THOSE 12 RT COVERS IN FULL

A cynical marketing ploy it may very well be, but for the week of the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary, that venerable old organ of programme listings publications, the Radio Times, printed twelve distinct and separate covers to "celebrate" the TV show in question on the presumption that sad little completists like myself would dash out and buy all twelve so that we could leave them rotting in boxes in our attics and basements until they become "worth something" even though, given that the RT remains Britain's biggest-selling weekly magazine, there are likely to be one or two about to keep the value low.

Or maybe they'll be gathering them up to sell to gullible foreign fans whose access to such merely national treasures is more limited than our own, and seeing them as a bit of an investment opportunity.

But I kid you not. A quick glance on eBay shows that a recent edition bearing a "Poirot" cover is for sale for thirty quid a mere two weeks after it came out, although just because it's on sale at that price doesn't mean that anyone will actually pay it.

That said, the editions from the 1960s, those old black and white "newsprint" editions featuring Daleks or William Hartnell or Patrick Troughton can actually fetch hundreds of pounds, so who knows what this week's bunch will go for if you've got another fifty years or so to wait...

That's the thing about collectors of ephemera, though. They know full well that most ordinary sane readers chuck the thing into the recycling at the end of the relevant week, and the "rarity" value immediately increases accordingly. Tales of people coming home from school and finding that there mum had thrown out all of their old "Eagle" comics find grown(ish) men weeping in corners, whilst the reality of the situation is that copies of editions lying in those stacks of old "Empire" magazines which still take up far, far too much space in our tiny little house, are still selling for £0.00 each (with no bidders) and are effectively worthless, as the Beloved keeps reminding me...

Ah but, you see...

A couple of months after my mum moved out of her house and into the flat which she spent the last decade of her life living in, I went to a Film Fair and noticed a stall completely full of old Radio Times editions selling at around six quid a copy and seethed quietly at the realisation that I'd just thrown several years worth into big bags and taken them to the tip as I'd been clearing my "old rubbish" out of mum's garage.

Mind you, whether I could have been bothered trying to actually find a buyer for them is a completely different thing and is, presumably, what marks out the person who seizes an opportunity from the rest of us. The truth is that I probably wouldn't have done anything about it even if I'd known about it, because it would have seemed like far, far too much trouble and, of course, the pragmatist has to understand that there's no point in fretting about something that you've already let go.

Meanwhile, and before you ask, no.

I did not go out and buy myself all twelve of these... Although I may have got myself more than one before I recognised that that was indeed the way madness lies.

Other past "Radio Times" covers can currently be seen at:
http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2013-11-18/partners-in-time-50-years-of-doctor-who-radio-times-covers
and all artwork is of course (c) covered by their copyright - although I'll be claiming that they're in the public domain if anyone asks...