The bitter war of nerves between rival
communites of The X-Files and Doctor Who fans was given a fatal
new twist last weekend, when an X-Files convention at the Concord
Novotel in Bromley was invaded by a mob of belligerent Doctor Who
fans waving banners and claiming their “300 year old
birthright to march through (their) convention unhindered.”
Attendees at the ‘Trust No
One’ Convention had no choice but to stand angrily by,
whilst The Third Division Purple Fife, Drum and Kazoo Order of
the Doctor Who Apprentice Society were given carte blanche - with
full police escort - to parade noisily and intimidatingly through
the main hall, interrupting a panel where, just seconds before,
actress Gillian Anderson had been hosting an intimate talk on the
joys of giving birth via caesarean section.
Distressed patrons spoke of the injustice to FanGrok: “It were ugly. The police only just managed to prevent a full scale WAR. At one point most of us were chanting ‘No law! No rights!’ - it were all we could do,” admitted shaken fan Paddy O’Deery.
The event was marked by the arrest of twenty X-Files fans, and several dozen hospitalisations after sectarian violence broke out, predictably enough.
A couple of the younger attendees took matters into their own hands, throwing stones and petrol bombs at the implacable marchers. “That’s when the riot started”, said one individual who was too frightened to reveal his identity. “The marchers suddenly dropped their flutes and drums and ran at us, brandishing their Tom Baker scarves... I ran and hid under a podium, but people were throwing chairs, fighting and punching and kicking each other only a few feet away from me. The mounted police aimed their plastic bullets and fired tear gas at us X-Files fans, but it did no good. They were allowing the Who fans to get away with beating everybody to a pulp, but we were clubbed with big truncheons if we so much as raised our arms in self defence....”
Another incensed X-Files devotee added: “It’s a license to commit mayem - I blame the British Government for caving in and allowing this march to go ahead. They’re basically pointing a great big gun at us and saying, ‘Suck on this’ - it stinks. What pissed me off more than anything was that these thugs had to come through just as Gillian was about to show us all her incision scar. We’re not likely to see her again at a convention in this country after this... Bastards.”
A spokesman for the Purple Order said, by way of explanation, “No hotel doors are closed to us. We have every right to march through any and all X-Files conventions, anywhere in the world. All those places hosted Doctor Who conventions decades before anyone’d ever heard of The X-Files anyway.
“It is our God-given birthright to trounce through their main halls, disrupting their little gatherings? he added, with a menacing laugh.”