This year’s Entertainment Media Show saw the Collectormania and Sportsmania conventions join forces at Kensington’s Olympia, enabling TV, film and sports fans to mingle with their collective heroes.

In keeping with previous years, Collectormania remained primarily sci-fi based, with guests from Star Wars, Doctor Who, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter and Dark Angel. If you happened to also be a sports fan, Sportsmania saw names such as snooker’s Jimmy White and Stephen Hendry, and Formula One legend Sir Stirling Moss.

Tucked away among the stalls and merchandising stands were various interactive areas offering such creative retreats as origami-making and Pokemon card-playing. Autograph tables were also in abundance – varying from the usual array of miscellaneous extras to bona-fide cult stars (David Prowse, Kenny Baker and Mercedes McNab to name but a few).

Amid all the vampires, aliens, robots and lightsabers was the promise of a rollicking movie quiz hosted by Sky Movies 35mm presenter Mark Dolan. Representatives from Empire, SFX, Total Film and HeyUGuys fought to prove they were the cream of the movie-knowledge crop. Each team was assigned a special guest captain, and Carl Weathers (Rocky), Alice Krige (Star Trek: First Contact), Paul McGann (Doctor Who) and Marshall Bell (Total Recall) supported their respective team mates in the fight for the Sky Movies Ultimate Film Quiz title.

Surrounded by Stormtroopers, Jedi, Jack Sparrow and Catwoman, Dolan presented the University Challenge style-quiz – his usual jovial manner saw the event run smoothly, even when the teams were plagued by technical glitches!

The fun, casual atmosphere drew onlookers in after an initially disappointing turnout, enticed no doubt by Mr Dolan’s enthusiastic murmurings, as well as the chance to win a year’s subscription to Sky+ HD.

Given the collective movie buffery of the competing teams, what could have been a rather one-sided viewing experience for the audience actually turned out to be a very engaging 90 minutes. The questions varied markedly in difficulty, allowing the spectators to silently participate while occasionally giving the competitors pause. The mix of clips, stills and soundtracks livened up the atmosphere, as did the personalised buzzers allocated to teams.

It was a close fight between SFX, Empire and Total Film the whole way (sadly, HeyUGuys never really got off the starting line), with Empire clinching the winning trophy on a tie-breaker with SFX thanks to the quick-thinking of Kim Newman.

The late start meant an abrupt finish (partly down to a rather unnecessary mid-quiz break), but on the whole it proved to be an entertaining and challenging lunchtime brain-teaser. Bring on next year's rematch! Alice Wybrew