Should I Have A Cosplay Page?

Recently I’ve noticed loads of new pages popping up for cosplayers, now before I go any further I can already hear you all shouting ‘Matt, you hypocrite, you have a cosplay page yourself’, yes, yes I do, but give me a moment...

Anyway cosplay pages, I have no objection, in fact if people want to have one I’d actively encourage it, however... before you run to Facebook to set up your page stop and think for a moment, why am I setting one up?

Good ol' Facebook

Reasons to have a page:

• You want to have a public profile that anyone can see – This is why I ended up with a page, I didn’t actually set my page up, it was done by my girlfriend at the time following on from an off the cuff comment of ‘I keep getting friend requests, I should have a fan page!’. Anyway, my plan way to have a profile that I could share all my Doctor Who related things on without it taking over my profile, not all my friends have the same interests as me so I’d feel bad spamming them with one topic, plus it also meant that I could keep my private profile, well, private, I’m not interested in how many friends I have on FB, I’d rather have 10 that are my best mates than have 1,000 that I don’t know because let’s face it who really wants to look at my random photo’s from years back?

Entertainment Media Show, Day 2 – Benedick meets Benedick (aka Matt meets David Tennant!)

So with day one of EMS completed and the series finale of Doctor Who watched it was time to put my mind to day two of EMS.

Why was day two so important, well unless you’ve been living on the moon you’d know that David Tennant himself was going to be there as a guest.

Benedick

Now call me a fanboy all you like, but for me this was epic and I have to confess I was very excited! However, I also had a dilemma... What do you wear to meet someone who you class as an icon??

I’d been pondering this very question from the moment that he was attending was announced. Normally for an event I’d simply don the 10^th Doctor suit and swan about as normal, but this was different, did I really want to meet David Tennant dressed at 10? How would he react and what would he think?

I asked the very question of what to wear to my Facebook Page and they replied with Ten but I still wasn’t really feeling it. I think the fact that the world and it’s mother (classic expression!) would be there dressed as Ten also didn’t really help, when I saw him did I want to be (or not be) remembered as just another Ten?

It's All About The Hair...

Here's the how to video I did for Tennant hair...

How This All Began....

I've recently been asked how I got into the whole Doctor Who look-a-like thing, well here goes.

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away..... (insert Star Wars intro music)

Clearing the fog from my memory, we need to go back to April 2007, I think it was my birthday but the exact date is a little hazy......

It was a Saturday night and I was in London visiting some of my friends, towards the end of the evening we ended up sat in The Walnut Tree, a Weatherspoons pub located in Leytonstone High Street. Sat at a table in the middle of the pub chatting I was surprised to have a random, slightly drunk (and from memory not unattractive girl) stumble over to me and proclaim “Did you know you look like David Tennant?!?”

I think my reply was ‘That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me’. After that I didn’t give it another thought as she’d had a few.........

One of the first pictures of me as the Doctor back in 2008

Skip forward a few months to August and it happened again, this time it was at home, my house mate of the time had friends round, I’d come home wearing a (pin stripe) suit and the same comment was made.... Ok I thought to myself, perhaps there is something to this.

So based on this my hair style began to change and I developed Tennant style sideburns. From this point the comments started to come more regularly, the best ones being when people walk past and then whisper to their friends “was it me, or.....”

Around March 2008 I decided that I needed to make more of the DT resemblance and got myself a 10th Doc suit and coat (back then it cost me just over £30 off of eBay, the suit wasn’t great but the coat looked fine).

By this point I’d also got a new housemate (Michelle) who, as it happens, worked for BBC Radio Suffolk. For the 2008 Suffolk Show they were going to broadcast live from the show and have a Doctor Who display in tent. Michelle said that I should go along in my Tennant gear as it would be good fun.

On Radio Suffolk with Terry Molloy

The result, I hadn't expected. It was manic, I’d never before been photographed so many times! As part of the event Terry Molloy (Davros, Classic Who) was there signing, he was also due to be interviewed about his career as well as the return of Davros to Doctor Who.

What I wasn’t expecting was that I’d end up on the radio too, chatting with Terry!!

After the radio interview (which at that point was one of the most nerve racking things I’d done), Terry gave me some valuable advice.

“Get an agent and make the most of it while you can, there’s probably only about 18 months of Tennant left (this was prior to David’s leaving announcement)”

So that’s exactly what I did, the rest as they say is history............

Me now, the look has improved!