A Look Back at Spaced-Out

The OG Fansite

This blog is far from the first Spaced Fan project, the owner of that title is Spaced Out, the original and the best, I have taken a break from travelling around London taking photos of random locations to take a deeper look at this iconic fan site.

The site is still active and can be seen here, however it doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2003, this does give us an incredible time capsule of early homemade websites and I’m so glad it has survived in its original form! The site was launched in November 1999 by Nick Lee and was a big advocate for the show and the whole Spaced crew, it featured contributions from the team, a forum (that lasted until 2013) and even Fan Fiction. I havre highlighted some of the most interesting aspects below, I have also used the way back machine to view the site in its late 2000s from, which includes some content no longer available.

Official Involvement

What separates Spaced-Out from so many other fan projects was the involvement of the creative team itself, you can read an interview the site did with Edgar here before the launch of Series 2 , as well as interviews with Simon and Jess, they are informal and you and tell the interviewers are fans but there is a lot of interesting tidbits and highlight just how invested they were in the site.

This was paid back late on as Spaced Out members were asked to appear as extras in both Season 2 and Shaun of the Dead, and Nick Lee, the sites creator was featured in “Skip to the end” the spaced documentary

The Conventions

This is where I get really jealous, in August 2001 the first ever Spaced convention took place, in where else, the Corrib Rest. 30 die hard fans turned up in full costume for a quiz fun and lots of drink. The high point though was the appearance of so many of the stars, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jessica Stevenson, Edgar Wright and Julia Deakin were all in attendance for a Q/A, The quiz and generally just to meet their fans, truly a once in a lifetime experience and something that really doesn’t seem possible in the modern age! See the full breakdown here.

The event returned in 2002, this time at The Camden Tup in Camden, with a larger turnout of 75, with more costumes and more drink, this time the special guests were Simon Pegg and Peter Serafinowicz, details of this event are a bit thinner and although it looks like a great success, it was unfortunately the last Spaced convention.

The Forum

The Spaced Out forum seems to have been a beast all by itself, it long outlived the website, and as far as I can tell, the Forum finally shut down at the end of 2013, 12 years after the show finished, which really demonstrates just how long lasting this show was in the hearts of its biggest fans.

Through the way back machine you can see some of the home pages of the forum, however it has not captured individual threads so much information and conversation has been lost. What can be seen though was the scale of it all, at the time of closing it had 760 members and over 792,000 posts over nearly 15 years!

Some highlights I was able to get from a 2004 version of the blog include this interview with Mark Heap, who steadfastly refuses to answer a single question seriously, a massive q/a with Edgar that can be seen here, unfortunately they also did interviews with Jess and Michael Smiley but these are lost to time.

The site has so much more than this, these were just of particular interest to me, so take a trip back in time and take a look for yourself!