This weekend was the Memorabilia show in Birmingham. A two-day general signing event primarily focusing on British television and old movies with a few glamour models and sports stars (footballers mostly) thrown in.
I attended on the Saturday with my parents with the sole intention to meet ‘the knights of Camelot’, three of them anyway from the BBC show ‘Merlin‘ – fantastic show by the way, if you haven’t seen it – the ones there were Rupert Young (Sir Leon), Eoin Macken (Sir Gwaine) and Alexander Vlahos (Series 5: Mordred).
Besides the knights, I hadn’t planned to meet any other guests in attendance but found myself needing to meet Hannah Spearritt (Sclub, ITV’s Primeval (the UK version, not the American spin-off)) after seeing her from afar while trying to find out where the knights were signing and where to buy the pre-paid autographs (known as ‘smileys’).
We bought our ‘smileys’, found out the knights were actually doing a free signing and headed off to their queue – which was huge! – this was around 10:00 and was told that the queue was currently closed and told to come back at 2.30, so we went to meet Hannah.
Hannah is one of the loveliest and genuine guests I’ve met, very down to Earth. She’d brought mini cupcakes she made to share with her fans 🙂 it was yummy. As well as Hannah we met two other Primeval cast members Andrew-Lee Potts (Connor) and Lucy Brown (Claudia Brown/Jenny Lewis), both also lovely.
While waiting for 2.30 to come around, we browsed the stalls. I also come to these events with the intention of buying Buffy stuff memorabilia – I guess Joss Whedon memorabilia is more accurate! – this event was no exception. I came home with a replica of Fred’s bunny from Angel, Anyanka figure, Buffy ‘making-of’, a big heavy Firefly book, a small Serenity book and a few non-Whedon items: a resign figure of Iron Man (OK, I guess that’s half Whedon as it’s an Avengers movie version 😉 ), a couple of presents (one for my sisters “stepson” and one for her boyfriend), some cupcakes from Emerald City Cupcakes and collected a commissioned album from Pheonix Copper Art – the man who makes these books is a good guy and friend of mine – highly recommend his work!
The Knights of Camelot:
We got back to the queue at 1.45 ish and it was already heaving (should have taken a photo!), mum and I knew we were in for a long wait. Just over 3 hours in fact! My convention meme from a previous entry was definitely accurate today.
We were worried when it was nearing 5 (the show closes at 5) and there were still 20 odd people in the queue in front of us but we did get to meet them and it was worth it. 🙂 The guys were again I use the adjective ‘lovely’ but they were!
We had a brief chat with them, how they were, how they’re day had been going and about the fact, mum had all 5 series’ of Merlin of DVD and that all were signed by various members of the cast but all had been signed by Tony Head (Buffy, Merlin, Doctor Who). The guys sounded genuinely impressed and interested by what mum told them and praising how lovely (there’s that word again!) Tony is.
All in all a great day even if the organisers failed to handle the knights signing very well. Staff were at times rude and letting only one person down the line to meet all 3 before the next person could. A better idea would be to have one person in then when they’d got to the next guest the next person went into the first guest and so on – they did this eventually but really it should have been that way from the start.
Regardless, it was a good event. Roll on May and Collectormania (different organiser)! 🙂