My 2900th Blog Post

 

The Great London 
Film And Comic... con

My 2900th Post 

For my 2900th post I thought I would like to bring to light the current escalation of the actions (some might even say crimes) committed by the London Film And Comic Con, which I used to love going to every year until the dreaded day that they did this (back in 2014). Since then, I’ve gone pretty much every year (as it’s the excuse I need to take the day off work when the blooming ‘Staff Barbecue’ is held) and, the list of egotistical celebrities just keeps getting bigger and bigger (I wish they wouldn’t invite ‘guests’ to these things at all if this is what happens) while the amount of choice on the stalls keeps getting smaller and smaller. I’ve seen a number of my regular dealers from other film fairs stop attending this one for pretty much the same reason... the wrong kind of audience being attracted by the dubious celebrities and treating the once main attraction, the stalls of merchandise, as a secondary add on. 

But I still like to go because the few different kinds of stalls they have there are usually quite unique when compared to the other, far superior, film fairs I attend every year (where else would you find pink, knitted Daleks and homemade Alpacas?). 

So once again, this year, I bought my advanced ticket to the 2026 show. Now I found it strange that, instead of the usual early July date (with, once again, what was always the best day of the show, the Friday, when the stalls have not been ransacked by other attendees waiting until the Saturday) being suspiciously absent once more... they’d replaced it with an early, Saturday or Sunday only June date. Okay, I could live with that and, once I’d seethed and raged quite a bit, I could also live with the bizarrely expensive increase on the ticket price, gone up another £6 this year to a staggering £31 entrance fee (for just the stalls, which is the ticket I always buy and which, before they got so pseudo-popular, always used to cost around a fiver). And, so it was booked and I didn’t have to worry about it again.

Except I did. 

A few weeks ago I received an email from the organisers of the London Film And Comic Con which started out with the very diplomatically worded phrase... “Sadly, we have had to take the difficult decision to postpone London Film and Comic Con 2026 to August 2027.” No people, if you postpone something until a date taking place even after the next annual event was supposed to happen... it’s not a postponement, it’s a cancellation! And, of course, rather than straight refund people without a lot of tomfoolery in trying to contact them, they decided to keep the money and just reassign the ticket to the new August date. Because of course they would, that’s how certain organisations like this operate I guess (and don’t get me started on theatre ticket, non-refund expectations during the pandemic). 

Reasons for this postponement/cancellation listed in the email used phrases like “airline costs rising sharply and ongoing uncertainty around flight availability”, “unfolding global issues”, “increasing energy shortages” and “rising cost of living”... that last specifically talking about the fact that they have the audacity to charge for autographs and snaps with the celebs! 

And I’m really not happy about this. All the decisions made here are to do with the string of guests they wanted to attend... many of which usually seem to be of the ‘third stormtrooper from the right’ in this film, ‘fifth Ewok from the left’ in this film, someone who ‘dressed up as a Dalek once’ variety... amongst the smattering of bigger guests who charge even more money for the privilege (if you care to call it that).

But what about people like me? 

I don’t give a hoot about the celebrities! I just want to visit the stalls. C’mon... what about remembering the real value and atmosphere of the ‘event’ of the humble Film Fair? Not what it seems to have unfortunately mutated into, in the hands of some certain showrunners. 

Once again the organisers seem to be getting away with it but, food for thought, my main concern after reading their email (asides from being cheated out of a day in London, shopping for unique merchandise) is... who is to say it won’t also be cancelled next year? Will there even be a London Film And Comic Con still standing or will it just sink into bankruptcy because of rubbish decisions like this?

Anyway, thought I’d spread the news here so people who were thinking of going again this year... and who are scratching their heads when they find next year’s dates on the website, know about it... well at least you’ve been informed somewhere, even if it’s just on this blog, that the show isn’t going ahead in 2026. It might have been nice to put that up on the landing page of their own website though. This is nuts!

So that’s my latest rant and my 2900th Post. Thanks so much for reading, always grateful. Normal reviewing service will return on my next post.

London Film and Comic Con 2014

The Geek Shall 
Inherit The Earth*

London Film and Comic Con 2014

It was about four years ago, not long after I started writing this blog of reviews, that I first mentioned my affection for the annual London Film and Comic Convention (and you can read that review here). Although I’m sure many of you will call me sad for saying so... it’s basically the highlight of my year. The one Saturday out of the 52 per annum which I plan my summer holidays around so I can make sure I am in London to attend. I’ve been going to this one for something like 8 - 10 years and, without fail, I always manage to do it.

Not this year though, although it wasn’t for want of trying.

Every year I get to the venue about an hour early (the show opens for regular “on the door” tickets at 11am) and either start or join the queue to buy tickets. Usually there’s around 3 - 50 people in front of me and, once they open the doors at 11am, I’m usually in and looking around my favourite stalls of knick knacks. And that’s another point I want to mention, by the way, before I go on to describe what a total fiasco this was this year... I’m not there for the celebrities. The queues for them, once you’ve bought a ticket for their own specific queue, are usually fairly lengthy and take a long time to get through... much too much time for me to be wasting queueing when there are such interesting fantasy themed goods on offer such as replica samurai swords or Buffy The Vampire Slayer knickers. In fact, the only time I queued for a celebrity at the London Film And Comic Con was the first year I started attending the event more regularly... so 8 - 10 years ago... and that was for Elvira herself, Cassandra Peterson. But that was in a time when the individual queues moved pretty fast and I was only waiting for her for about a quarter of an hour.

Last year was no exception to my usual routine but I did notice, after an hour or so, that it was getting very difficult to move around in there. I took a photo from a lounge above the cafe last year and I remember tweeting something along the lines that the organisers really did need to address the fact that the event had kind of outgrown it’s venue. It was never as popular as it was last year and it made the show less enjoyable because the geeks, who shall inherit the earth, no doubt, were out in force. You couldn’t count the number of fezzes, stormtroopers and superheroes on the fingers of any number of hands you and your friends brought with you. The sheer number of people coming to this thing and being crammed into an increasingly inadequate space, in costume or just in civvies like me, was a real problem.

This year, I did my usual thing and got up at a time best left unmentioned to arrive for the queue at Earls Court at 10am. I wasn’t expecting to have literally thousands of people in front of me. The queue, usually a relatively small number of people at best, went right around the building and also did about eight zig zags around the front area... before even getting to the back of the buildings where the main entrance to Earls Court 2 is. It was staggering. The last two times I’d seen anything like this was when I was a young boy in the early 1970s. I remember queuing for many hours to see both a Salvador Dali exhibition at the Tate Gallery (when there was only one Tate Gallery and not a whole fistful ilke there is today) and the Treasures Of Tutankhamen at the British Museum (the real ones, not the replicas which were on show over here lesss than a decade ago).

But, it was still only ten o’clock so I figured I’d still be able to get in by 11am, right? How wrong I was. To say the queue was slow moving would be an understatement. And it only got bigger and bigger after I arrived... snaking back on itself so many times that it was soon literally cascading out into the High Street. This was not good. As the day wore on, many queue companions, people I’d met there that day, had dropped out. Things were getting pretty ugly by 1pm. There was one guy dressed up as Doctor Who and he was shouting at the top of his voice to anyone that would listen that his day had been ruined. Well yeah, we were all victims here, actually, mate. All our days had been ruined and none of us, it would seem, are going to be offered any compensation by the organisers for the £6 - £30 travel costs, depending on where you were coming from, to basically go and stand in a queue all day.

The various queue stewards were bearing the brunt of the complaints quite admirably and they were clearly not to blame for the lack of organisation from the people running the show... but they were really left in the dark, it seems to me, on how to handle the sheer numbers of people out in force this year and, I can hardly blame them for not having an organised response.

I blame the organisers.

If I could see this coming last year... why couldn’t they?

After a while the building became over capacity... that is to say, it was pretty much illegal to let any more people into the place until various people had left. So they just kept closing the doors. Things were getting ugly. It was looking like it would be an unruly but immaculately costumed mob bearing pitchforks and lightsabres at some point. I chatted with various people, some of them cosplayers, some of whom you can see in the photos at the top of this post, and many of them were very patient people and, like me, most of them gave up at some point in the day.

Now the day wasn’t a total loss for me in that I usually get one of the guys who runs a stall at the Camden and Westminster Film Fairs to order in a load of fairly unusual stuff for me, so it’s worth my while going. Halfway through the day he managed to get a break and brought the stuff he’d got in for me out to the queue so I could buy it from him there... so that was really good of him. However, the reports of what was going on in the building were less than encouraging. Apparently, the place was packed to bursting with nobody being able to really get to look at the stalls they wanted to because everywhere it was all at something of a standstill... human traffic jams were all over the place, it seemed. And, when I inquired if business for that day was fairly good for his stall, he basically said that it was terrible. Everyone was there, it would seem, for the celebrities and those that could manage to claw their ways through to the stalls were not buying, by the sound of it. They were blowing all their money on the celebrity photo shoots. Not too encouraging.

So there we all were. An angry bunch of, mostly, humans. To paraphrase a popular sci-fi TV show of the 1970s, we were “a ragtag fugitive fleet on a lonely quest... searching for the entry tills of London Film & Comic Con."

I stuck it out for as long as I felt I was able to in that queue. I’ve had a terrible cold all week and, on top of that, I’ve been getting some problems with my feet which means I can’t be on them for too many hours without getting some chronic pain. So I had someone save my place and I scoped out the rest of the queue. Well it looked like there was at least another couple of hours to go and I wasn’t going to be getting in any time soon... let alone the thousands behind me, poor things. My heart went out to an old lady with a walking stick who must have been in her sixties at the very least. She was on her own and must have been in the queue longer than I had been. Ditto for a blind guy in the queue who only had his guide dog to keep him company... I couldn’t believe they were letting these people queue. These people needed to be fast tracked inside somehow, I think. That was just plain wrong.

At 2.30pm, after I had been queueing for around four and a half hours, I called it a day. Things weren’t getting any better and the human bladder can only last so long in the sweltering heat. I’d not eaten since my breakfast at about 6am and my stomach felt like it was folding in on itself. So I left the queue and gave up this year. I was not best pleased about wasting my entire day on this exercise with no real updates or organisational set up to be able to cope with these numbers. This was a really bad idea.

When I got home I jumped on the message board for the London Film & Comic Con to see what people were saying. It wasn’t exactly a love fest on there and there were some echoes about the bad organisation of the event which pretty much mirrored what I’d been hearing from people in the queue all day. One person on the board tried to defend various issues by saying that people who were in the queue should have planned to bring water with them etc but, seriously, if we knew that it was going to be packed out with at least ten to fifteen times the amount of people who usually show up for these things, then we certainly would have.

Frankly, to end this post with the kind of sentiments that I was hearing from everyone’s mouth in the queues.... the organisation of this event and the lack of a viable, or at least visible, “reflex action” contingency plan to what was, from very early on in the day, a big problem with overcrowding, was a complete joke. This is not how you react to an event like this if more people turn up than you were expecting. It was a travesty and I bet half of the geeks in the queues could have done a much better job at identifying these kinds of problems months before they happened. I’m not at all happy about the way things were handled here... and this definitely wasn’t the highlight of my year in 2014. Which is a real shame.

*I use the term geek in the modern accepted parlance, which I personally don’t accept but am doing so because it suits my title pun. Please remember that the term geek is actually a reference to a carny act of a particular style of performer who would bite the heads off of live chickens. That’s what geek really means. But I’ll let it slide for this post only.

London Film and Comic Con

Earls Court - 17 & 18th July 2010

So... got up bright and early this Saturday to go to what is, I’m sad to say, becoming my most interesting social event of the year (I don’t get out too much), the London Film and Comic Con. This is a good one for me... I even arrange my holidays around it. Why? Because of all the London based fairs (and I’m looking at you Camden and Westminster) this is the biggest, brightest and most buzzing geek event in the social calendar. And I’m not even a geek (and no, you can’t disprove that).

Got off the train at Earls Court and did the long walk around the exhibition centre to the other side (after trying to find the right exit again after the atrocious use of signage on this particular station... it catches me out every year! I learn slow.) and found that my friend was already in the queue and that, much to my surprise, even though I got there only three quarters of an hour before the doors opened this year as opposed to getting there really early, that it wasn’t really that crowded as yet. Was expecting to be greeted by the sight of several storm troopers and giant furry Japanimals warming up the crowd but there weren’t that many costumes in amongst the people in the queue this year.

I did see, while waiting, “look-and-dressalikes” of: one Matt Smith, two David Tennants, one Patrick Troughton (at least I recognised him when others didn’t) and a giant sized Mickey Mouse in Jedi costume... kept getting his light sabre out. I like to think of him as Darth Maus!

I did also see a young lady dressed as a St. Trinians school girl... at least I thought she was at first. Given that she was hanging around a “facsimile” Tom Baker I was forced to change my guess to the Lalla Ward incarnation of Romana... I think. Possibly. Sure she wore that outfit in one episode.

Not so many representatives of starfleet this year as in previous years... although there was one woman dressed as an old red shirted yeoman from the Kirk days who I really just wanted to hug to my bosom! Would possibly have got arrested though. She was sexy!

So there I was in the queue talking to my friend about... well what does one talk about these days in queues... aspect ratios, length of prints, availability of prints which inevitably leads into the "my print's longer than yours" pissing contest... when the guy in front of me in the queue turned out to be a Star Wars stormtrooper... and no, I’m not blind before you start writing Zatoichi comments at the bottom of this page, this guy was an undercover stormtrooper... out of uniform. I'd been talking about going to see Inception at some point... because everybody keeps tweeting at me that I should... and the guy in front of me started raving... well okay then... discreetly laying his opinion of it on the line and making me want to see it even more (if you do look in on this blog and read this Mr. Stormtrooper... I promise I’ll get out and see it soonest!). That’s when I found out that when stormtroopers are out of costume, they go and hang out with their stormtrooper mates who are going around in white fibreglass uniforms and doing all that stuff with the marching and stalking and killing.

Now I was going to do a whole paragraph of conjecture here, while I tried to work out just what it is that stormtroopers get up to at their “meets”. I was going to ask the guy but some military looking guys pulled him out of the queue and got him in without paying before I had a chance to ask. I will probably practice the typing equivalent of biting my tongue here too since, frankly, I might get a little unforgiving about groups inspired by Star Wars characters going around and interrogating people, drinking heavily and going on “book burning” binges.

I will say one thing though... when I saw the guy inside he had an adoring lady on each arm... so he must have been doing something right here! I wanna be a stormtrooper too! Do they do those uniforms in black with white piping? And how many times would I have to endure the "These aren't the droids you're looking for" line if I joined up?

So anyway... got into the Film Fair finally and I have to say that both the layout and the amount of interesting stalls was quite a bit less than other years. At least that’s my perception. As I entered I was greeted by the sight of the Batmobile from the last two Batman movies but as I moved around to the right most of the stalls seemed to be dedicated to Manga and Anime. It turned out all the more interesting (to me) knick knack stalls were to the left... which is annoying because I’m pretty fixed when I go to these things and tend to work my way up and down the aisles in a strict, right to left, up and down linear fashion. So it was an hour before I got to see anything really interesting... but there was a lot of stuff worth seeing still. Much better than the Camden and Westminster gigs.

Was very tempted to buy a replica of Deckard’s gun from Blade Runner, for example, but they wanted £80 for it. And they wanted £300 for a rather good model of Robbie The Robot. All in all though there weren’t as many fantasy weaponry stalls or pin badge stalls or press book stalls or Japanese miniature model stalls as previous years... which is a shame because I usually pick up one or two models to add to the decor in my office. Very disappointing.

There was a guy selling cool mugs though so that was alright. And somebody was selling steam punk jewellery which would have looked rather fetching on one of my blog/twitter followers (hey there fleysomewench!).

I didn’t see any of the big stars because there were the usual hordes of people queuing up to pay them money (gosh, there was no queue for Elvira when I got her to sign a photo for me there a few years back) but I did see Brian Murphy (if anyone remembers Geoge and Mildred) so now I know that he’s still alive... so that’s okay.

Although it wasn’t as good as the previous 5 or so years, it’s definitely something I’d recommend everyone go to at least once... just to see the diverse collection of customers that you get at these things... I was queuing up in the toilets by a big bear of a man dressed as Fred Flintstone... you don’t get many weekend experiences like that.