, when it began, it was intended to encourage those who have left to return, but now its remit has expanded. Unfortunately its name has not.) Presumably the intention is if you can encourage people to come along just this once they’ll realise what they’re missing out on, and choose to stick around.

However, the somewhat awkwardly arrogant name is not the real issue about the campaign. That real issue would be that almost nowhere on their website or promotional materials do they make any mention of God or Jesus, or anything that Christianity is about. Instead they’re trying to sell you your local church as a quality spa day for you and your best friends.

The clearest example of this is their radio advert, which I’ve streamed below. Just hit the play button.

A few choice quotes:

“It makes me feel good about myself.”

“If I’ve had a rough week, I can just leave it all behind.”

“Friends, family, fun… I just love it!”

It’s church as beauty therapy. It’s a way to relax, unwind, and just let your hair down with friends. Forget all the tough things in life! Come to church!

It’s about as far from any understanding of church as I can imagine.

Let’s define terms. “Church”, unhelpfully, has at least three distinct meanings. There’s church the building. There’s church the institution. And there’s church the body – the family of people. Presumably this campaign is aiming for a conflation of the first and last – they want to get you into the church building, so you become a member of the church body. And it’s partly this conflation that leads to the peculiarly atheistic delivery of their campaign.

Church has a responsibility to be otherly. It should be unrecognisably different. The desperate attempts by all manner of church groups to reinvent themselves as a diluted simulacrum for something currently fashionable or popular is the absolute antithesis of its purpose. Church should stand out against the rest of the world, it should be counter-cultural, unsettlingly alternative. Disguising church, attempting to hold up a painted sheet of a trendy wine bar to trick people in, is a sad, sad sight. “Look at us! We’re a bit like that other thing you like!”

I love church. I understand this to mean the ‘body’ of Christ, the collection of people with whom I co-labour in the act of being church. And yes, I have great friends there. I have fun with those people. In many ways, I feel better about myself. But that is a sliver of its reality. Church is really tough. To be a Christian isn’t a badge for a club – it’s a decision to live life in constant turmoil, face incessant challenges, and be enormously open to change. (Even the most traditional of Anglican churches, stuck in their centuries-old ways, on their centuries-old pews, are still – hopefully, in their own odd way – encouraging some form of change in their congregations.) To put yourself in the body of a church is to agree to transformation and revelation.

To be a part of church is to embrace sacrifice. It’s to serve others. To change your priorities. It’s to recognise hard times and face them. Christianity is a faith that says, “whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing.” Christianity is a faith that includes the lamentations of those for whom God made life incredibly difficult. It’s a faith that says we must be challenged and transformed by that which is Other. It says we must love our enemies. We must stand out.

It’s fantastic. It’s fantastic because of the tough stuff, on top of the extraordinary joy that is knowing that you are created and loved by God, alive with purpose, and living because of the sacrifice of Jesus. It’s fantastic to be a part of something that repels the notions of existing to serve oneself, of seeking to take from others.

It’s not a spa.

And most of all, to focus on the most egregious of all the comments made in their advert, it’s not a place to go after a rough week leaving all your troubles behind. It’s a place to take your troubles to. That’s the whole point! Church is where I take my broken, crumpled self, and serve others, love others. Love that brings about change.

I recognise how extraordinarily unlikely it is that an organisation would put out an advert with people saying, “I go along every week, and it just gets harder and harder. I really feel like giving up.” But I’ve known many people who’ve felt this way. People who don’t give up, and then see extraordinary change. But wow, imagine if their advert did say that. THAT would be counter-cultural.

But I absolutely do not expect an organisation such as this to avoid the words “God” and “Jesus”.

I mean, I get that fear. Typing them here, on this blog – the blog on which I write about television and videogames – is pretty terrifying. I imagine people reading this and thinking me a loony, deleting the blog from their RSS feeds. I think: “Maybe if I just remove those bits and make it more of my usual ranting about a crappy advert, that’ll be easier.” I get that it makes for a difficult commercial, having someone say “Jesus”. All that baggage, all the assumptions made. Heck, when I hear someone say “Jesus” on the radio my immediate response is to worry about what’s coming next, and assume the worst. I get why people try to avoid using those words. It’s fear and shame.

In their “What Is BTCS?” section, they list “Success Stories“. Nowhere in this mini-interview with a nice lady who found she liked church does it mention God, Christ, relationship, love… She talks about how it’s not as stuffy and boring as she remembered, how it made her laugh. You know that old restaurant where the food used to be so bland? It’s a bit better these days.

I’m certain that Back To Church Sunday has good intentions. They want to see people coming along to church. They want this because they want those people to get engaged with it, to fall in love with God. I’m sure that’s their motivation. They’re also about trying to get those currently in church to invite their friends, to “evangelise”. There’s obviously a lot of inter-church “initiatives” going on, trying to push the notion nationwide. (Oddly, their website – referenced in their radio advert – seems to be focused on those already in church, convincing them to invite others. A strange choice bearing in mind the nature of their publicity.)

But in stripping out all that church exists for, replacing it with asinine statements of what a lovely social club it is, they’re either ashamed, naive, or attempting to hoodwink people into joining. None seems a good option. They’re trying to sell The Church Show. “Come along! It’s not quite as boring as you remember!”

I would very much love for people to try out church. But I want people to go in with expectations not only of receiving, but of giving too. Expectations of challenge, of tough times, as well as joy and love. Not of joining a gym with a lovely sauna, but of joining a revelatory, life-transforming, counter-cultural force, driven by love.

We’re not really here. We’re in the past. In Episode 37 of Rum Doings we’re speaking to you from history. We’re not discussing whether organic produce is worth the premium for hard-working families.

Can you still lie in? Should God save the Queen? Then something I can’t bring myself to even type. But we can all see who really has the problem, Nick.

Once Nick stops upsetting John with horrible comments (surely this time he’ll garner complaints – come on people, complain), he then criticises John’s job. Then criticises his washing machine.

Why are John and Nick still friends, despite everything? What’s the secret to our parody of success?

Nick needs some suggestions for stopping the nasty boys in his neighbourhood on their noisy bikes. John tries to defend GPs. We then argue for more traffic wardens, and Traffic Politeness Officers. And the taint of BMWs.

Then we ponder the great debate of our time: how do you deal with a fly in your cake cabinet in Starbucks? And when should you sue a Starbucks?

Pencils, handwriting, typing, we cover all the big issues.

Then the tale of when Chris Eubank crushed John’s hand, and his ensuing madness.

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You may have been following the saga of Rev. Stuart Campbell Vs. Benchmark Reviews. You may now be wondering why Stu’s site is dead. Here’s the story.

Someone on Stu’s forum spotted a review on the tech site for a chair. A chair called the Herman Miller Embody. It costs $1200, and will apparently cure world hunger. Large sections of the review read an awful lot like a press release. It was filled with the sorts of daft, exaggerated nonsense that wouldn’t make sense for a reviewer to write. Spurious claims of medical benefits, peculiar puff about its design. Stu wrote about this. People who left comments asking about this found their words were instantly deleted. Stu, who then tried to leave another comment asking why, found himself IP banned from the site. As in, he wasn’t even allowed to look at the site from his computer.

Stu updated about this on his blog. He wrote explaining what was happening, and included some evidence that demonstrated that the text on the Benchmark Review site was absolutely directly from press releases and statements made by Herman Miller. Benchmark responded to this by a) changing those passages that Stu pointed out (then declaring that they’d always been that way), and b) published Stu’s home address and phone number on their forum.

Absolutely extraordinary behaviour. And not, you might consider, the behaviour of a site that had made a legitimate mistake. Were RPS to – and this is the only way I think it could ever happen – accidentally quote a statement from a press release and forget to put it in quotes and cite it, we’d respond to this being pointed out by editing the article so it was correct and saying, “Oops, sorry about that.” We sometimes quote press releases for games that have just been announced, because no independent information is available. So we’d say, “According to the Shootybang VII press release, the game will offer, ‘The greatest shootybangs gaming has ever witnessed.’” Clearly we’d not make such a claim ourselves, but I don’t know, let’s say I had a cold and was attacked by a pirate, I might accidentally forget to put the quote marks in? It seems unlikely. I think it would be reasonably difficult to write an eight page review, and forget every time.

So Stu followed this up, pointing out these changes, and linking to evidence that they had been changed. Around this time I spotted something strange. A huge number of words from this extraordinarily long review for a very expensive chair appeared on another site. A site called Smart Furniture that sold the chair. Entire paragraphs were identical on both sites, rearranged into a different order, and occasionally with tweaks made, but otherwise the exact same copy. So I assumed that there must be a source document, the M to these two sites’ Matthew and Mark. I wrote to Smart asking if they could send me the press releases on which their copy was based. They wrote back telling me it was all their original work. Which seemed more strange.

I wrote back to them asking if they knew Benchmark had lifted it all for their “review” of the chair. I never heard back from Smart Furniture.

Then it got more weird. The Benchmark review, with even more unacknowledged tweaks and changes as the author silently conceded that other parts of the original text weren’t written by him, had some new advertising. Throughout all eight pages are adverts for the Herman Miller Embody chair, available from Smart Furniture.

So now you have a site maintaining it publishes independent reviews, using thousands of words of copy that’s also used on a store selling the product, on which the store advertises the product being reviewed. On no level does it look good. Now, it’s very possible for a site reviewing something to also advertise the same product. Say RPS were to review Shootybang VII, and at the same time the game’s publisher, EvilCorp, had negotiated an ads deal with our ads people, it’s possible that a Shootybang VII review could awkwardly be accompanied by adverts for the same game. Clearly that always looks a bit odd, but as it happens it’s difficult for a site to be dodgy enough to arrange it. Ads are worked out often months in advance, and of course they aren’t specific to one page of the site – the Shootybang VII ad looks less weird on the page talking about our favourite knitting tips. But were our review to contain vast numbers of words identical to those of the Shootybang VII website where you could buy the game, I think it would be very reasonable to start asking some serious questions.

But apparently if you ask those questions, Benchmark get a little cross. Beyond the disgusting behaviour of publishing Stu’s address and phone number, they’ve now started throwing out DMCA takedown claims in every possible direction. And unfortunately most ISPs respond to such claims, no matter how erroneous, by instantly capitulating and removing the site from the internet immediately. So that’s why, if you were wondering, Stu’s blog is currently gone. Hopefully it will be up and running again shortly.

The DMCA claims are completely false. Stu used a screenshot of the Benchmark logo, edited down, to illustrate the piece: perfectly legitimate. (Even the neurotic Google recognises the need to use a Google logo in a story about Google.) And he quoted text from the reviews (oddly enough in quote marks and correctly cited, which perhaps confused Benchmark and made them dizzy), which is absolutely allowed and in no way a violation of copyright.

So if you want to find Stu’s articles on the subject, they are, for now, here.

Welcome to our web of lies. Become entwined in Episode 36‘s multitude of untruthful deceit. Be deceived by our woven evil. Then listen as John’s house falls down.

And while pictures are appearing, here’s that bench:

Then, pear/blueberry cider lengthily discussed, we get around to reading out some of the last million years of emails. And you kept telling us to do this, so you can’t complain.

Does Coke taste better out of a glass? What are the odds of sitting in the United States? Should we stop whining?

Is Nick’s science dodgy? Is that a microphone, or are you just pleased to be recording a podcast? Is Rupert Murdoch Australian? Is Nick safe in your dreams?

Is there a more awful hairdressers name than this?

We then sidetrack into discussing Richard Herring’s As It Occurs To Me, at some length. Then when the name-dropping begins, Douglas Adams.

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It’s a back to basics, good old fashioned family values 35th episode of Rum Doings. Just Nick, John, a microphone and a disgusting bottle of rum. And this week we’re not discussing whether FIFA should have to bring in the rule that they should have the cameras in the goal posts to see if the goals are scored instigated.

We bring you some genuinely excellent news from Sainsbury’s (which apparently might be quite old news), and then move on to talk about John’s weekend break, and the joys of a British B&B. This of course involves tales of ketchup and coffee.

We talk about awful people, and responses to cold callers. Nick predicts the end-times, which brings us to the stories about the BP methane bubble. And where exactly does oil come from?

We finish by talking about Raoul Moat, although this was recorded before Cameron made his remarkable comments about feeling no sympathy.

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“As far as I can see, it is absolutely clear, that Raoul Moat is a callous murderer. Full stop, end of story. And I cannot understand any wave, however small, of public sympathy for this man. There should be sympathy for his victims, and for the havoc he wreaked in that community. There should be no sympathy for him.”

Just to be clear, obviously Moat’s crimes were terrible. And his victims of course deserve abundant sympathy. The “wave of public sympathy” to which Cameron refers is the much publicised, and obviously ludicrous, Facebook groups in which people are supporting Moat as a hero. No matter what the circumstances of someone’s life, perhaps it’s reasonable to suggest that at the point they start murdering people one should cross them off the hero list. Unless they’re Batman.

However, the idea that in not supporting/endorsing a murderer’s actions one must backflip to the opposite extreme, and exhibit no sympathy at all, is quite extraordinary. It is, in fact, inhuman.

Whether Moat became so awful after an idyllic or abusive childhood and life isn’t really relevant. Although the chances are that someone who was so frequently in trouble with the police, someone capable of assaulting children, someone whose response to a girlfriend’s leaving him is to attempt to murder her and her new partner, did not have a great life. People don’t wake up one morning and think, “I’ll be evil from now on. Muah ha ha.” But of course many people have shitty lives, and they certainly don’t go on to be the sort of person Moat was. Nothing, at any point, excuses such actions by an adult. Other than, of course, mental illness.

But why does any of this exclude Moat from sympathy? He certainly has my sympathy. To be so broken, so damaged, so pathetic – that earns my sympathy.

I don’t doubt for a moment that Moat could have been quite a different person if given a different life. It appears even he was conscious of this, the latest stories revealing his own denied requests for a psychiatrist. He told social workers,

“The more you block things out, the more numb you become in the heart you know. You get to a point where happiness to you is just like, you know, neither here nor there.”

I feel sympathy for him for having felt this way.

The most remarkable thing to come out of the Moat story has been the response from the policeman who was shot. David Rathband, likely to be permanently blind after being shot in the face, said something extraordinary.

“I bear no malice towards the man who shot me, but now wish to move on with my life.”

To have this response highlights the grotesque nature of Cameron’s remark.

It’s much easier to demonise a murderer than to consider them a human. To cast them as a one-dimensional monster lets us feel much safer about ourselves. To consider otherwise is to consider that it could have been us. Because, of course, it could have.

To reject sympathy is so horribly dangerous. Perhaps it’s partly because so many people conflate sympathy with endorsing something. Anyone suggesting that Moat’s actions were in any way valid is clearly ridiculous. But to sympathise has nothing to do with such suggestions. It is, instead, to recognise Moat as another human being. When we stop recognising people as human beings we enter into a dark and dangerous territory. One our Prime Minister is suggesting we should all be in.