(PS. If you do just want to look at pretty photos instead of reading this rather convoluted report – they’re right here.)

T1 was Starfury’s first *deep breath* Chuck/Sarah Connor/Dollhouse/Dr. Horrible convention, held at the Hilton Metropole Hotel in Birmingham. The guests were Zachary Levi, Adam Baldwin, Summer Glau, Dichen Lachman, Miracle Laurie, Felicia Day, Tom Lenk, Jonathan Woodward, Mark Sheppard, Georges Jeanty and Dominic Keating. Well Tom and Dichen were billed as ’suprise’ guests, but Tom was the only real surprise because there were many whisperings before the convention part of the convention began about Dichen being there. I believe Mark was meant to be a surprise, but he’s become a staple at Starfury conventions. That and he announced it on his Facebook. After Jonathan outted him on his Facebook status for being a guest too.

Being a Gold Ticket holder I had a few perks, one of them being the Meet and Greet on the Friday night. That’s where you sit around a lovely big table with your friends and the guests come over and sit with you. I’ll be honest, the last few M&G’s I’ve been to I’ve been a bit disappointed. Just something with them lacked that little something extra. Though my reservations were firmly kicked in the arse with this M&G!

The order of the guests is probably not the order they came in, or in any specific order, just the order in which my brain chooses to remember the events in.

Zachary Levi aka Chuck Bartowski aka a very, VERY awesome guest. I was hoping Zachary would be one of those charming, very likeable and brilliant guests. I wasn’t disappointed. He came to our table, sat with us, ate our Jaffa Cakes (To which he added that maybe peanut butter should be added to the mix – can’t say I agree!) and talked about Chuck, TV of the present, future and hope for a third season. He’s very passionate about Chuck and while hopeful for a third season he’d clearly be bummed if there wasn’t. He did tease us that season 3 would be epic, if we ever got it. But didn’t let slip any secrets about it!

Adam Baldwin was a surprise. Well I say that now only because the last time he was at a con he wasn’t the happiest of chaps for whatever reason. Though this time he was back to being his chipper self, making a mess on the table with Jaffa Cakes. After being dubious about them, he single handedly devoured about 3 in quick succession. Again we talked a bit about Chuck and a third season. Can’t remember much else. Aside from introducing ourselves individually to him as requested. Though I think Adam was just being polite when he said he recognised some of us. Well maybe he did! I live in quite hope that he did genuinely recognise us who’d seen him before. Adam did tell us one thing about Zach we wished we knew before – he loves Avenue Q and will sing all the songs! If only we’d seen Zachary after Adam, with Avenue Q being one of our favourite musicals we were kicking ourselves for not having a serenade of Zachary singing ‘Everyone’s a little bit Racist’!

Tom Lenk we may have made a mistake with. The first thing we mentioned to him was his very brief role in How I Met Your Mother! Mistake – he wasn’t happy with his role in that! Woops! Never mind.

Felicia Day was high on sugar I believe. She stumbled onto the chair, and as she did so a piece of fudge fell from the side of her mouth. I think she was a little embarassed to say the least. Still we had a bit of a geek out, I’m sure, about something or another. Words were exchanged, but my memory’s failing me now.

Dominic Keating was … well, I think the less I say about him the better for me and anyone reading this. He wasn’t my favourite guest of the weekend. Or any convention. Not my taste maybe.

Miracle Laurie was a gem though. So bubbly and so excited about being there! As was Dichen Lachman. Both were eager to talk about Dollhouse. Dichen in particular seemed genuinely interested in how we felt about Dollhouse and we were quite honest in what we thought. Well short of telling her it’s crap. We were the picture of polite!

Jonathan Woodward was just himself and I wouldn’t want him there any other way. His usual happy maybe slightly tipsy self. He told us what he’s currently up to. He took a break from acting to try the real world. Went back to school to, I think, study something with the word politics in it. Possibly. And he’s also turning into a humanitarian and supporting a charity in Haiti for children. He’s meant to be sending details to Rach and I for Jonathan-Woodward.com and once I get the details here I’m sure I’ll post some details here. As usual he guzzumped our Jaffa cakes, and I believe her performed a pre-Sunday Communion especially for us, which was nice!

Who am I missing? Oh Summer! Bless her little cotton socks, she had no voice! Sure we had a taster of how bad her voice was on stage during the opening ceremony, but she really was fighting a losing battle with it later on that night. It was shot! But bless her she continued on with minor hope for another season of Sarah Connor.

And then there was the BIG wait for the almight Mark Sheppard. You really can’t do sarcasm here, can you? No, in all honesty, he’s a great guest because he loves to talk. But it’s his love of talking and having people listen that tends to drag the M&G a bit because he takes forever to get around! Though when he finally came and sat with us, stole our food and etc I did manage to talk to him a tiny bit about Middle Man, in the vain hope of there being something SDCC related. And there still could be. He was trying to help us understand Caprica and him being appointed the president in the final episode of Battlestar.

All in all it was a fantastic M&G and like I said earlier, one of the best, if not THE best I’ve been to out of all the cons I’ve been to.

(This looks like it’s going to be a long report, but don’t worry, they’ll be more pretty photos for you to look at if you want to take the scenic route.)

Saturday’s a bit of a haze for me. I do remember the morning consisted of constantly running into and out of the hall where the talks were going on due to having photos taken. Thankfully I did manage to see a little bit of all of the talks.

The first talk of the day was Jonathan Woodward and Dominic Keating. They definitely complimented each other! Jonathan talked a bit more about his charity work and what he’s been up to. I’m pretty sure Dominic made some comments about something or another to do with Buffy. But he got a few boos out of the audience for whatever he said. Unfortunately I don’t think there were many Star Trek Enterprise fans in the hall, so most of the topic was very off topic and just general laughter inducing stuff.

Next talk up was a Buffy themed talk – Tom Lenk, Felicia Day and Georges Jeanty. Unfortunately I think I missed most of this talk due to getting some photos done! I did however get some photos. Enjoy those:

Next up – Dollhouse talk with Mark Sheppard, Dichen Lachman and Miracle Laurie. Miracle and Dichen are just adorable. This is their first UK ‘proper’ convention but they didn’t seem phased and seemed to be really enjoying themselves. Sidenote – Dichen has an uncanny ability to walk around on the highest heels I have seen and yet still be so graceful.

Miracle talked about her most nerve racking scene on Dollhouse – the love scene with Tahmoh aka Paul Ballard and that being one of the first scenes she had to do onset. Dichen was so enthusiastic and really seemed to genuinely want to know what we were thinking about Dollhouse which was really refreshing.

Though the highlight of said talk has to be Uke Box Heroes. Who? Uke Box Heroes (see their Myspace page) is the ukelele band fronted by Miracle Laurie and Christopher May (Miracle’s fiancee who actually appeared in Buffy season 6 episode, Life Serial – he was the candle dude!). They play their ukeleles and sing covers of songs. Both were more than happy to play for us and it really made this part of the convention a little different! They were both fantastic.

The one talk I was desperate to see all of I missed a little bit of – Zachary Levi and Adam Baldwin. Thankfully I don’t think I missed too much due to photos. They make a great onstage duo. Apparently I missed a burping incident with Zachary. He’s a charmer!

Best moment from this talk? Someone brought up musicals, Avenue Q was mentioned which caused me, Hilary and Rach to yell out ‘SING!’. And it worked! Zachary sung a song from Avenue Q and we sort of told him that he’d make a good Princeton. He would! Adam wanted to be Gary Coleman. Cue much laughter. Zachary can definitely do a live action version of Avenue Q – I’ll be there waiting to see it.

The final talk of the day was Summer Glau. Bless her she was all on her own and with barely a voice to speak with! That didn’t stop her having the attention of pretty much all the attendees. Lots of talk about Sarah Connor and the possible/inevitable cancelation.

Then came the autographs, which consists of standing in a queue for a fairly long time and then dropping pretty much everything as you get your things out you want signed. Firstly we were off to see the ‘major’ cast of people to get things signed. This was Adam, Summer, Zachary, Dichen and Miracle. We challenged Adam and Zachary to open the Region 2 Chuck season 1 DVD without breaking it. Adam struggled but eventually opened it without breaking. Zachary was faster though. Seriously, anyone else got this set and were they equally as perplexed as to how to open the fricking thing?!

We talked to Zachary about something he brought up in the talk – a Chuck sponsored march to a nearby Subway. He sounded like he was really up for it and it just needed organising. At this point we were very excited at this prospect, though we had no idea how big it would actually be.

Dichen and Miracle were brilliant as ever. Summer was lovely, still struggling with her throat. And special shout out to Christopher May – that man never broke his smile!

With the fancy gold pass I was able to get all my autographs done for the day! I got around to seeing Felicia, Georges, Mark, Tom and Jonathan. Tom did not approve of Andrew’s nose in the Buffy comics and remarked at how studly Andrew had gotten.

Finally the last big event for the day was the fancy dress party. You might think me rude to say this, but mostly I’m there to laugh. Well there are people who put a heck of a lot of effort into their costumes, but some who don’t. This time around there were a lot of Terminators in various forms of being blown to bits. A lot. There were some impressive costumes and some of the usual weirdness. Still it’s a part of the convention I like to see, mostly for the guests expressions. Strangely no Buy More employees. Stil I guess that’s a relatively easy costume to do.

Saturday ended and then Sunday rolled in. I like Sundays. They’re relaxed. Just sit in the main hall and take everything in, with little else to do.

Sunday mornings + Starfury convention + Jonathan Woodward also brings another Sunday morning routine. Some people find it offensive. Well the minority do, but I kinda love it. Jonathan holds Communion. Though it’s not your regular Communion. It consists of whiskey, biscuits/Jaffa cakes and being blessed by said whiskey. Though he’d upped the ante this time around. He invented Whiskey-Cam! Basically a camera attached to the whiskey bottle, so with every swig any attendee took, their face was shown on the big screen. Pleasant! Foolish as I was I did go up. I haven’t done Communion in a while and my plan to hide my face from the camera failed.

Next up another Dollhouse themed talk with Dichen, Miracle and Felicia. Felicia didn’t let on anything about her role in Dollhouse. Sadly. Though again we had a musical highlight with these girls. We didn’t just get the Uke Box Heroes – we also got Miracle doing some Polynesian dancing, with Felicia and Dichen trying to follow along in the background with Christopher playing the ukelele and singing.

Who doesn’t love that!?

Then the most exciting thing of the day. Remember earlier I was talking about us urging Zachary on to do a march to Subway in aid of Chuck? Well at 2pm instead of a Chuck talk with Zachary, Zachary came to the head of the hall and asked how many of us were going to Subway with him. I think he was a little surprised to see that more or less everyone was up for it. He urged us all to get our cameras out to take photos and video. Well he rather foolishly asked if we all had our cameras. Cue flashes of many camera flashes!

Off we went to the nearby Subway in the Birmingham NEC. I don’t know how many, but a good few hundred! To see some great crowd shots and a whole heap of images check out the flickr group I set up to collect photos from this mini-event.

Somehow I ended up being near the front of the line. My favourite bit from this, well one of. Zachary saying as he entered the queue area of the small Subway, ‘Hi. These are 600 of my friends and we’re here to buy some sandwiches!’

To which there was a massive cheer and Zachary bought the first of the Subway sandwiches for Chuck. Not long after the prepped and started preparing Subways for the attendees. He was REALLY into it and seemed to be really enjoying himself. There are countless videos of this on YouTube. One of them was done by the organiser, but loads of fan done ones on everything from mobile phones to fancy cameras. It really was brilliant. And the best thing about it? The weather held up for it!

Sadly this meant we didn’t have a second talk with Zachary which was a shame, but in the larger scheme of things, this was still a most awesome thing to have happened.

The final talk of the day was billed as a ‘Firefly’ talk but, as much as I love Firefly it was nice to have very little Firefly involved here. The guests in the final talk were Summer, Mark and Adam. I think there were some weird questions thrown around during this talk. For some reason I remember that, but can’t remember what was actually said. I do remember Mark and Adam having a ‘nice’ conversation about guns or something along those lines. Cue uncomfortable silence!

With more or less everything ‘con’ related finished there was some relaxing before the closing ceremony where Jonathan drew the winners of his raffle on behalf of the charity work he was doing and all the guests said their goodbyes. We were also lucky enough to see a rought cut of the ‘official’ Subway march video. Zachary seemed pretty happy with it!

As it may sound I had an awesome time. I’ve not done hundreds of cons – not yet. I’ve done a fair few and I’ve loved them all for different reasons. This one almost tops the list in terms of guests and fun I had with my friends. So much so I’ve booked my ticket for next year’s T2. Oh yes I most certainly have. See you next year!

Oh and if you want to see all the photos in their fullest I have them up on my flickr page. They’re not up for the taking but if you do want to ‘borrow’ any please let me know first!

» Joss Whedon Speaks Candidly About Dollhouse and has a Message for Haters
Sci Fi Wire has a video interview with Joss, which I sadly can’t watch in this country, but there’s an edited transcript on the page too for anyone else outside of Sci Fi Wire’s zone. They’re up to the 10th episode right now and then they have the last three which are being written by Jane Espenson, Tim Minear and Joss himself. Joss also addresses some of the speculation concerning Dollhouse’s shelf life. Speculation I share!

» Joss Whedon is now Working with Tom Cruise. Horrors? Yes!
Another snippet of an interview Sci Fi Wire had with Joss about his movie, Cabin in the Woods, he’s co-written with Drew Goddard. This article’s about his meeting with Tom Cruise, who is the head of United Artists and MGM own a big share of UA, AND MGM are the ones developing the movie. There’s nothing really core about the movie in the article, just linking Tom Cruise with Joss now.

» Huzzah! Whedon Promises There Will be More Dr. Horrible
As a fan of Dr. Horrible this puts a big grin on my face. Of course Joss is keeping quiet on what could potentially happen in more adventures with Dr. Horrible, but he’s gone back to his aged old stoic-ness and shadow puppets.

» Buffy Season 8 #24 Cover Preview
Comics Continuum have posted a preview for the cover of #24 of Buffy season 8 comics, featuring Giles and Faith, drawn by the brilliant Jo Chen and Georges Jeanty. Here’s how they describe the issue:

Faith. Giles. Let’s catch up! In a one-shot issue, Krueger fleshes out the go-to girl for dirty deeds, Faith, and her new partner, Giles. After her last thankless escapade, where she put a stop to Buffy-hunting Slayer and kindred spirit Lady Gigi, Faith decided that though she’s determined to be finished with bloodshed, she’s not ready to leave misguided Slayers (like Gigi) with nowhere to turn. Fast-forward to the present… bloodshed still abounds, and the Faith-and-Giles team is still finding out what it really means to help those chosen to slay

» Last Three Daisies in a Row?
And now for the Pushing Daisies news – according to TV Guide we could see the last three episodes of Pushing Daisies in one big marathon, as opposed to being stretched out over three weeks. As they’ve said over there, that’s a whole lot of pie, but I won’t be complaining! I’ll complain afterwards when I have two weeks without any pie.

» Battlestar Galactica: The Face of the Enemy
The most important show in television comes back to the interweb and there’s a few answers about the writer of the webisodes – Jane Espenson:

Espenson, who wrote all ten episodes of Face of the Enemy is a writer and producer on BSG. And for people who care about writing, especially screenwriting, she’s something of a demi-god.

 

Espenson broke into the business writing spec scripts for Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the early ’90s she knocked around the backwaters of TV land until Joss Whedon discovered her and gave her a writing gig on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. From there, Espenson wrote for other Whedonverse shows, including Firefly and Angel, before branching out to write for Gilmore Girls, The OC, and finally BSG. On the side, she even found time to write for comic books and The New Republic.

Read more about her on the link, and the rest of the webisodes in preparation of the new season of BSG.

» Georges Jeanty – Eleven Questions Asked
The Independent Comics Site has done an interview with Buffy season 8 comic artist, Georges Jeanty. He talks about where he started in the comics industry and what his reaction was to getting the Buffy season 8 gig:

Like most people, I didn’t believe it.

 

Really. I thought Dark Horse was yanking my chain. What a cruel trick I thought, to get me to draw your book by telling me the guy who for some is a house hold name asked for you personally. But it was true.