The following is a message to the entire Gallifrey One family: our attendees, our guests, our staff, our sponsors and partners, as written by our program director and co-founder, Shaun Lyon.

We invite you to check out our complete recap of this year’s (2025) convention — including our incredible $37,000 intake for this year’s Bob May Memorial Charity Auction, breaking a previous record by nearly double the previous amount! — and a preview of our 2026 show, in the separate story also posted today here on our website.

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It was with a heavy heart that we announced on February 16, 2025, at the end of this year’s convention Closing Ceremonies, that Gallifrey One will be coming to an end in 2028, after three more events over the next three years.  Our February 2028 convention will conclude an unprecedented, sometimes inexplicable and definitely historic 38-year run as the world’s largest and longest-running annual Doctor Who fan event.

Nothing in life lasts forever… but for so many of you who have been with us for years or even decades, it probably felt like the fun would never end. Every year, we hear the same thing: Gally is timeless. Gally is eternal. It’ll be there for us always and forever. Yet it’s very easy to forget that behind every guest, every program item, every photo, every autograph, every vendor, every art show participant, every game, every video, every moment: there is a person. Sometimes the same person. More often, many people. People who care, people who give of their time… some for a weekend a year, some for much longer, and even a few who have dedicated their lives for thirty-six years and counting, our entire run. Volunteers, every one. Gallifrey One is a fully non-profit event. No one has ever benefitted financially from it; not one cent. From our Board of Directors to the volunteers who help us on site, it’s always remained an all-fan, all-volunteer experience. In fact, many of these volunteers don’t even live in Los Angeles; they commute to L.A. (on their own dime) to help us run the show, and that includes a member of our Board of Directors too, who lives all the way in the U.K.

When we began this impossible journey at a meeting in January 1989 — a year in which the original Doctor Who series was still in production, and less than sixteen months after the Doctor Who USA Tour stopped in our city — our local fan group was focused on holding that one convention. We had ideas and a title for a second, and a title for a possible third, but we were never looking for a legacy. Fate had different ideas in mind.  We undersold our first year, running up a huge bill at our first hotel that required a sizeable loan from the Southern California Institute for Fan Interests (SCIFI) Inc., along with a few bonds; meanwhile, Doctor Who had just gone off the air, seemingly forever.

Our attendance dwindled in those first years; at our lowest, only four years in, the Northridge Earthquake hit the city in January 1994, and our convention a month later had just over 300 people in total, including guests and staff.  But it was the loan hanging over our heads that prevented us from giving up; and a combination of luck, good fortune and good will kept us alive through Doctor Who’s “wilderness years” and allowed us to begin to grow. We benefitted from friendships forged with writers of the Virgin Publishing and BBC Books Doctor Who lines; we established relationships with some of the people behind the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie, especially producer Philip Segal; we began our long partnership with Big Finish Productions to promote their Who audio stories; and our website became a popular Doctor Who fan destination for well over a decade. By the time our bills were paid eleven years later (in 2001), we were fully established, just a couple years before the biggest stroke of luck hit us: the show was coming back to television. And in 2006, we moved from our former home at the Airtel Plaza Hotel in Van Nuys (where we settled comfortably into a crowd size of about 750 people for a decade) to the Marriott at Los Angeles International Airport… and the rest is, as they say, history.

Conventions do not exist in a vacuum. Every program item or panel you visit has a history: people who created the panel, people who volunteered to staff the panel, its promotion and scheduling. Our medium-sized convention like ours has nearly 400 program items all weekend, be they panels, presentations, interviews, autograph sessions, photo ops, gaming sessions, auctions, everything you can think of. And that’s just getting started. There are staff members making sure the lines run, the doors are monitored, badges are distributed, attendees guided, tech installed and supported. Dozens of guests’ flights are booked and paid for; fees are paid up front; hotel rooms booked and paid for; car services booked for pickups. Gallifrey One’s guest budget is massive; it’s around 80% of our total budget (in excess of $250,000), easily explained by actor appearance fees and the fact that nearly all of our featured guests hail from another country. We treat them with the same respect we treat all of you: all of you are special to us.

We have staff members who join us for three days a year (or four, or five) and we love every single one of them. We have department heads for our various units, all of which do some preplanning, be it resource gathering, or reporting, or promoting, or printing, or assembling, or even loading a truck at no less than three separate locations then unloading it at the Marriott; and doing all the same in reverse a few days later. We manage technology that needs to get in and out of the hotel; vendors and artists to consider and support in our Dealers Room and Art Show; videos to assemble for programming and the Video Room; guests to take care of in our green room and our team (again, all-volunteer) to support in our staff lounge. And we have to staff Registration and ConOps and Member Services and Kaffeeklatsches and Accessibility Services and Masquerade Registration and Children’s Programming and Autographs and Gaming and Karaoke and the Charity Auction team, and so much more. Nearly 180 people were on our staff list in 2025, including 27 department heads.  It’s a jumble of planning and preparation, and we’re not even that big in the grand scheme of things.  We may make it look easy, but it never is.

But through all this time, we’ve periodically had discussions about what an endgame looks like. Nothing, as we said above, lasts forever.  We’ve come close a few times (2010 was probably the closest we ever got to finishing up… but honestly, we weren’t so sure about coming back after COVID, either; it was a scary time for everyone.)  You have to plan for your endgame.  A writer doesn’t want to write a book, writing the beginning and the middle and then hand it over for someone else to finish; the writer wants to write the whole story.  We want to write our whole story, too.

Those of us who have been on this journey for decades have earned the right to go out on our own terms. We aren’t interested in passing along our name or reputation to someone else, someone untested, who might squander the good will we engendered in the fan community. We don’t ever want Gallifrey One to be remembered as the convention that didn’t know when to quit, or is looked back upon with regret: it was great, until it wasn’t.

Most importantly, we want it to be a testament to all the people who brought it forward, from the launch in January 1989 to our first convention in May 1990, through decades of memories and connections (and even a year without one, thank you COVID) until today, when it’s the destination so many people look forward to. So many friendships have come about through the convention.  People have met and married through Gallifrey One; babies have grown up with their families attending.  And along the way, we’ve also lost so many friends through the passage of time; friends gone, but never forgotten.

We also gave our fandom three years’ notice. We didn’t want to spring this on all of you at the last minute. Many of our former attendees we know would love to come back again before we’re done. Many others out there who dream of attending one day, now have three years to plan if they want to make it in time. We didn’t have to do it, and we certainly didn’t do it to make any of you panic; this was a gift to our dedicated fan base, so that you know you’re being looked after and don’t need to think about the future… quite yet.

We don’t want the fandom that we’ve engendered here for so long, the friendships and families and memories we’ve shared, to disappear.  That is why we are confidently moving forward with our plans.

We still have three more events to bring you before we close the book. In 2026, we will proudly present our thirty-sixth convention, The 36 Legends of Gallifrey One: Stories Untold on February 6-8 due to the NBA All Star Game on our regular weekend. (More details about that convention on the wrap-up article & 2026 preview also posted today.) In 2027, our thirty-seventh convention (already named, and we will share it next year) will also be a week or two after our regular weekend (the Super Bowl returns to LA that month). And finally, in 2028, we’ll present the last Gallifrey One convention: a last hurrah and final reunion as ourselves, with a convention name our former chairperson came up with more than thirty years ago.

But as Tom Baker said at the end of part four of Logopolis so many years ago… it’s the end, but the moment has been prepared for.

For over a decade, Gallifrey One has partnered with Showmasters Events in the UK to bring you most of our major celebrity guests. We’d like to tell you a little about Showmasters, and specifically about two people who have been at the core of their team: the owner, Jason Joiner, and his right-hand man, Paul Jones. Jason and Paul have been absolute champions of Gallifrey One since we started working with them (for Paul, even before that, when he also worked with the Tenth Planet shop.) They do things a bit differently at their shows in the UK, much grander events like the London Film & Comic Con, but at Gallifrey One they stand by us fully and go along with our way of doing things. They bring in their own support people to help with all of the autograph sessions, as well as the photo studio (through their side firm, Convention Photo Shoots.) They arrange and carry out two of the most popular events at our show, both optional add-on events: the dynamic script reading events, and the evening guest receptions, both of which remain among the most beloved parts of our convention. They give a tremendous amount of support to our charity auction every year.

And something else you might not be aware of: they’ve repeatedly assumed the financial risk for our major guests, going to bat for us when we weren’t sure if we’d be able to afford it all. Without them, Gallifrey One would not be what it is today. It was Jason’s idea to bring us Sir John Hurt in 2016, for what would be his last convention appearance in North America. It was they who brought us Chris Eccleston and Jodie Whittaker and Sir Derek Jacobi and so many other wonderful guests.

In discussing the end of Gallifrey One in 2028 with Jason and Paul, it became apparent to us that the best opportunity to continue the spirit of our convention was with them: Showmasters Events has the financial strength to run a Doctor Who show here, run in a manner resembling much of Gallifrey One — but not entirely. Put simply, they don’t want Gallifrey One’s fan community to disappear after 2028 any more than we do. And they’ve committed to running a show, while not a non-profit event like Gallifrey One, that operates much like it does today. They have the contacts we have, and most importantly, the capital to put up (this type of event is expensive, and everyone gets paid up front these days, including the hotel and the guests.) Some of Gallifrey One’s team, as well as some guests and attendees, have already committed to helping them through the transition, so that programming operates in much the same way (discussion panels, for instance), the photos and autographs continue, your favorite dealers can continue to vend, and so forth.

We also asked them not to use the Gallifrey One name, as that brand — that legacy — retires with us; they were completely in agreement that this would be something new, but still for the fans. That means no “Gallifrey Two” or any permutations of Gallifrey; we’ve seen many comments joking about such, but it’s not happening (and to be honest, it’s very disrespectful to the people who brought you Gallifrey One for so long.) It’ll be its own thing, and Showmasters Events will have more to share about this in the weeks and months to come… while still respecting the fact that we still have three years left to go.  Make no mistake: they have our complete support for 2029 and beyond.

For so many of us who have shaped this convention, its legacy is unique and special and personal. For myself, this wonderful, stressful, silly, sometimes-maddening, always-worthwhile endeavor has been a pillar of my entire adult life, from the bombastic 19 year old I started as, to a more mature and introspective 55 today.  So much of my life is made up of friends I have met through this event; it’s been my passion, and my honor to support this fandom for 36 years, and I look forward to the next three, and beyond. Because I will definitely still be there in 2029 — I hope you will be, too —  when I can enjoy more social time and fewer emergencies, knowing that everyone who touched this convention in some way is part of its history, and its identity, and its legacy that we will leave behind. That’s all anyone can ever hope for.

Thank you all for your understanding, your support and your belief in Gallifrey One; we won’t let you down the next three years, we will be there with you to begin the next journey… and we hope you’ll always treasure all the moments that made Gallifrey One special for you.

Shaun Lyon
Program Director, Co-Founder and Resident Cheerleader, Always and Forever
Gallifrey One Conventions