I love how, sometimes, grey dull Saturday afternoons can suddenly become very interesting indeed. It was drizzling when I headed out earlier: the type of annoying rain which isn’t hard enough to justify staying home, but which nonetheless seems to soak into your skin after a while. In order to avoid it, I had the idea of going over to the excel centre to see if anything interesting was happening there. There probably wasn’t, but it’s often a cool place to spend a couple of hours.

On the bus to Woolwich, though, I noticed two or three young people wearing fairly weird costumes. At first I thought nothing of it as hallowe’en is so soon; but the nearer I got to the excel centre, the more I noticed. I soon began to wonder whether there was some kind of fancy dress event happening somewhere.

I caught the Elizabeth Line the single stop under the river. Getting off at Custom House, everything suddenly became clear: I had stumbled into London Comic Con!

Of course, I’m not that big a fan of the kind of comic book, action hero, genre films which such conventions are about, but I am still very interested in fans and fandom. I instantly decided that the event was well worth checking out. Rather surprisingly, I got in without anyone checking whether I had a ticket or anything, and was instantly met by a mass of people: I have never seen the convention centre that busy. Both sides of the massive building were being used, and there must easily have been tens of thousands of people thronging around. Naturally I was reminded of Destination Star Trek ten years ago, but this was definitely even bigger.

At first I was thrilled: London had done it again, it seemed, and brought me into the kind of cultural event that I usually relish. As time wore on, however, my enthusiasm began to wane. There were stalls and exhibits about all kinds of things, from Manga to Marvel films, but very little really excited me. There was nothing about Star Trek or The Lord Of The Rings. It seemed very commercial and bland: if this was a manifestation of filmic love, it was filmic love in perhaps its shallowest, most superficial form. People were playing computer games and walking around in all kinds of costumes, but I didn’t find anything to sink my analytical teeth into.

In fact, after about an hour or so there it was getting so crowded that I began to get annoyed. No doubt the people around me would claim to be film fans, but most were probably there just for show. I doubted that they relished the characters most were dressed so lavishly as, let alone really understood them. Yet there were so many of them, constantly walking into my way so that I had to move at a snail’s pace, that things were no longer fun.

At that I went on to see if anything was happening up in Stratford. Comic Con had been fairly disappointing, but at least by then the drizzle had stopped.