Fandom Past - A Talk Given at Nine Worlds 2015 - Lillian_Shepherd - Fandom - Fandom [Archive of Our Own]
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Fandom - Fandom
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Additional Tags: Meta
Summary:This is as much a memoir of Fan Fic and its Fandom in mainly in the UK in the 1980s. It’s placed here because I’ve been asked to put it here so a couple of people can find it.
For everyone else, nothing to see here…
This is an awesome and detailed memoir written by an early UK slash fan. Here are two sections
On the difficulty of getting access to source:
“Researching canon and writing meta. Ah, this was a problem, more so here than in the land of the Repeat across the Pond. The first VHS tape recorders arrived in 1979 and they were expensive. Most people rented theirs – and quite often if you were a single woman you had to get a man to sign a hire purchase or rental agreement. The tapes were expensive too. Quite often, a group of fans would fund both.Before then you had to rely on repeats (and many programmes were never repeated, some never shown because of something the BBC/ITV considered more important and some of those tapes were wiped.) There was you and your memory (and boy, did mine get trained) and, if you were me, a sound tape recorder of some kind. I bought my first reel-to-reel recorder in the mid sixties. I would tape shows I was interested in, making ‘movement notes’ then I would type up the script. Later, I might 'novelise’ the script……
…..Believe me, there was an awful lot of fanon accepted as canon in those days.When an old show was repeated it was often around midnight in another part of the country or even on the other side of the world. Most of our Garrison’s Gorillas tapes were recorded after midnight by a good friend in Southampton, who even stayed up to take the ads out, while three and a half tapes travelled all the way from Melbourne. (Later, a friend sent us tapes of Babylon 5 in the States long before they aired in this country – there were different standards for televisions and tapes between us and the States but there were ways around this.) “
On the need for Plural Point of View and the importance of Doing Your Own Thing:
“I had occasion to go onto Fanlore to look up some facts for this talk, and I’m pretty sure they’re right. Other things I discovered written about fandoms I was involved in don’t seem right. I’ve tried to indicate here stories that I know happened, or that I am pretty sure happened almost the way the original participants told them to me. However, people’s memories differ, so remember that no one has the true gospel of fannish history. Enjoy your fandoms, new and old, read and write what you want to read and write, argue over canon, and character, and discuss whether you find actors hot. Be welcoming to newbies, don’t be a dick, but always be a little sceptical about what you’re told. There’s always bias, folks.”