antigwenallies | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy

Here is the post I made on Save the Coffee Boy about The Greatest Show in the Galaxy:-

A friend of mine went to the recent Greatest Show in the Galaxy in which all of the original Torchwood cast were together on stage for maybe the last time. She has kindly put together a report for you all to read. She is not a member here so I am posting it for her. She has put a lot of hard work into this so if you disagree with her opinions, please do so in a polite way.

Greatest Show in the Galaxy

This was my first big con as opposed to the TW focused HUB and I really enjoyed. It was interesting to see how other panels differ from the Torchwood panel and they do. They were more sedate and less dominated by one cast member but to a variable degree lacked the energy of the Torchwood panels.

But first things first –the first person I met was Freema who just seemed to radiate beauty from the inside .She has a new series in the USA --Sex and the city: the Teenage Years. But the real surprise for me was Burn who was Owen Geek in person and such a nice man –he really seemed to be interested in you as an individual. Indira just came over as this amazing strong lady-she is in Silk next week. Then it was Tom who told me he had been filming for 14 hours when they did the scene in the camps where he is sitting holding hands with the young girl who will die when they fix the Blessing. Finally Eve and she called me dear-people who do not know me do not call me dear without putting my back up and those that do know better than to call me dear-it’s one of my pet peeves so the less said about Eve the better.

Like others I was excited about seeing the whole team together and it did live up to my intentions but not entirely –so here is a summary of the two panels.

I think they did make an effort to make sure that the panel is focused on the whole team but it still tended to be a little bit about John Barrowman and Miracle day. They all agreed that countryside was the episode they had most enjoyed filming. This was because it had taken them out of Cardiff and there was some quite funny tales about the hotel they stayed in. John and Eve had the best rooms and were in the best part of the hotel. Gareth came in the next day saying he’d walked out of his room and into a theatre whilst Burn had complained that he had gold lame sheets and they were giving him electrical shocks all night.

The facilitator asked them to say how each of their characters had died. Gareth said he was killed by an alien fart, Burn that he liked to believe that he hadn’t died but he was in particles somewhere in the atmosphere. Naoki said the her character had been killed and Gareth laughed and said how long it had taken her to come up with that answer in a teasing way. Oh and Naoki also said that her favourite class at school was attacked as she built a sofa and a vending machine and Gareth was like you made a sofa at school? Gareth and Burn sat next to each other and really did seem to be enjoying each other’s company again which was really nice to see. John Barrowman got up to his usual pranks ,he was throwing sweets at the audience ,jumping up and down a lot and at one point he went over and decided he was going to man the microphones in the audience and was his usual bouncy self.

The first thing John did was get into passion fight with Tom Price in which they ended up pushing the annoying moderator of the edge of the sofa. Which was good because he was basically blocking you from seeing the actors.

Somebody asked the panel members what was their favourite season. Eve said hers was a miracle day and kind of went on about it for a bit until Indira stopped her by saying that hers was season one because without season one they would never have been a miracle day. I kind of liked that. Unfortunately nobody else got to answer that question. The moderator I am afraid was very miracle day focused. It was his favourite season. He said something about miracle day being called the American Torchwood. John Barrowman then did this a longish bit about how it was not American and but was 80% Welsh at which point I really did want to say pull the other one John.

They all said what they loved about filming TW was that they laughed a lot although Freema admitted she had found it daunting at first. There was another question about pranks on the Torchwood set. John said that they got up to lots of pranks . He then said to Lachlan can you remember that the prank I played on you. Lachlan said was that the time you got your boys out. And everyone looked a bit aghast. John said then that the pranks on the Torchwood set were adults in nature implying they would not be repeated at the forum. Gareth then went into his pranking monologue which had everybody in stitches and is up on YouTube. Someone then said something about it being a family event so after that there was very little innuendo etc.

The only other group question I can remember always was the one about how what advice they would give to young people who are going into the acting profession. Gareth said to get back up after the knocks, Tosh said to do some theatre work, Kai said have a second job, and Indira said not to use Botox and gave a little demonstration of why you shouldn’t use Botox basically saying with the exact same expression on her face this is happy, this is sad this is angry. Everybody laughed at that and then John Barrowman made some joke about Desperate Housewives.

The moderator then said that the most moving scene in Torchwood was when the Rhys dies and Gwen is basically screaming although he didn’t put it like that. He asked her how she managed to come up with that strong emotion. I think he missed a really good moment here because it would have been good if he had asked the rest of the team about emotional scenes that they were in and how they manage to find the feelings.

John said that if CJ was to die he would like him to die in Gwen’s arms. This was because he would like to feel that CJ would die saving somebody he loved.

NEWS

John wants us to petition the BBC to bring back TW but the responses was s strangely muted as the number of people who put are their hands saying that they would like to see him in WHO with River.

John said they were negotiating film rights for his new book as he spoke. I think it was the Torchwood book but I lost track of things at that point. He indicated that his new book would be about him and went basically up with some other people making appearances.

Someone asked members of the panel if they would like to see the Hub brought back to Torchwood. Unfortunately Eve hijacked the question and basically told us that although they love the Hub and they were sad to see it go the Hub will not be returning to torchwood.

Best moment: for me it was Gareth’s we like to prank, we are always pranking, etc etc etc

Worst moments: John and Eve basically played up from the audience having played fights etc basically too much Gwack.

The biggest disappointment: that there was very little interaction between John and Gareth. It was almost as if John was choosing not to converse with Gareth. He kind of did his flirty bit with all the other team members but basically there was nothing directed at Gareth. As far as I know they did not even stand together all day -certainly not in public. From what I can see a lot of the photos that were taken up of the group photos had Ianto and CJ on either side of whoever was getting a photo taken. I was told that that was how it was set up but some people wanted something different so they could move them around. I guess I had been hoping for hug or few jokes about Ianto but their relationship was never mentioned.

Best Tom Price moment: somebody asked if they had ever read any fan fiction. Tom said his wife had read some to his mother on Christmas day in which he and John Barrowman were making love. John said that sometimes fan fiction is best left as fan fiction.

Most spontaneous moment: somebody asked them to show their best dance moves and Tom, Rhys and JB did a little dance. Eve then ran around the auditorium and came back and did a little dance on the stage. I had to say it reminded me of embarrassing moments with your mother.

I think that just about covers everything. I did feel slightly annoyed that JB and to some degree Eve were giving us the hard sell over Miracle day. But I guess that was bound to happen as the moderator seem to think that was why people were here. When I talk to the people manning the auto graphs they had been told that the two main people who would get long queues would be John Barrowman and Eve Myles. However the longest queues on the first day were for Burn and Freema and the guy who plays Mickey in Doctor Who. Having said that Eve and John did have long queues. Naoki and Gareth’s were the next longest. And Tom and Kai had very short queues. I think this was actually because a lot of people already have Gareth and Kai’s autograph.

I would like to have had more focus on the team during the panels but I think this did not happen partly because of the quality of the moderation and partly to do with the fact that John intends to take over. And John was definitely pushing the whole CJ/Gwen scenario as well as playing up to Eve generally. But still I’m just really glad that with Torchwood probably coming to an end that the cast were all gathered together for one last time. I have posted some pictures on one of the torchwood forums if anybody wants the links but probably most of you might have seen them already. There are also quite a few videos up on YouTube.

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Date: 2012-05-25 02:27 pm (UTC)

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we will not run, we will not hide, we hate Gwen, and say it with pride

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