Cult TV 2000 was a moving experience - my roof moved from my hotel room to land on someone's chalet!  Not so many pics as Nexus, as my camera was damaged by the flood.

See my pics here Cult TV pics and John's pics (including the inevitable gratuitous chest shot) here www.gaspode.net ...think I'll stick to wearing only polo neck jumpers at the next con!

So What's the Story?

The weekend started badly for me as I am incident officer for my division and I had to deal with a reportable incident at one of the plants in North America before I could set off.  No incidents in the last 8 months, but when I try to take some time off…this didn’t bode well!  This also meant that I was an hour and a half late picking up Kathy from Swindon.  We made up the time on the motorway though – Kathy was very brave and pretended not to be scared by my usual foot-to-the-floor driving and late braking.

We arrived at Barton Hall at around 3:30pm and found our way to reception.  Kathy was in one of the chalets and my room was in the hall itself.  When I had packed, I had not appreciated that my room was going to be at the back of the building and on the second floor of a hotel with no lifts!  We managed to lug my things up to my room and across to Kathy’s chalet.  By then, the others had arrived and we had some help in offloading all the boxes and bags from my car into the dealers room.

After that it was time for a quick reviving drink before dinner.  The lack of a lift or porters should have warned me what to expect from dinner.  There was a big mix-up over tables, even though we had specified who we wanted to sit with.  Jenni, John and I decided to cut our losses and sat down at another table with some other people we knew.  Having never encountered a holiday camp before, I wasn’t prepared for the chaotic lack of service and inedible food.  By the time we had dessert (the coffee and mints never actually turned up) Jenni and I had determined to eat out the next day!

After dinner I caught up with some of the talks and screenings that were going on – the program was pretty packed, but unfortunately a lot of what I wanted to see clashed and I was left with large pockets of time during the day when there wasn’t much on that I wanted to take part in.  Having said that, every talk and screening or workshop I went to was very good!   I made some time to pop into the dealers’ room to look around – I was surprised at how few dealers there were compared to Nexus.  The room was in a really bad location; in an outside building with no heating.

I met up with the rest of the gang in the bar and then headed for the ballroom as the bar was about to close to join the 1989 Friday theme party.

I made it down to breakfast the next morning and then wished I hadn’t bothered.  I decided to make do with a black coffee after trying the toast and finding them completely inedible.  Later on, I braved the weather and headed for the chalet to raid the tuck box my mother had made me bring with me – don’t you just hate it when mother turns out to be right?  After the experiences of yesterday’s evening meal and breakfast, we decided to eat out.  By now it was raining hard and it was windy enough to make using an umbrella ineffectual.  We stopped off at a café in Torquay and enjoyed the now novel experience of eating real food!

Back at the Hall, it was hard to make an effort to go and see anything in one of the outside rooms, as the weather had taken a turn for the worse.  Those events that I did go and see were very good though.  There was a screening of Rough Magick, starring Paul Darrow, just before the awards ceremony.  It was horror rather than sci-fi.  I thought it was pretty good and would probably have watched it even if Paul weren’t in it.  The awards ceremony was mostly entertaining, with some good repartee from Bill Oddie and Gareth Thomas, but it went on a bit too long.  Later in the evening it was the Casino Royale theme party. I thought the layout of the casino was pretty poor – all the tables were bunched together and consequently very crowded.  I didn’t bother taking part.

The next morning the weather was deceptively calm to begin with and I took another trip down to the dealers’ room.  It was icy cold in there, so I didn’t linger, except to bring some welcome hot chocolates down to the now frozen dealers.  I didn’t really feel inclined to buy much, as I knew I would be able to order anything I particularly wanted to have directly from Diane.  She had brought the Hamlet video I was after to the con, along with the 2 Mythmakers videos that I didn’t have (thanks Diane!).  I did buy a collection of interviews and the two Blake’s 7 radio plays....will do a review of these later.

It was then time to join the Fact Files workshop.  Owing to a mix-up, Jenni and Tim weren’t sure that they were gong to be allotted any space for their presentation (which they also weren’t expecting to be exclusively on the Fact Files).  I initially went along just to add some moral support, even sacrificing a screening of Battle of the Planets in my desire to be supportive.  Once Jenni had begun going through her stuff though, I soon forgot why I had gone and was drawn into the fascinating world of producing the Fact Files.  Thanks to Jenni, I had seen some issues of it before and was very impressed by the layout and content.  Even as a non-Trekkie I found it very readable.  Jenni went through some of the issues they encountered from Paramount and how they dealt with them and showed round some samples.  This whole talk took place while Jenni was suffering from a very heavy cold, but I think that we kept her too busy with our questions to remember to cough!  I could see that the whole group found this run through very interesting and we were all surprised when we were told that our time was up.  She’ll turn me into a Trekkie yet…

That evening, I had rather rashly agreed to take part in the cabaret.  I had brought some props for the cabaret with me – a Space hopper borrowed from my niece and some guns recycled from Nexus.  There weren’t many acts taking part, which was a shame, but we had great fun doing our sketch based on The Prisoner escaping from Cult TV.

The theme party for that night was Adam Adamant Night and was very slow to get going.  A lot of people had chosen to stay in their chalets because of the atrocious weather.  We had a birthday to celebrate (Mark’s) so we braved the elements and hogged one end of the ballroom.

The effects of the storm outside were making themselves felt inside the hall from quite early on in the evening.  The ceiling on the stairwell leading up to my room was leaking and there were also smaller leaks in other parts of the ballroom.  I last went up to my room around 3:00am, but I don’t remember it leaking at the time (hard to tell though, as I was less than sober at the time…).  The party broke up around 4:00am and we packed up the left over food and drink and took it over to Pauline’s room along the corridor.  I wondered back to the ballroom at around 5:00am and was greeted by one of the Cult TV crew members.  When he had confirmed that I was the occupant of room 214, he told me that my room was flooded.

By this time, large areas of that part of the ballroom were leaking and we carefully negotiated our way up to my room.  You could hear the water now gushing down the ceiling.  Inside my room, everything was chaotic.  Several of my clothes lay swimming in my suitcase on the floor.  Everything in the room was dripping wet, including the bed and the carpet.  My laptop and camera had been removed by the Cult TV crew when they had first discovered the problem and had been taken down to the security office at reception for safekeeping.  All the clothes I had brought with me were drenched and it dawned on me then that the only dry clothes I had were those I was wearing; a sleeveless evening dress and shoes.  Because my room was so close to the ballroom, I had not bothered with a wrap or jacket.

We quickly packed up as much of my stuff as we could and took it down to the registration room that was acting as an emergency shelter for those who were affected.  There were about half a dozen people (all from Cult TV I think) camped out on various sofas and chairs.  In my usual prima donna style, I refused to even consider spending the rest of the night there and demanded that someone find me a room elsewhere.  This took the hotel management over an hour to organise (surely they knew which ones were vacant?).

In the meantime, I had rung all the local hotels and found myself a room to stay in - I am deeply grateful to my secretary, who had insisted on putting hotel and taxi numbers into my palm pilot.  Unfortunately all the taxi firms confirmed that the road to Barton Hall was blocked and would not be cleared until morning.  I went to see about my laptop and camera and, finding them both still dripping wet, decided to leave them where they were.

The hotel management eventually found me an empty chalet, but didn’t seem concerned about how I was going to get there with all my gear, wearing only an evening dress and high heels.  The Cult TV crew came to my rescue once again and, having lent me a huge fleece to wear, lugged all my luggage and me up to the chalet.  They even gave me a pre-signed copy of the Cult TV magazine, as mine was ruined in the flood.

The chalet turned out not to have been cleaned since the last occupants were there and the bathroom in particular was filthy.  I rang the hotel, but nobody picked up the phone.  So I put the fleece back on and picked my way down the slippery steps to the main building.  There were 4 people in reception hanging around chatting to each other and I went into full prima donna mode.  The result was that a receptionist was dispatched immediately to collect all the necessary equipment and to clean my chalet.  It was 6:30am by the time I finally went to bed, exhausted and very cold.

I got woken up by a phone call from my friend Emma at around 8:00am and it was too cold to go back to sleep.  By the time I had showered and blow-dried a top and trousers to wear I had missed most of the Stephen Greif and Jacqueline Pearce talk.  I then found out that the Cult TV crew and I were not the only victims of the storm.  Our roof had landed on Judith and Anne’s chalet, but luckily the structure of their ceiling held and nobody was hurt.  I think Steve Rogerson managed to take a picture of this   I think we are just going to have to do a Wizard of Oz meets Cult TV sketch at the Redemption cabaret!   Hmm, Judith/Anne as the wicked witch of the West/East, me as Dorothy, Rover (space hopper) as Toto, Steve as the Tin man, Gareth Thomas as Alex Geairns as the wizard of Oz…

That got me thinking that there’s no place like home and all that, so I set off to find out what was happening.  It turned out that there were no trains running, so all our friends who had come by train needed to be squeezed into the available car spaces.  I had travelled down with Kathy and John had come by himself, so by a bit of careful packing we were able to fit 9 of us into the 2 cars with all our luggage.  We even found space for Rover.  Our top priority was leaving the crumbling Barton Hall behind us, so we headed into Torquay for food and decision-making.

After a leisurely 2 hour lunch, where some of us ate the first real food we’d had since Friday lunchtime, we got a phone call from people who had set out earlier and had managed to make it back to civilisation.  This prompted us to have a go at getting back rather than spending another night in windswept Torquay.  I got back to my part of London at around 9:30pm after dropping people off at Swindon and Stockwell and spent the next 2 days in bed recovering from the weekend.

Despite the damp ending to the weekend, I really did have a good time and would definitely go again…as long as it was held in a proper hotel!

Just wanted to add a big "Thank You" to the Cult TV crew for rescuing me and my luggage from drowning in the storm and for putting up with my stroppy histrionics when I demanded to be re-housed!  It was the responsibility of the Barton Hall management to deal with this crisis (and they failed miserably to do this effectively), so the Cult TV crew did a brilliant job in minimising disruption to the event under those circumstances.