There can’t be many things more challenging to the ingenuity, unpredictable or frustrating than trying to get a DVD for a reasonable price on the release date. And I should know- I’ve been following Tranmere for the last thirteen years. Back in the days when I did message boards (and there’s another article in that which I’ll write one day), there was a great debate about which site was best for getting the latest Who release on the day of issue. I’m not sure I ever did it, though. More usual was to get my order on the Tuesday or the Wednesday, by which time half the people on the board had already seen it, analysed the extras and found the Easter eggs. As I write, it’s Monday night and ‘Lost in Time’ has yet to appear in spite of having been ordered in the middle of last week; bearing in mind that I have my Russian class tomorrow night and another meeting on Wednesday, it can pretty much come when it likes now because there’s no way I can sit down with it properly before Thursday.

Release dates are a thorny issue- I remember another message board discussion from a while back asking whether it mattered all that much that shops who have a certain release in the stock room hold onto it until the release date. The answer was that for the industry as a whole, it does- distributors put a lot of money and effort into promoting the release dates for Hollywood films, and making sure that retailers stick to the release date ensures that everybody gets a share of the market. Or put it this way- let’s say that ‘The Underwater Menace’ is due for release on April 1st (well, it couldn’t be any other day, could it?) and there are two shops in town which are going to stock it. Let’s call them VMH and HW Smith. Now if both shops order 20 copies and VMH put all theirs out on the Saturday before the release date, chances are they’ll sell them, while HW Smith will be left with their 20. Their stock control people are going to assume that Who doesn’t sell and stop ordering as many, which in turn has an effect on the size of the pressing of the next release. Of course it doesn’t always happen that way- about 10-15 years ago, WH Smith in Liverpool could generally be relied upon to have Who releases on the shelves the Saturday before the official date, and the publishing industry tends to play at fast and loose with publication dates, unless it’s something really big like Harry Potter, simply because books are lower profile and publication dates are made less of. I have fond memories of my friend Mike taking about ten minutes to talk one of the assistants in the late lamented Wilsons bookshop in Liverpool into selling him the paperback ‘Dragonfire’ about a week before the publication date, only to walk into the Waterstones around the corner and find it already on the shelves.

The logistics of getting a DVD to your customer on the official release date are tricky too. If it’s a Monday, as in most cases it is, then it’s either a case of putting it in the post first class on Saturday or second class the middle of the preceding week- depending on when the distributors let you have the stock. For ‘Lost in Time’ I went with DVD.co.uk, largely on price; I could have gone with Play, but they tend to send things halfway around the world in an attempt to avoid VAT and while they can hazard a guess at an arrival date, the other week I ordered ‘The Leisure Hive’ and ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’ from them and they arrived on different days. I could, of course, have used Amazon, but getting it today would probably have involved having to pay for the postage, or, let’s face it, I could have gone in Woolworth’s at lunchtime today and paid the full whack for it. But what’s the point of paying for an Internet subscription if you can’t get some of it back by saving money on DVDs?