The Jersey Jagaroth

Fan Club
Name:	The Jersey Jagaroth
Dates:	?-1989?
Founder(s):
Leadership:
Country based in:	New Jersey, US
Focus:	media science fiction (British?)
External Links:
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The Jersey Jagaroth was a late 1980s fan club for fans of British media science fiction.

It's newsletter was called A Mouth on Legs.

Goodbye from a Member

From The Freedom City Gazette #7 (1989), from a member, Joe Nazzaro:

It was with great sorow that I learned of the demise of the Jersey Jagaroth, a fan club that was an important part of my life for several years. The Jagaroth was my introduction into organized fandom and as I see the club fading into oblivion, I feel like I'm losing an old friend. Death is never pretty, even when we're talking about as intangible entity as an organization of fans.

I can stil remember the first interview I ever did for the Jagaroth. It was with Nick Courtney, who was then appearing at a Creation convention in New York. Not wanting to be unprepared, I was armed with pages of notes and questions, while trying to act as calm and self-assured as possible. That was three years (and over fifty interviews) ago, but I can still remember how exciting it was to be talking one-on-one with an honest-to-gosh actor. As an interesting footnote to that story, I attended Panopticon in London last September and was interrupted in mid-conversation by a loud below of "Joe Nazzaro!" I looked across the crowded hallway at Nick Courtney, who pointed a finger at me and grinned, indicating that he, too, still remembered.

Over the next few years, I was lucky enough to interview some of the finest people connected with Doctor Who, and even luckier to be able to see my work published in A Mouth on Legs, our club newsletter. I was one of the first Americans to interview Sylvester McCoy and Bonnie Langford, and the very first person to talk to Sophie Aldred in print. I talked to Tom Baker about Sherlock Holmes, pried information from John Nathan-Turner (no easy task), and spoke to the founders of Coast to Coast about their work on Doctor Who, never realizing that, two years later, they would be producing their own big-budget film version of the good Doctor. I started to develop a reputation of not taking "no" for an answer, and I suspect that more than one interview was granted because it was an easier task to talk to me than to get rid of me. It was a special time for me, a time of great learning.

There are so many marvelous memories of my time with the Jagaroth that I can t even begin to list them all. I remember a group of us dressing up in Gallifreyan regalia and forming the Gallifreyan Jug Band (a less talented group of individuals you'll never find!). I think of our "Low Council Report, our monthly lampoon of Doctor Who fandom, which our members either loved or hated, but always read. I remember, with a great deal of satisfaction, our April Fool's issue of 1988, which prompted a flood of letters and phone cals to the BBC, and the fact that several Doctor Who people later told me our storyline was better than the real thing! I recall Rassilon's birthday party and our Gallifreyan New Year celebration, to which I brought my little brother, both of us dressed as red-haired Androgums. The list goes on and on.

Once again, some of our readers are probably asking themselves what al this has to do with Blake's 7. Quite honestly, if it wasn't for the Jagaroth, you wouldn't be reading this issue of the Gazette right now. One of the reasons we started this fanzine was to help raise money for the club, so I guess the connection has always been pretty strong.

A few months ago, we passed the reins of the Jagaroth on to a new group of people, but, so far, the magic has not been there. There's been a lot of political in-fighting, a lot of childishness, and al too little attention paid to the members. It hurts me to see a club that was once among the best in the world reduced to such a sad state. Right now, it's too early to say the club has folded, but, in my eyes, it's over. It's over, and fandom is poorer for its loss.