NEW SERIES! For 21
years from 1981 to 2002 I attended dozens of Doctor Who conventions and events reviewing many of them at the time for
various print fanzines. In this series of posts I’m reproducing some of those reviews
which hopefully capture the spirit and flavour of what conventions and also
smaller events were like. They remain largely unedited except for anything
completely embarrassing! These are very much personal opinions of the events,
what I saw and the people I shared them with. We start at the beginning (for me) with PanoptiCon 4 held at Queen Mary College
in London in August 1981.
(Originally published in 1981 in
`Steel Sky`)
So there we were, in Euston Station at midnight, Andrew Smith,
(yes, him), Mark Crowder and myself when
this bloke looking about as healthy as Muto stumbles towards us asking for money. There was I, having just spent about fifty quid on Panopticon
IV and this guy will sleep on the
stone cold floor of the station. Welcome to the real world. You may think your
city centre is large but that's peanuts compared to London, as Douglas Adams
might say. It is a huge teaming mass of people each to his own. You could be
alone and forgotten in a crowded street of milling thousands. You never see
London. You see bits of it and fleeting images stick with you, but every time
you go back its a whole new place to explore.
This was
my first convention and my companions through the labyrinthine corridors of
our beloved capital were Mark Crowder, (who luckiIy knew the place fairly well) and Ian Mackenzie, (hot on ideas, but not on
how to get there). Still we managed to find our way onto the Tube and finally
arrived at the accommodation centre. Our sense of anticipation was soon
replaced by boredom was we watched Ian McLachlan bravely try to sort out
someone else’s mistakes with the room listings as familiar figures milled
about, everyone trying to pretend they had nothing to do with a Doctor Who
convention. Over in the pub opposite a small band of people clustered around
tables; Martin Wiggins tried telling everyone how good `Savage` was and,
failing this, vanished into the raining darkness. Not an auspicious start.
