What would possess anyone to part with over twenty quid to spend an entire Saturday in a cinema, watching two series of a sitcom that they already own on DVD?

What would possess someone who already works in a cinema to spend their entire Saturday in a different cinema, watching two series of a sitcom that they already own on DVD?

Spaced has possessed those people. And it possessed myself, Amy J, Sarah and Lucy to gather at the British Film Institute on Saturday. At 12.30pm they showed all seven episodes of the first series. At 7.30pm they showed all seven episodes of the second series. And then we went home.

Except, a few nice things happened along the way. First, I snuck out after the first four episodes and stood in the standby queue for the Q&A session that was going to take place in between the two screenings. A Q&A session with almost the entire Spaced cast, including none other than Simon Pegg (of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and, er, Spaced fame, among many others).

Tickets for the Q&A were sold out when I booked the tickets for the screenings, so the standby queue was our only hope. Happily, when I reached it, it wasn't very long. But it was the strangest queue in the world:

There were ten people ahead of me, all standard issue studenty, arty types that sit and drink alcohol in standby queues at film institutes. And boy, had some of them been drinking alcohol. It transpired that the gentleman at the head of the queue had been in it since 10am, and in fact had constituted the queue in its entirety for at least two hours.

At 1pm-ish he'd been joined by a few others and had proceeded to get himself very, very drunk, sat at the front of the line. By 3pm when I joined the queue, he was a little loud but not overtly tipsy. By 4.30pm when I got my standby tickets for the Q&A (hurrah!), he was wandering the queue offering a selection of newspaper supplements to bemused Spaced fans.

While I had been waiting in line, others in our party had been busy. Sarah and Lucy had been watching the final few episodes of series one. Amy J had been dipping in and out of them (the episodes), but had been a little distracted by the appearance, outside one of the auditorium doors, of Simon Pegg. And a few other cast members. She might have managed to persuade them to sign stuff:

But she didn't bump into Simon Pegg as he left a gents' toilet. That honour was reserved for Sarah, as Pegg took evasive action to avoid her on re-entering the corridor. (There's a euphemism.) Sarah turned crimson, purple, green and white simultaneously, then had to press herself against a wall to avoid keeling over. It seems the man had that effect on quite a lot of people in the building. Strange.

Pegg was not the only victim mercilessly tracked down by the teenage duo of Sarah and Lucy, led in their mercenary celebrity bounty hunt by a rampant Amy J, for whom this sort of thing is a routine bloodsport, a bit like pheasant shooting but less humane. Spaced star Nick Frost, outside the venue for a crafty fag behind a flight of stairs, was brutally assaulted with a camera and two young women, to the point where he felt compelled to run away and hide (though that could have been the queue of fifty fans that built up behind them).

Everyone left the venue with a piece of paper full of signatures and some nice photos involving celebrities. Everyone, that is, except me. Nothing on this earth will persuade me to pester a celebrity to have my photograph taken with them. I would rather gnaw my own nipples off than either:

a) become the nineteen millionth person that day to trouble some poor individual with the misfortune to have become well known; or

b) lower myself to the status of 'fan with a camera and a marker pen'.

Seriously. We were stood outside the VIP area, roped off with a security guard uttering menacing directions at passers-by now and then, with the three girls trying to barter for autographs with the admin lady. I felt a quite horrible pang of disgust that I had to stand outside the rope and do the whole 'pleb' routine. My fingers teased my BBC ID card in my pocket. "Why must I be a total nobody outside the rope when I could be a total nobody inside it?" I asked myself.

But then, even total-nobody-outside-rope status beats wanker-who-got-told-to-shove-his-BBC-pass status.

And you know what? I'm just happy that everybody else was happy. Not that I wasn't happy, because I was happy. But I was happier because other people were happy, and that was no happy accident. It all fell into place. What a brilliant day out.

By the way - if you were in seat M32, you're going to kick yourself. You won the special prize announced on stage. But you'd gone home so the bloke in seat M31 took it. Just thought you'd like to know.