Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Sunday 1st May 2005

Me and some friends arrived at Milton Keynes at about 9am and the queue to be let in was enormous - it spread right the way round the shopping centre. Joined it and prepared to wait. The doors opened and we were let in and joined the nearest queue for tickets for the autographs. Our ticket was 865 - we found out later that they’d only allocated 1500 for James and they’d all gone within the first half an hour.

So then we went for a wander until our ticket numbers came close. My friends daugther R., who likes to sit on my knee while we wander round (I’m in a wheelchair for distances), got my Angel puppet on her knee and had it waving at people that walked past - that caused a few chuckles and no small amount of embarrassment for me!

Then we noticed that we could get in the queue for Alexis, so we did. Alexis is such a nice guy, he takes the time out to have a chat with everyone - he’d told me the day before that he’d let Alyson loose in London with his credit card and said that he’d probably be broke by the time they went home! He chatted away to R. about whether she was enjoying her day then promptly shook the Angel puppets hand - that’s what now gone up in value!

After we went straight towards Tony - he is always such a pleasure to meet and always chats away and has a laugh with you. Just as I’m getting my autographs, R. turns round and informes him that he has to shake the puppet’s hand because Wesley had. At this point I was holding the puppet, me and Tony just looked at each other then with a sigh I stood the puppet on the table in front of him and he reached out and shook both of its hands then I told him about what she’d been doing with the puppet which made him laugh.

Watchers Talk with Tony and Alexis

The Watcher’s Talk was excellent. They both giggled quite a bit and Alexis jokingly blamed Tony for teaching him to giggle while filming. Specifically, he talked about the impossibility of filming certain scenes (one in "Spin the Bottle") due to excessive laughter and Tony mentioned that they had giggled through the scene where they are fencing in the library in BTVS.

Those two really ought to go on the road with the double act, they were so funny and you could tell that they were good friends. I also wonder how many slash writers were in that audience because Alexis was throwing so much innuendo into some of his comments - all in good fun of course. When someone asked about spin-offs, Alexis suggested that Wesley and Giles should "set up" together, as Giles knows just how Wesley likes his tea. He then suggested that perhaps they should have a show consisting of dancing Watchers(and did little jig for emphasis). Alexis joked that it was because of Tony that he gained a job and a wife, and now he has one, but not the other.

He talked a bit about his and Alyson’s visit to Papua New Guinea and mentioned that a documentary had been broadcast and apparently shown in the UK (and presumably America).

There was also a time that Tony’s mobile phone rang in the middle of the talk ( ‘though all people had been asked to shut them off) and he ended up talking to his daughter Daisy with the microphone still in his hand and he told her that the call was being listened to by over 400 people, Alexis turned round and told him to take his time and that we’d just entertain ourselves. They were brilliant and it was such a treat to see them both together in a relatively informal setting - so informal, Tony was wearing torn jeans.

They talked a bit about their favourite episodes and about the scariest episodes of BTVS/Angel. Tony re-enacted his "I’d like to test that theory" entrance in "Grave", after which Alexis said he looked hot in that (which the audience certainly agreed with). Tony said that one of the best screen kisses (in terms of humour) had to be that between Wesley and Cordelia (and Alexis commented that they kept clashing teeth while trying to film the kiss).

Someone asked them what their favourite TV programmes were before they grew up. Tony said that he hasn’t grown up yet (and he mentioned that as a little kid he used to watch "Rin Tin Tin" and "Whirlybirds" - he got quite nostalgic about the cool guy with the sunglasses who used to fly a helicopter in the latter series). Alexis mentioned that he liked "The Prisoner" and "The Avengers".

Tony then was asked to sing again, but said that this is always a difficult request for him (even though he loves to sing), because he can never remember lyrics and he feels that he would look quite sad carrying a guitar to conventions (just in case someone makes a request - needless to say the audience did not agree with the latter comment and the fans were very much in favour of him singing at conventions). So, for sentimental reasons, he sang the Cadbury’s Flake jingle. He also said he’s been in London recently filming Rose and Maloney and joked that he suffered whiplash from having to snap his head back quite a bit. I’ll leave it at that so as not to give away any more of the storyline!

Both men praised Joss and his writing and said that he tried to be on the set of Buffy and Angel as much as possible. However, Tony mentioned there was a scene outside Giles’ house, between him and Sarah, where he played Giles as being very grumpy. Joss watched the scene after and said his intentions were that the scene should be comical, so Tony and Sarah had to re-voice the whole scene consisting of 10 or 15 pages of script.

Their talk ended about an hour later and the organiser had just 15 minutes to get everyone changed round for the James talk, as we had tickets to that too, we stayed where we were.

He managed to do it as fairly as he could then was informed that James was running about half an hour late so we all had to wait.Which gave a couple of people to chance to complain about the disabled being at the front. Anyway, enough of the griping, James turned up and like at the concert, the girls went wild! It was kinda funny though when he jumped on stage and hit out at an enormous Spike bobblehead that they were auctioning off later. Some of the questions were the usual - but some gave an insight into him that no-one knew, here’s a few for you all. He said that he wants to be remembered as a good dad to his son. He even told us at what age he lost his virginity - 13. He also explained the reason why he doesn’t personalise autographs - that’s because he once shattered all the bones in his left hand and it hurts to be writing for so long, so he’s managed to perfect his signature but anything else just becomes illegible, to which he apologised for as he knows that a personalised autograph is so much better - I thought that was so sweet. He also told us that he suffers from arthritis in his spine due to an accident while filming Buffy early on.

He was a really nice man, friendly, chatty and was excepting gifts from people, including a little girl who could only have been about four. He answered all the questions with joy and a glint in his eye, but he had a tendency to swear then immediately apologise for it and some of his answers to questions became a little bit risqué. He’s very hyper aswell and had a habit of wandering around while talking and saying "rock on" a lot :).

His talk lasted for an hour as well.