Two weeks ago today I went to United Fan Con out in Springfield, not only the first time I had been to this convention but my first attendance at any convention that was primarily focused on tv and movie people rather than sf writers and artists. My expectations weren't that high, but I couldn't pass up the chance to see not one or two but three Doctor Who people at once. Considering I've been watching the show for over 20 years, not once had I ever seen any of the performers in person, and they're starting to drop off, so it was now or never.



This convention has been around for awhile and seems to have the hang of how the whole thing works down pretty well, between a combination of a byzantine pricing structure that allows you increasing levels of access to the "stars" the more you pay, and a long list of dos and don'ts (mostly don'ts) that you can't believe need to be spelled out but obviously are based on past experience. Since I've never been to one of these before, I can't compare it to ones that are more commercially run (like that Expo thing that was in Boston for the last couple of years) but the general consensus among people there (and most of the people there obviously go to these things a lot) was that United Fan Con's set up was better organized. For $25 bucks I could show up for the day and see a bunch of people, most of whom I'd never heard of. But you could pay as much as $300 for the entire weekend including a dinner and cabaret and preferential seating and guaranteed autographs of everybody. They mentioned in the program that this year was an experiment in headlining a non-Trek guest, as interest in Trek people seemed to be waning in the last few years, and it seemed to have worked.



At 10 am people were still waking up, and I was just there for the day, not the whole weekend, so I figured I might as well see everybody I could, even if I didn't really know much about the rest of them. Pretty much all of the guests had done these things before and knew the drill and what to expect, with varying levels of success in keeping the audience entertained. The first two guys were Steve Austin, who had a recurring part on Babylon 5, and Scott Schwartz, who was primarily a stuntman and former pro wrestler.







Austin apparently has a standup comedy gig, so his halfhour was devoted as much to that as to answering questions. Since it was so "early", there weren't that many people in the room, but he managed to keep things going. Schwartz resorted to just pointing people and saying "ask me a question", to which one guy responded "Who are you?"







Things got going in earnest whe the Who folks came on. While it was nice to have them all on stage at once because they could play off one another and didn't need to rely so much questions, it wouldn't have been a bad thing to get to see at least Davison or Katy again later by themselves. Matthew Waterhouse, as it turns out, has lived among us in Connecticut for the last five years (no one thought to ask why), and has started being a little more active in things Who-related, having done some DVD commentaries and such. He was by no means an apologist for the show or his time on it, and is probably somewhat baffled by the continued interest in it after all these years.







Katy Manning was hilarious, and sporting an eyepatch, not as a homage to "Inferno" but because of contact problems while in transit from the UK. She comes across as very expansive, constantly "dahling" everyone, jumping up and acting things out, much more like her new Iris Wildthyme character than like Jo Grant. Peter Davison was equally funny, answered a lot of questions about his other series appearances outside DW, and they both were quite gracious in answering questions that I'm sure they'd already answered a million times (what's your favorite story, etc.). One interesting answer from Davison was in response to the question of which was his favorite Big Finish audio that he'd participated in, and he admitted that because most of those are done in only a day or two, he didn't remember them well enough to be able to choose one. Katy of course took umbrage and said, "what about the one with me in it, dahling?" They could've gone on for hours, and I would've stayed for it all.







It was lunchtime already, but next on the bill were two Trek guests, Gary Graham, who's been popping up on Enterprise recently as the Vulcan, Sorok I think his name is, and Alan Ruck, whose only Trek connection is as a captain in the Star Trek Generations movie. These guys were happy to answer questions, but not surprisingly did not possess a deep knowledge of the show. Somebody asked Graham about whether he'd like his character to appear the next time Tupal was in whatever the Vulcan word is for that thing they go through, and Graham had no idea what he was talking about ("I'm paid to hit my marks and say my lines"). Someone finally shouted out "Sex!", but then they thought it was just somebody yelling that out for no reason, and played off that for a few minutes before it was explained to them what that whole Vulcan word thing meant. There was much enlightenment, but that didn't stop either of them or someone in the audience from yelling out "Sex!" again at any point that the conversation lagged or a non sequitur seemed called for.







After lunch and a trip through the dealers room, I sat in on part of Mercedes McNab's session, and as a fairly young actress you have to give her credit for wanting to do these kinds of shows and getting this close to her public, some of the questions were badly phrased ("why was the Fantastic Four movie such a dud?") but none were inappropriate. I guess I've probably seen her on Buffy, but couldn't picture it, and I don't watch Angel, but after seeing her maybe I should.







The headline guy this year was Michael Shanks, one of the stars of Stargate. I confess to have never watched an episode of Stargate prior to this, so I knew nothing about him or the show. In the last couple of weeks I've watched a few episodes and I have to say its pretty good, some fairly well-scripted plotting, a lot of accumulated backstory to sink your teeth into, and some good chemistry amongst the main characters. Shanks was entertaining, told some good stories, none of which I can think of offhand, said he enjoyed giving Richard Dean Anderson grief about the hairstyle he had in MacGyver.



More interesting to me was a panel about the future of Doctor Who, which started out being moderated by a couple of fans who were just regurgitating what they'd read on gallifreyone.com, but fortunately the discussion was soon taken over by some softspoken middle aged anemic-looking English guy who turned out to be Andrew Beech, uberfan, conrunner of Pantopticon, one of the big UK DW conventions, and now cardcarrying employee of BBC Worldwide. He set the record straight that there's absolutely no truth to any rumor about any particulars regarding the new show because the people who are going to make it haven't met each other yet. Who pandemonium has set in throughout Britain, apparently, as a result of the news, both within fandom and in the general public. The weekly Doctor Who pub nights had to be temporarily suspended because so many people started showing up to pitch ideas for scripts and such. Russell Davies had to get an unlisted e-mail address, etc., etc. He was flying back to Britain the next day to help organize some sort of Doctor Who reception for BBC Worldwide that was taking place at the houses of parliament.



The new show can't possibly live up to its advance billing (this is me talking now), but I think there would be general agreement that if they can't make a success of it this time around, it won't be for lack of trying, and maybe that should be the end of it. That was it for me for the day (wasn't much going on after that except the banquet and showing some movies), but it was well worth it.