London Film & Comic Con 2016

Once, A Con, A Time

London Film & Comic Con 2016
Showmasters at London Olympia

It was 4.05am on the morning of Friday 29th July 2016 when my Starship Enterprise alarm clock started proclaiming it was time to “Beam us up, Scotty” and making energiser sounds at a volume designed to rob a person of precious sleep. Time for me to get up, get dressed, have breakfast (while checking Twitter, naturally) and pack my bag for the opening day of this year’s big event, the 2016 edition of the London Film & Comic Con. I’ve written about three of these cons previously on my blog and, if you’d have read the previous editions here, here and here, then you would know that my affection for what was once my favourite annual treat has somewhat soured over the years, as it’s become more popular and ‘corporate’, for a number of reasons. You might wonder, after my conclusion to last year’s review, why I actually bothered to go back there again and... the answer to that is Friday.

For a few years now, LFCC have been opening their doors for just a couple of hours on a Friday evening as a preview to the show but, for the first time this year, they have added the Friday as a full day and decided to put the two hour preview on the Thursday instead. Now, as it happens, they cancelled the Thursday evening at short notice but the fact that the event was a day longer and, also, a few weeks later in the year than when it is normally held, made me decide to pre-book tickets for myself and a few friends, based on the idea that it wouldn’t be so crowded and that the numbers would be further cut down by people going on holiday more around this time of year. So I took the Friday off of work, booked my ticket and, as you can see from my previous paragraph, got up extra early to try and get the jump on the various queues for different kinds of ticket holders.

Let me say that, overall, the event this year was a much better show, at least in terms of lack of stress and ease of use. The people at Showmasters have exceeded my expectations by actually listening to what went wrong with the past few years and finally come up with a workable solution which made for a pleasant day. I can’t speak up for how the Saturday and Sunday went but the Friday was a pretty big success. It was a bit of a double edged sword in that they couldn’t account from the fall out of stallholders expectations this year, and I’ll get to that in a little while, but overall the organisation of the show was a whole lot better.

I arrived at Olympia just before 7am and managed to find my way to the right queue... delighted to find that there were maybe only less than 60 people ahead of me. Gone are the days when I would turn up for the show a half an hour early and start the queue off myself but... yeah... no use wallowing in nostalgia, I guess. This year the queue was moved into the building after only ten minutes after my arrival where, I’m delighted to say, there was a proper bag search and a big screen showing new movie trailers for people who got there early. The down side to this was that my two friends, who arrived at different times, were forced to queue separately as there was no way anybody could effectively save a place for people in the queue. I spent the next couple hours in the company of two charming ladies in the queue, Barbara and her daughter Jenny (pictured above), both of whom were in some way working in the entertainment industry and who regaled me with stories about meeting up with the likes of Sean Connery and Richard Harris. It was a pleasant couple of hours and I managed to slip two of my favourite jokes into the conversation. Barbara was a fan of Judy Garland and so I managed to get my “weigh a pie” joke in... and Jenny was a fan of Disney’s Stitch, so I managed to get my ‘difference between Robbie Burns and Walt Dis’nae’ joke in. So my work there was done.

When the show was officially open, the queue moved like wildfire as we were all just quickly scanned in and allowed to enter. I’ve not seen the hall that devoid of people in a good few years and it was nice to be able to wander around without accidentally recreating the Marx Brothers stateroom scene from A Night At the Opera. The organisers had really got the stalls and other entertainments on offer organised right by opening out into two halls (and upstairs for celebrity signings) and there was a hell of a lot more space to be able to get to look at everything properly this year. So well done, again, to Showmasters. Not something I was expecting to say about them but they really did an exemplary job this year... on the Friday, at least.

The stalls were great and this is the one show I see various different bits and pieces on offer that I wouldn’t normally see at the likes of the regular Westminster and Camden Film Fairs and it was good to see entire stalls devoted to pin badges, colourful shoes, weapons and props etc. That being said, there were hardly any DVD stalls this year and the majority of the few I found were overpriced... apart from one of the stallholders I know who always gets a good deal for people on the stuff he brings in and who brought me along some nice filmic treats in the form of the US Blu Rays of Belladonna Of Sadness and a Chesty Morgan triple feature. So thanks to Jason for that and thanks to the gentleman giving away free, signed copies of the first issue of comic book Trippers, which you can find more information about on the facebook page for Dark Dell Comics (I don’t do facebook myself but the first issue is well written so it’s probably worth a look).

My main reason for being here this year was to buy the three sets of vintage Topps Star Wars cards that weren’t available in this country in the 1970s... the yellow, green and orange sets. Alas, for the first time in a while, there wasn’t an abundance of dedicated trading card stalls (I think there were only two or three) and these particular cards were not something anyone had. One guy didn’t have any vintage cards at all although, I did manage to pick up the first three sets of Topps The Empire Strikes Back cards and the set they brought out for Raiders Of The Lost Ark, from the early 1980s, from another trader there. I also bought a preview mini set of the upcoming British Horror Film cards and was jammy enough to find a rare, hand signed, autograph card by Paul Stockman... he who played Konga in... erm... Konga.

However, while there were a lot of stalls at the show this year,  my one big criticism would be that there wasn’t nearly enough ‘old stuff’ for people like me on the stalls... mostly newly produced merchandise and, for the most part, a lot of the different stalls were interchangeable with a fair few specific types selling the same things as each other. Now, one of my stallholder friends had warned me that almost all the regular stall holders, bar two, from the Westminster and Camden Fairs, had flatly refused to attend this year because of the absolute disaster of the previous two years and... yeah... this really did show. I wanted to get some pre-Ecceleston Doctor Who DVDs and... really? Nobody was selling them here this year? That was somewhat unexpected.

The other thing I noticed, but I think this is purely because it was a Friday, rather than the Saturday and Sunday shows, was the small amount of cosplayers at this year’s event. Now there were some but I didn’t see battalions of Star Wars stormtroopers or Mega City lawmen that I usually see at these things. Nor did I see an abundance of Doctor Who cosplayers which was a big surprise. There wasn’t a fez in sight. I expect they were all there for the Saturday and Sunday shows, though, and if that’s the trade off for coming on a Friday... I think I’ll stick with the Friday show, thanks.

That being said, there were some wonderful cosplayers there and I am kicking myself for not asking the lady dressed up as Rey from The Force Awakens for a photo. The most unusual cosplay I’d seen in a while was the two ladies dressed as the twin girls from Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining... which was cool. Also saw a couple of people dressed as the Victorian Cybershades from the 2008 Doctor Who Christmas Special, The Other Doctor. So stuff like this was nice to see. However, I did see an abundance of ‘professional’ cosplayers wandering the halls with assistants holding a hat out. They were charging people money to take shots with them and, I dunno, this seems to be a little counter to what the spirit of cosplay is about but, hey, it’s up to them what they do. Free enterprise and all that.

My one negative experience this year was booking the tickets and that’s the one thing I can positively say was the fault of the organisers. I had to book for myself and two friends and the online ticket booking is on a timer. Unfortunately, it also wanted to know all the details (address, email, date of birth and such like) of everyone attending and, let me tell you, when you’re on a 15 minute timer... that’s not long enough. I had to try this twice and I only just beat it by about three seconds. So booking tickets wasn’t the most positive or practical experience in the world, it has to be said.

Even so, despite the lack of DVD and card stalls and the ticket buying woes, I have to say that this year’s London Film and Comic Con, for me and my two friends @cultofthecinema and Doctor Rob, was a resounding success and, though maybe a shadow of its former self in terms of ease of use and range of goods on display, a much better experience than it has been over the past few years. Lets hope Showmasters continue to learn and do good things in this arena and maybe they’ll win back some of their old stallholders, with any luck.

London Film and Comic Con 2015

Con Voyage

London Film and Comic Con 2015
Saturday 18th July - Olympia

This year’s London Film and Comic Con was a more successful one than last years abominable experience (read my review here) but there was still a feel that the organisers maybe didn’t learn enough from the previous years and haven’t been paying attention to the obvious problem that has grown around this show.

However, like I said, overall it was a lot more improved than last year’s shenanigans and, though I missed seeing the various stormtroopers and Mega City law enforcement officers parading the queue (which was mostly all barriered up and stopped you from reserving a place in the queue for your late arriving friends, for example), it was a heck of a lot better than spending the whole day waiting in a line, only to be told you wouldn’t be able to get in after all.

That being said, my biggest complaint was the decision that Showmasters, the organisers of the event, made to not sell tickets “on the door” this year. Which I can kinda understand as it was a technically smaller venue and after last years numbers... I guess that’s one solution to the overcrowding problem. However, it’s a double edged sword. I was alright because, after last year, I decided to buy a ticket in April. However, one of my friends went to buy a ticket, after I’d advised him to, only to find they were all sold out and that he couldn’t queue on the door. The thing is... I’ve been going to this event (and a lot more of this kind of event by other organisers) for as long as it’s been going... they’re now in their tenth year. It’s only last year that I started looking on the website... just would always turn up word of mouth and get in no problem. Last year the issue with the swelling numbers at the show I had been talking about for so long bit me, and many others, in the backside. However, just because I look on the website now... many people don’t.  A lot of people will just turn up to an event, possibly with kids in tow, to just buy tickets on the door. Blocking ticket sales is not the best alternative but... hey ho... from what I understand from the Showmasters forums (read them before they’re censored or taken down like last year’s threads) it was as easy to get in without a ticket as it was with. So that’s a bit strange.

I got there at 7.30am for a 9am opening. I wanted to get there earlier but the first train out of my snoozy town of Enfield was not until the late time of 6.22am... so it was pretty much the earliest I could be there. As such, there were maybe 400 - 500 people ahead of me in the queue. It was a queue that kept moving because the organisers, who were much better equipped to deal with crowd control this year (it has to be said), kept having to expand and relocate parts of the queue because, by the time of the event. it was actually snaking around past the long edge of Kensington Olympia station and track... I’m really glad I wasn’t at that end of the queue, I can tell you. My friend turned up ten minutes after me and he was 500 or more people behind me in the line. That being said, when the doors did open at 9am (doors which weren’t visible from the side of the building I was queuing from) the people did move unbelievably quickly and I was in within ten minutes.

The day started out well with a lot of friendly cosplayers (such as the stormtroopers I’d missed seeing outside) who were only too happy to pose for photos when I asked them but, as the day wore on, the crowds really did start making it almost impossible to move around. One of the stall holders who orders stuff in for me told me that various of my favourite stalls had got to the point after last year where they just refused to come anymore. Apparently, a lot of the people there to see the celebrity guests or wear costumes are less than profitable customers when it comes to buying goods from various stalls and, I have to say, the uniqueness of the stalls at this particular event is the only thing that keeps me coming back. I did notice, this year, that while their was still a unique range of interesting knick knacks for sale, a lot of the stalls could have passed for each other and a lot of the kinds of things I was looking for just weren’t there. How many stalls selling Star Wars Lego minifigures can there be? I actually left the halls with a lot of the hard earned stash of cash I’d been saving up for the event still in my wallet.

At the end of the day I guess I can’t complain about that but... would have been nice to see a wider range of things there, like some of the previous years, and I would have liked a little more product knowledge from some of the stall holders, to be honest. Both me and my friend @cultofthecinema asked various people questions and it was clear that a few of the stallholders either didn’t know their stock, took their customers for fools who didn’t know their business as well as they did (one comic stall-holder really showed his ignorance on the storage of comics while implying that he actually knew what he was talking about) or just obviously made up outrageous prices on the spot for some of their “treasures”... while trying to gauge what you would be willing to pay for an item based on the perceived enthusiasm for one of their products. This coupled with outrageous prices double or triple the rate of what you would pay on Amazon for stock in better condition than that brought to the show made me back off a bit from some of my purchasing options, it has to be said. It’s no good, for example, charging £12 for a new DVD which is easy to get brand new, for a fiver, online. Similarly, a book which is always available in shops and on Amazon brand new in the same edition for £5 should surely not be marked up as £25?

Anyway, it was an experience in itself though, not always the most positive one it has often been in years gone by. This event really has outgrown itself now. Much appreciation to Showmasters for building an extra temporary staircase to get people from level to level... this had queues going up and down it all day and made it easier for the rest of us to just use the side staircases, which were mostly “people free” and easily assailable in less than a minute. I do believe that the organisers should reconsider selling tickets on the door while going to a much larger venue like the O2. Also, integrating the trade, cosplay and celebrity areas so it’s all a bit more broken up and not all in sections (there was a little of this going on this year, but not enough) would, I think, help to keep the people flow much more manageable. Just a thought... I doubt anyone’s going to read this and factor any of those suggestions in. As for me... I think, like a fair few people I know or talk to on twitter, that I’ve maybe had enough of this show for now if the crowd sizes aren’t controlled a little better and in a more user friendly manner. There’s not much there now at the show that I can’t pick up online or from other places and I think I may give next year’s show a miss and wait and hear if it improves substantially.

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.