Giant town square telly approved :-(

The bad news is that this week the council planning committee ignored public opinion (39 letters of objection and a number of public speakers) and approved plans for the Olympic-funded giant telly in Walthamstow Town Square, backing on to the children's play area.
The only tiny bits of good news are that...
1) Rather than being there forever, the screen only has planning permission from this summer till summer 2012, after the London Olympics. So if it's unpopular, too loud, vandalised or otherwise a failure then we can hope the council won't grant planning permission for it to stay.
2) The insanely long operating hours of 7am till 11pm every day of the year were not approved. Instead the applicant will have to come up with revised operating hours and return to the planning committee with them for approval. So we will have the opportunity to lobby for shorter hours (i.e. only switch it on when there's something genuinely worth watching!) and for the sound to only be switched on when appropriate. This would also result in energy savings - by our estimates, the screen would have the same carbon footprints as 59 households if switched on for the proposed 18 hours a day.
Oh, and finally, one councillor made a big thing of the fact that there weren't many people in the public gallery - suggesting that this meant no-one cared! We don't really see why people should have to spend their evening watching a council meeting, at which they're not allowed to speak, in order to prove that they care. But if this is the way that the councillors see it (i.e. they might have even voted differently if they had a bigger audience) then it's essential that a huge number of us turn up when it comes to the planning applications for tower blocks in Blackhorse Road, the Arcade site, etc.