Tomorrow is the opening day of Gallifrey One, one of the biggest Doctor Who conventions in the US, and this reporter (ha! – Ed.) will be there, phone and camera in tow, documenting the event for all seven of you. I’m just nice like that. I’ll be tweeting from the event, assuming I can get a signal, using the official URP! Twitter account, which almost never gets used for anything else, although a word of warning: I imagine I’ll be saying “fuck” on occasion.

You’ll be able to follow other, more general “coverage” of the convention on Twitter – virtually anything to do with the con is being tweeted under #gally, which seems as good a way as any of following what other, less URP!y people are experiencing at the con. There’s also the official Gallifrey One Twitter feed, on which I’ve learnt that a film crew from The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson will be in attendance during Saturday afternoon. Which is nice.

I’ll also be posting end-of-day reports on the blog, which will invariably involve discussion of costumes, panels, events, guests, and possibly other things. Hopefully they’ll be a little more prompt than last year’s efforts which, as you may recall, went up a couple of days after the event had actually finished.

Well, I said it would happen, although to be fair that’s because Craig Ferguson hinted at it enough – the recorded rehearsal of the Doctor Who theme dance number that was originally going to open The Late Late Show‘s Doctor Who episode has finally found its way onto the internet:

I think the studio audience reaction is ours. The dance number was recorded during rehearsals before we were let in to the studio, but they did show it to us on the day and we did clap in time with the music. I can’t imagine them going to the trouble of putting in canned laughter/clapping for something like this, especially when the equipment to record our reaction hovered mere metres above our heads.

On Tuesday Matt Smith appeared as a guest on American late-night chat show The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, and Yours Truly was lucky enough to be in the audience. It didn’t occur to me to actually write about it until I mentioned it to some of the other URP!ers, at which point I’m sure they all tried to reach across the Atlantic and throttle me to death with their bare hands. Or something.

Oh, if you’re not interested in reading my lengthy recap because “Studio audience story, boring”, you might be interested in reading it to find out how long Matt Smith intends to continue playing the Doctor for. Read on…