After a crazy amazing week it was finally time for the real reason we were in Wales – the SFX Weekender. This was a 2 day event where everything was held on site at a holiday camp (this year Pontins at Prestatyn) which was run by the people behind SFX Magazine. I’d won four tickets via a Cineworld competition and you’d think with such a great team behind it you’d get a really well organised event but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. In fact it was one of the worst events I’ve been to (including expo) for organisation. That’s not to say that I didn’t have a good time, some things were really great but for me, the negatives outweighed the bad.
Luckily we arrived at a perfect time to check in as there was no queue and we headed straight to our chalet/apartment thing. To start with the accommodation was really poor. For a holiday camp that was marketing to people they’d recently been upgraded, the standard of our “gold” chalet was not good. I’m now so very glad that we were forced to upgrade to this from “silver” as by the sounds of it those were not great and didn’t even have a shower! There were twin beds in the bedroom and a leather sofa bed (which was the nicest piece of furniture in the place!) all of which were very uncomfortable (I would know, I think I took a turn of sleeping in them all!) and not suitable for a couple (where exactly are mum and dad supposed to sleep on the family holiday?!).
Anyway, one good thing about the event was that everything was in the same building so you didn’t have to leave one area to go to the next and it meant the majority of the weekend I had no idea what kind of weather was going on outside. This did have the bizarre knock on effect of having the signing area in the cafe and people having to walk through the main stage to get to pretty much any other part of the building but this wasn’t a huge issue. The dealers area was pretty small and I didn’t find anything to tempt me to go over my alloted budget (the fear of being over my weight limit like I was close to on the way down also helped this!)
The event began with an opening ceremony which included the introduction of the Area 51 Dance Troup (which turned out to be one of the best parts of the weekend bizarrely enough) who were there to entertain us for the duration and a sneak peek at those who helped put together the weekend. After this there really wasn’t a lot to do…
The schedule itself seemed to be pretty well thought out and except for the minor weirdness of the standard signing pass holders slot being before the VIP for one of the autograph sessions could have worked well. What they weren’t prepared for was guests getting delayed due to trains and others having to cancel completely at the last-minute. This unfortunately was not communicated well with items on the board scribbled out and arrows pointing to where slots had been moved to. I believe there was also announcements made from the main stage as well but you had to be in the right place at the right time to hear them and even by the end of Saturday there was still nowhere I could find that confirmed that Anthony Stewart Head was no longer attending.
The quiz which I was really looking forward to attending when I first heard about it was billed to be 3 hours long which in my opinion was just WAY to long to hold my attention so instead we decided to head to the Imaginarium show which was full of weird and wonderful acts including a contortionist, a female magician and of course more half-naked dancing-girls. (It’s a good thing I find women hot as the “entertainment” was most definitely focused on the male geeks in attendance!)
It was then time for the Friday night party when the legendary Pat Sharp took to the decks. I had a few drinks (probably more than I should have but not enough to get drink) did a little dancing and then decided to call it a night until we heard that the gorgeous Eve Myles was in the screening room and very drunk! (As we discovered the next day she was being served pints of wine!)
Thankfully the show doesn’t really start very early as I had one of the worst nights sleep of my life on the Friday and headed to the Eve Myles talk that was starting at 11am with a bit of a grump on. Eve makes everything better though as she is such a lovely, lovely woman. (I’ve since had a dream where she told a con friend that she thought I was scary and to please keep me away from her at all future events but I really hope that this is not the case!!) She told us about Barrowman’s little Barrowman, the pints of wine she was being served, how much she loves working on Torchwood and her upcoming role in Zach Braff’s new play All New People and just genuinely put a smile on my face.
It didn’t last long however as pretty much the rest of the Saturday was spent queuing for autographs. I’d bought a signing pass for £20 which means you can get one autograph from each guest attending at no additional cost but you do have to queue for them. Both Hollie’s from Red Dwarf were there and thankfully there was just the one queue for the two of them. Brian Blessed seemed to have three seperate queues and it took some people around 4 hours(!) to actually obtain their autograph so I decided to avoid that headache! But I couldn’t resist the chance to speak to Eve again which was fab.
I was excited about the True Blood screening before I realised that I’d already seen the episodes in question and I’d been introduced to Shaun of the Dead at new year by Matt and Liz so we had another fairly empty early evening ahead of us. We went for dinner with some of Matt’s friends who run the Corsham Sci-Fi Event which lasted a little longer than we expected and so missed the SFX Sci-Fi Awards and Cosplay Competition but it was worth it for the lovely food and company (the food choice in Pontins was horrendous and that is all I will say on the matter) In the end we still made it to the screening room in time to catch the singalong screening of the Buffy episode “Once more with feeling” (despite getting back to the room to find out we had no electricity left in the meter!)
Then it was time to head back to change for the masquerade ball where Craig Charles would be our DJ of choice. Unfortunately Craig was late due to the train situation I believe and the party never really got into full swing for me. We decided fairly early on to call it a night and try to get some sleep as I was supposed to be flying home the next day (I never did in the end as my flight got cancelled). I did like the fact that this event was on a Friday/Saturday as it meant you had the Sunday to recover/travel and you could be back at work on the Monday morning but I would only do this event again if they got some seriously amazing guest that I just HAD to meet. I think it’s more an event for people who like to get drunk and party rather than people who are interested in meeting guests and hearing talks. If I did SFX again, I’d also stay in the nearby Beach Hotel which when I looked it up had comparable prices to what we paid for the chalet.
)
) but it was exceptionally beautiful. On the way there we spotted a little ruin of a castle and decided to go back for a peek before heading on our way. It was a classic example of how not to build a castle being so close to the river that it got flooded and the layout being practically impossible to figure out but it was lovely all the same.
And then, alas, it was time to leave but not before making my donation to the renovations of the Central Hall by making Dippy roar!
