MCM Expo London Film and Comic Con and Memorabilia – There’s Nothing Like an Organised Event...

...And this was nothing like an organised event.

The Doc and Babydoll

Now don’t get me wrong I was really excited about London Memorabilia, to put it simply Freema Agyeman was attending!

But before the good there are a few little moans I need to vent...

One: If you have 50,000+ people turning up to an event you need to have a well organised and managed queuing system... Expo have got most of it sorted, when you buy a ticket online it’s emailed to you and you print it off, simple.

Once you get to the event you ticket is scanned and you’re sorted... Well, not quite.

Once you’ve queued up to have your ticket scanned you then get to queue again to be given a wristband, here’s a really easy tip it you have lots of people scanning tickets (I think there were about 10) then make sure you have just as many giving out wristbands, if not you end up with a bottleneck...

Once you escaped the wristband bottleneck you then get the joy of a bonus queue! You get fun job of queuing to leave the queuing hall!! For the love of all that is holy, I still can’t see the point of the bonus queue...

Not quite sure what Tim and I were doing...

Anyway, that was the queue for Expo dealt with, however Expo isn’t just one show, this year there was the bonus show of Memorabilia London. So if you’re still following I’d now got my wristband for Expo and now had to get a stamp for Memorabilia. Again it was a case of getting my ticket scanned, this time rather than loads of scanners there was one person with a mobile phone... Really guys? Really...

So, we’re now into Memorabilia. Objective 1, get autograph tickets for Freema, this brings me onto my next little grumble...

Two: If you manage to get a big guest that has never done an event before you must be prepared for quite a few people to actually want to come meet them! With Memorabilia you get a ‘Smiley’ ticket, smiley tickets are needed for all the big guests. In theory this makes sense as it stops staff needing to handle money. However, if you’re going to use this system you need more than one person selling the tickets! Sorry, guys but the excuse of ‘We didn’t expect it to be this busy...” just doesn’t cut it!

Once we’d done battle with the (not so) “smiley” queue it was time to think about photo tickets, this brings me to the third of my main moans, the photo studio.

It wouldn't be winter Expo without a Zombie

Three: This is a few niggles in one, the photo shoot tickets were tiny and very easy to lose, the more worrying thing was that when you get your  photo done you give in the whole ticket, as such you then have no proof you’d actually bought a photo... My other little groan with the photos is that some guests were at both Expo and Memorabilia (I know, I’m confused too) as a result there were some photo sessions with two queues... Third groan was that the photo session itself wasn’t overly well managed. At a Showmasters event it’s like a military operation, in, pose, smile, click, leave, done. 


With Memorabilia/Expo (whatever you want to call it...) it was a bit more freeform which, while nice as you got a bit more time with the guests, wasn’t what I expected as it made the queue drag, if you want to chat to a guest line up and get an autograph, final moan (I promise) is that there was no one really taking charge of photo collection, the pictures were just put in a big pile for anyone to look through, if I’m paying for a picture I don’t want hundreds of people finger prints all over it!!

That’s enough of me moaning and probably a good place to end this particular blog post, the next one will be more positive, I promise!!