| Fandoms: my addiction
For as long as I can remember I have had this need to
bring people together and form communities or clubs. When I was at
school I was forever creating little clubs for my friends to join,
producing membership cards and trying to do newsletters, very often I
was the only one who'd do the work and my clubs disappeared as quickly
as they were born. I remember the most successful one was when I
formed a 'Blackadder' fan club to support the tv show that was on at the
time, it had a grand membership of two, thanks to my best friend - I got
as far as making a membership card, she had the rank of Blackadder and I
had the rank of Baldrick and that stuck for nearly three years, no
newsletters ever resulted but she played the part of Blackadder well and
I got hit a lot.
My desire to form clubs and bring people together
never left me, I used to produce 'playerzines' for my team mates when I
played football (soccer) a weekly roundup with match reports, player
spotlights, photos and news which became so successful that a couple of
my playerzines ended up for sale in a football programme fair at
Brentford Football Club, I received no payment for my efforts.
However, it was in tv fandoms that I knew I could finally find my place,
it started with Red Dwarf that already had a successful fan club and I
began to help them with articles and scamming my way into tv recordings
of the show and going behind the scenes on anything associated with the
show. Even still, I found it hard to keep up the momentum and a
lot of articles I promised never materialised, sometimes six months
would pass between mail outs and I knew I needed something easier to
manage, to have a community closer to home that didn't involve the
postal service and then came the Internet.
Coinciding with my first ventures online was the
rebirth of my interest in The A-Team, a show I adored as a kid and had
very fond memories of. I joined a mailing list and instantly loved
the banter and being able to talk to likeminded souls about a show still
being enjoyed worldwide. I started writing
fanfic and asking questions about the show, it was brilliant.
However, things soon turned sour when I found myself on the wrong side
of the owners of that mailing list, I was banned unjustly (I didn't beta
my fanfic... shock horror!) and so began the most surreal and exciting
phase of my fandom life, I helped create a new A-Team mailing list that
over the course of five years would take me on an incredible journey -
meeting the actors of the A-Team, appearing on TV as an expert on the
show, quiz shows, radio spots, helping Universal produce videos/dvds and
at one point I was even given temporary copyright to use the infamous
theme tune for my own ventures. My time in the A-Team fandom was
sealed when Dirk Benedict declared that I was 'an honorary A-Team
member' (see photo above).
I left that fandom after a series of misunderstandings
and general tiredness and found myself in a new fandom some six months
later. This time for the show 'Andromeda', having had a nightmare
few months that ended with me declaring I would never take charge of a
fandom again, I went back to basics of just being a member of a
community that loved a tv show. Less than a year later I was a
moderator again for a breakaway group of fans and then to just cement
that claim of 'never again', I accepted an offer from Gordon Michael
Woolvett to look after his message board, after spammers threatened to
take it over.
So thats my fandom story, I now look after
GMWMB and entertain the fans of both Gordon Michael Woolvett and
Jaimz Woolvett, through web chats and my own fan site 'Woolvettbros.com'. |
