More slight drift. Marine Salvage of Portsmouth sent several ex Saudi Lightning cockpits to Pinewood for use in the Wing Commander film.

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(This one is – or was – at Little Horsted, East Sussex)

I believe a Canberra cockpit also appeared. Developed for the big screen from a computer game, it wasn’t awfully attention grabbing…

…even a bit of paper from Dam Busters regardless of how glamorous it actually is…

Strangely enough I have similar bits of ancient but interesting bits of paper that I keep because they have an historical – if maybe personal – relevance and are a direct link back to an actual event, but I wouldn’t dream of selling them (if they were to be sold, that is) because I would be embarrassed to ask for anything like £145 for any one of them. I pulled that bit of Dam Busters memorabilia out because it appears to be exceedingly expensive for what is, in essence, just a torn and folded sheet of paper with a few details on it that – unlike some of the props on sale at that site – probably never went on the set, was never handled by any of the actors involved, and might be the last survivor of several run off on the studio’s copier to be distributed to executives and producers; to actually display it like they have almost lessens the value of the ‘genuine’ articles they have, the stuff that did appear on screen. (Somewhere I have something similar from The Guns of Navarone (1961), which has other names typed in but crossed out and the stars names added in pen. I picked it up along with a folder containing scripts, a couple of storyboard pages, portraits of the actors in character, and a letter commenting on the poor quality of the prints used for the general release asking if there is anything that can be done to resolve the problem; I ‘rescued’ it all from a pile of stuff that was going to be dumped in a skip by a house clearance crew in North London about 15 years ago)

To me that cast list is not worth £145, to someone else…yes, maybe, but it will be interesting to look back in six months and see if it is still for sale at that price.