Before the Masque (and During): Gallifrey One Part One

I was going to write about Gallifrey One tonight, with a more general and factual perspective than my Friday night misadventure entry or my Saturday night introspection. I can't, though, because two or three hours of editing photos has left me no time to write actual words. I'll get to it, though.

All of these photos are from Friday, February 15th:

Sylvester McCoy (who played the Seventh Doctor) emerges from the TARDIS as Sophie Aldred (who played his friend Ace) rushes to follow up on Sylvester's shtick. Shaun Lyon, the emcee and public face of Gallifrey One, looks on in amusement, having just introduced Sophie.

Sylvester and Sophie put their feet up as writer-editor Gary Russell asks them a series of numbered questions. Sophie wants to know whether it's a game show.


Skipping over Opening Ceremonies, here are some shots from the Masque of Mandragora, the con's costume contest. Here is the littlest Cyberman, or Cyberboy. The premise is that like Ianto's former girlfriend in the Torchwood episode "Cyberwoman," the Cyberboy wasn't completely transformed when the Cybermen got him. The following evening, this little boy and his equally tiny sister were rolling around in the hallway as orange-suited Luke and white-hooded Leia from Star Wars.

A comedy Dalek. For some reason all my shots of the TARDIS came out skewed, and refused to be fixed by perspective and skew and arbitrary proportion-editing tools. That TARDIS also has an unfortunate tendency to come out purple in photographs. It isn't that way in the real world. Oh, and Steven Moffat says that the windows are the wrong size. (That's a running joke. Fans debated the size of the windows on the recent TARDIS props earnestly and at length, and Moffat commemorated this with a line of dialogue in his award-winning episode "Blink." But he did say it about this TARDIS as well.)

The supposedly drunk Doctor from Moffat's "The Girl in the Fireplace" sings "I Could Have Danced All Night," praises bananas and insults the audience.


Harold Saxon, the mad, murderous Prime Minister, turns his laser screwdriver on us.

Harry Saxon's deranged wife Lucy pouts prettily in her handmade satin "moll" dress.

The Seventh Doctor introduces Ace to the Second Doctor in a brief sketch, which references a Dead Ringers comedy bit about the Second Doctor's foes being "made of tin foil."


Over a decade later, fans are still upset that the Eighth Doctor claimed to be half human. How much bigger would the firestorm have been had the Eighth Doctor been female?

Another female portrayal of a male character: Captain Jack's old flame Captain John, played on tv by Buffy's James Marsters.

More tomorrow. With words, even!

Karen