(Charles Illumination's convention guide, from the PanoptiCon '95 booklet)

The Way It Is...

So this is your first Doctor Who convention, and you don't know what to expect? Fear not, for Dominitemporal Services Limited has generously arranged for your education. Charles Illumination, a veteran of a thousand conventions (well, he's three short of attending a full half-dozen actually), presents his guide to fan gatherings

Attending a Doctor Who convention is a bit like coming home to find an elephant uni-cycling around your living room whilst singing "When I'm Cleaning Windows": unusual. I have compiled a few notes explaining some of the more common problems experienced by people trying to live and breathe Doctor Who for an entire weekend:

• Badges - I have no doubt that somewhere within this booklet there is a reminder to wear you convention badge at all times. After considerable research I can reveal that however likely it is that you will be ejected from the building for not pinning that scrappy little piece of paper to your breast, you are far more likely to be dumped unceremoniously on the hotel's door step for failing to wear clothes. I know of someone who in the excitement of attending a Doctor Who event turned up in the main hall wearing only a pair of odd socks and a smile. Embarrassed stewards had to escort him back to his hotel room. Of course, far fewer people would have witnessed the event had the person in question not been organising the convention and standing on the stage giving the opening speech at the time. I am not mentioning Andrew Beech's name at this point.
• Seats - Everyone wants a good seat at the front of the hall where they can feel Jon Pertwee's aura, or where they can try to look up the companion's skirt (be it Nicola or Frazer), or where they have some chance of hearing when the sound system packs up, which it will do at various points during the weekend. But how do you secure such a seat? Convention organisers are wise to fans who leave bags on seats to save their place and frequently close the hall so that they can search the bags for illicit drugs, bootleg videos of The Power of the Daleks or soiled Terrance Dicks paperbacks. There are two ways of keeping your front row position. Firstly you can cover the seat with some sticky substance so no one wants to sit there (although this does mean that you have to walk around with a sticky stain on the seat of your trousers for the whole weekend; this might not cause you any problems?). Secondly you can walk into the hall and start a rumour that Tom Baker is doing a signing in the dealers room: this usually clears the hall completely in under thirty seconds. This routine is unlikely to work more than twenty or thirty times at any one convention... and now that everyone has read the convention booklet, it might not work at all.
• The Bar - It is not a good idea to try to outlast the rest of the attendees at the bar. More specifically, it is not a good idea to try to outlast the audio/visual crew. Indeed, there is a medical term for this sort of behaviour: "Complete Stupidity". If you look up the word drunk in the dictionary you will find that it makes some reference to "acting like an a/v crew at a Doctor Who convention" . If you still remain to be convinced that outdrinking the a/v crew is a bad idea, consider this: the first ever Doctor Who convention was in 1977, and no one has seen a sober member of the team since.
• Autograph Queues - Autograph queues are boring. This is a great shame considering how many convention goers seem to spend a large proportion of their weekend stood in line. The most frustrating experience is to find that, having waited five hours to see Tom Baker, Jon Pertwee and Peter Davison, when you arrive at the front of the queue the organisers have rotated the panel and you are about to meet an unidentified extra from The Underwater Menace, Sylvester McCoy's mother, Nicola Bryant's orthodontist and Keff McCulloch. The easiest way to avoid this problem is to persuade the people in front of you to leave the queue. Eating chilli and garlic crisps is usually quite effective, but there is no food that will irritate the fan who hasn't removed his anorak for at least three years and is therefore immune to all smells.
• Anoraks - Doctor Who fans don't wear anoraks, they wear ski jackets. Honest.
• Stewards - Don't assume that the stewards know what is going on. If there is a change in the schedules they will be the last to be informed, indeed they probably won't have been told what was supposed to happen in the first place. They are always so ill informed that it is a miracle to me that they ever turn up at the right hotel. Don't feel embarrassed about asking a steward where the lavatories are (even if it means waking them up to do so) because this is the one question to which they are likely to know the answer. Don't ask them difficult questions like "What day of the week is it?" That's just being cruel.
• The Video Room - The video room isn't very interesting unless you actually want to watch Doctor Who. It is more usually used as a place to sleep by people who can't afford a room in the hotel. This is why most convention organisers schedule The Web Planet, The Sensorites and Four to Doomsday between the hours of 1 a.m. and 7 a.m.
• The Dealers' Room - You always expect the dealers' room to be a treasure-trove of Doctor Who merchandise that you will immediately want to buy. In actual fact you will walk around the room at least five times in each direction and still not find one new or interesting piece or merchandise for your collection. Despite this you will somehow manage to spend your salary for the next five months and have to walk around the hotel for the rest of the weekend carrying around seventy five plastic carrier bags. Sad, huh?
• Daleks - At every convention there is bound to be someone who's job it is to trundle around the event in a Dalek: it's tradition or an old charter or something. Normally the Dalek operator is a quiet accountant from the West Midlands and the wildest thing in his life is a cup of coffee. But once in the machine, he is a changed person - innuendoes fly from his modulated vocal chords and he shoves his sink plunger into places that he wouldn't normally dare mention. Pouring lager through the Dalek's ventilation slats is childish and immature. It is also a lot of fun.
• The Convention Booklet - Don't read the convention booklet. It's not as if the magazine's editor has read a word of it*. Let's face it, if he had read this article, he wouldn't have printed any of the above. And if you do by some chance read the booklet, don't believe a word of it.

Have fun.

Charles

*Editor's note: If I hadn't read it, it would still have had nearly as many spelling mistakes in it as the Evil of the Daleks Novelisation.

Back to PanoptiCon Retro