I recently had cause to watch, for the first time, an episode of the 1979 documentary series Time Out of Mind, which spent 25-minutes presenting a fly-on-the-wall insight into the Seacon ’79 convention that took place at the Metropole Hotel in Brighton between Thursday 23rd and Sunday 26th August 1979.
Time Out of Mind was a short-lived BBC2 documentary series which looked at the writers of literary science fiction, and Seacon ’79 was the title of that year’s Worldcon event. Worldcon was – and still is – the shorthand name for the World Science Fiction Convention, which has been held annually all around the world since 1939 (apart from 1942-45, when the US finally decided to get involved in WWII). The convention is usually held somewhere in the US, but other countries occasionally get a look-in, and in 1979, it was the UK bid that won the right to host the event. (Like the Olympics, or the World Cup, rival organising groups bid to host upcoming Worldcon events, sometimes three or four years in advance of them happening).
Previous to Seacon ’79, the last time a Worldcon had been held in Europe was 1970, when West Germany hosted. The UK itself last hosted the event in 1965. So Seacon ’79 was a Very Big Thing at the time. And around 3,000 people agreed that it was a Very Big Thing, as that was the number who flocked to the Metropole Hotel in Brighton that August Bank Holiday weekend in 1979. Now, I knew very little of Seacon ’79, as I was only in junior school at the time, but my interest was piqued by a couple of grainy black and white photos of Tom Baker lounging about at the convention, as printed in the inside cover of Doctor Who Weekly issue 2, some months after the event.