What a superb weekend! The Dimensions series goes from strength to strength. The guest list included a whole range of people from all eras of the show, with a good number of stars from the new series, some of whom were making their convention debuts.The Friday night entertainment took the form of a music quiz, with the sublime Paul Darrow as MC. Paul is such an entertaining and charismatic speaker that I’m sure we could have had a whole weekend just of him and still enjoyed every minute.
The stage talks were generally fascinating. As well as old hands such as Peter Davison and Frazer Hines, we were treated to several rarer guests from the original series, such as Bernard Holley, David Gooderson and David Brierley Maureen O’Brien was also making her first convention appearance, 40 years after appearing in the show! Although she found the experience a little nerve wracking she did extremely well and gave two talks over the course of the weekend. This brought up an interesting point; would the new series guests still be coming to such events 40 years down the line?Paul Darrow’s solo spot was hilarious. He didn’t need an interviewer – he had the audience spellbound. He even took a turn as interviewer himself for Nicola Bryant and Mark Strickson.
The new series guests all came across very well. Martha Cope (daughter of Kenneth) and John Schwab were interviewed together and clearly had great enthusiasm for the show. Alan David and Annette Badland made a good double act too. Florence Hoath was interviewed on her own and she came across really well. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more of her on our screens in future.Caroline Morris joined Peter Davison on stage for some of his talk.
It soon became apparent that Peter didn’t actually read his Big Finish scripts very carefully and he had very little idea as to what the stories were about; he left Caroline to answer most of the questions regarding that aspect of his work.Charlie Ross and Sandy Nelson provided the Saturday night laughs and very good they were too.Big Finish were there in force too, although I missed most of their talk due to being stuck in a long autograph queue. I had the same problem right at the end and missed the closing ceremony (the queue for Annette Badland was only just going down after 5.00 p.m.).10th Planet did a superb job in organizing this event and, like last year, they offered an exclusive version of the latest Big Finish story (‘Singularity’) for sale as a strictly limited edition.
There’s lots more I could tell you but this report is already long enough. Why not join the fun next year |
