Hello there, and welcome to a new feature, in which I will consume a glass of the gooseberry wine that my mum and dad brought back from holiday in Cornwall, and hold forth on a topic of interest.

In a moment of idleness earlier on, I was browsing through the sites of a couple of well-known shops who deal in Who merchandise. You know the ones, the kind who take out full-page advertisements in DWM, organise signings and can get you practically anything at a price. And I was absolutely amazed at the prices that some merchandise is attracting in the secondary market these days- ‘The Dying Days’ going for £75, for example, and ‘Cold Fusion’ for £60. We’re talking about paperbacks which came out not even ten years ago, with a cover price of a fiver. Admittedly because of Virgin’s licence, ‘The Dying Days’ and ‘The Well-Mannered War’ were out of print the moment they hit the bookshelves, but it’s still steep. The fact that you can download the text of some of these books for nothing means that whatever these places are charging- and people are presumably paying- reflects the book’s value as an object, rather than a text; it’s disappointing that somebody is presumably prepared to pay that amount of money for the book just so it can sit on a shelf.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the position with the supposedly-current BBC ranges was breathtaking (that’s my favourite word at the moment). Now we all know that the BBC Video range was deleted in its entirety not long ago, and this is pushing some prices up- not least the better Pertwee stories which don’t exist as top-notch prints and so aren’t coming out on DVD anytime soon. A few weekends before I went on my world tour, I popped into Virgin in Leeds to see what they had on clearance, and saw two guys piling up copies of ‘The Creature from the Pit’, making no bones about the fact that they were destined for eBay in the fullness of time. But it’s clear that the range was being run down for some time, from evidence like the comments on the RT site about the various duplication faults on ‘The War Machines’ which were never corrected because nobody in their right mind would sanction another duplication run of a b/w minority interest title. The last eight years of VHS were a treat for the completionists and the tapes were probably duplicated in appropriate numbers- no more and no less than BBC Worldwide and their distributors knew they could expect to shift. After all, if you want to see a colour story then UK Gold have them on a continuous loop and you just need to be able to get up on a Sunday morning, and if they go back to ‘Robot’ once they reach ‘Survival’, then it takes about a year for them to come full circle.

But this is moderate compared to what’s happening with the paperbacks. According to at least one site, ‘Sometime Never’, which came out earlier this year, is now out of print. I’ve always thought "out of print" an odd expression- as if the publishers have run out of typeset or ink or something. In modern times, of course, no book needs to be out of print- in theory it should just be possible to order any book electronically, have a copy printed and sent to you within a few days - after all, the publishing industry uses the same technology to print the things in the first place- but nobody’s managed to make it work yet. What it means in practical terms is that there are no copies with the publisher or their distributors, and they aren’t about to do another print run for a couple of thousand people who might want a copy. Again, BBC Books are printing as many copies as they know they can sell and no more, and not reprinting any titles. Amazon, of course, can always get anything for you at a price and will probably continue to do so.

What gets to me, though, is the manufactured scarcity which feeds the secondary market. Next year (one hopes), there’ll be a whole new audience hungry for the adventures of the previous Doctors, and they’ll be scavenging around every bookshop in the country picking up battered EDAs because they’re the only ones they can find, or battering each other half to death for a copy of ‘Inferno’. And if what the new fans find is a secondary market charging the earth for what are, after all, mass-produced books and videos, they’ll probably go back to something which is less hassle.