fairyd123

So woke up at the crack of dawn (well 6:30!) in order to get to day one of LFCC at a reasonable time. Thankfully I had gone to bed in a strop (two people near me having parties last night) at an early hour so the early start didn't kill me. Because of work on the underground what should have been a nice easy journey on the circle or district line actually took the best part of 45 minutes via a very convoluted route. Arrived thinking that the pre-booked ticket queue wasn't really too bad...only to look around the corner and discover that it snaked half way down the building. Thankfully the queue moved very quickly and I was in not long after 9:00.

The hall itself was very strange. It was large but very weirdly set out making it pretty easy to get turned around on yourself and parts of it were so dimly lit that it was hell on the eyes. Dashed to the back and picked up a ticket for Dominic Monaghan and found out that they weren't issuing tickets for Gareth as they obviously felt he wasn't going to be busy enough. Bless!

I loved Transformers (seen it twice!) and they had a replica of Bumblebee so I had to have a picture:

10:00 a.m. the guests arrived - except for Gareth who was nowhere to be seen. This causes the crew no end of hilarity whilst the keener Gareth fans (who were already queuing) seemed quite upset. As I was waiting for

cyberamanda to arrive anyway I spoke to my friends and the organiser's right hand man who said that Gareth had finished filming Torchwood at 5:00 in the morning, had jumped straight in a car and driven down to London. Wow - that's dedication!

Went up to get Dominic's autograph which was short and sweet (even if his manager/friend/whatever was leching on me a tad which wasn't pleasant) and just before I got up there I realised Gareth had arrived - hooray! (well actually could see his cap before I saw him!)

cyberamanda then arrived and we went up to see Gareth to get our autos/photos. He greeted us with an insanely cheerful "Hello!" which suggested that the can of Redbull sat in front of him probably wasn't his first of the day. First impressions - he's much more muscled and well built than he is in the show which is weird as TV is supposed to put weight on you and his accent is a lot broader.

Look how pretty we are:

I got one of

ryuuri_chan's Ianto pictures signed as the photos on his table on offer weren't great:

He said he's seen the picture before somewhere and that he knew that John really liked them. I had printed off the new promo pic with Martha and when I put it down for him to sign he was really surprised "Where on earth did you get that?". He said that he didn't even know that it had been released and that he hadn't actually seen it and suggested that maybe they could show him before people came up to him with the picture to sign! We said that we were really pleased that he had come this weekend as we had been at Bad Wolf and had been really sad to miss him. He said that he was very sad that he couldn't make it and that he was stuck instead on the M5 (which yeah sweetie - still not entirely buying that excuse but I'll forgive you) He also said that he had already agreed to do the next Bad Wolf.

cyberamanda asked whether he knew yet what he could say about the new series and he said that he didn't know what he could say so he wasn't going to say very much. He said that he had a lot more screen time in series 2. I asked him whether the team has bonded more in series 2 and he said that they had definitely bonded and were much more of a team in the second series. We asked whether there were going to be more Owen and Ianto scenes and he said that there were and that he loved working with Burn and that he was a fantastic actor.

cyberamanda joked that we'd been there a few minutes and hadn't even asked him about Jack/Ianto yet and we asked him whether he thought it was strange that all the girls liked that relationship so much. He said no and that he said that if you took sex out of the equation he felt that women very much related to either Jack or Ianto but especially Ianto as he'd been in the role of caregiver with Lisa and was the one who looked after everyone.

I asked him about how the Jack/Ianto relationship had gone from Ianto wanting to kill Jack to being with him and asked whether he had created his own backstory for how that happened. He used a captor/captive analogy and said that when everything had been taken away from Ianto when Lisa died it was natural for him to turn his affection, his focus and his love onto the one person who had taken everything away from him - Jack. That when everything had been stripped away from him he focused on the one thing that was left - Torchwood and Torchwood is Jack. I pointed out that that seemed like a pretty miserable basis for a relationship and he replied that when the second series starts we'd see that the love, respect and hero worship that Ianto has for Jack has always been there and has grown.

At this point bless him he tried to move us on as the people behind us had been waiting as he pointed out "ages!". So we got the rest of

cyberamanda's pictures signed (she tried to show him the rest of the artwork but I think he was conscious of the other people waiting and said that John had said he was going to bring a bunch of them onto the set to show people) and our photos and

cyberamanda got one final question in asking whether he was in a relationship with someone at the beginning of the series - which he wouldn't answer.

We then wandered around for a bit before meeting Adrienne and took her up to see Gareth. He was looking pretty exhausted at this point and my attempt to ask him about horror movies was met with a tired if polite assertion that he couldn't pick a favourite. So Adrienne got her photo and we left Gareth to get his lunch.

My feet were kinda killing me at this point so I went to see Robert Rankin who I adore (and who rather shattered my illusions of authors being rich and prosperous by saying that if he didn't know Jason (the organiser) who had given him the table he wouldn't have been able to have afforded it!) and bought his new hardbook and the paperback version of The Toyminator for £20 which I think was slightly dearer than it would have been in the shops but he did sign both of those and two paperbacks for me.

Also bought some Doctor Who goodies - including the new playing cards which are really nice - for those who care about such things the set relating to the first series is especially nice and features Captain Jack on at least 7 cards but he isn't heavily featured in the third series set.

At which point I left - feet killing me - ready to prepare for tomorrow which looks set to be even busier!