Collecting can be very rewarding, but it can also be incredibly frustrating. Over the years I have collected numerous things on a sporadic basis. I still have in a drawer somewhere a collection of free fliers and catalogues picked up in shops while on holiday in the West Country. For reasons I cannot now explain, I would acquire these leaflets, booklets and fliers and bring them home, amassing quite a pile by the end of the holiday. I also collected lollipop wrappers (although I only have a couple left: something called Lolly Gobble Choc Bomb and, my favourite, Count Dracula's Secret, a black-coloured ice lolly that was filled with an oozing red liquid), bizaare rubber skeletal figures in manacles, plastic rings with monster faces on them, horror film cuttings from the television listing magazines and numerous other strange and obscure bits and pieces, including all the bits of junk given away in cereal packets.

I collected butterflies for a time. Lurking in a dusty corner is a case full of these fading and desiccated wonders, all neatly labelled and pinned to cork. The smell of ether always takes me back to halcyon days stalking through fields and woods with my butterfly net, looking out for something that I hadn't yet murdered for the sake of a bizarre collecting instinct. These days I find the thought of killing something in order to preserve it faintly distasteful, but, hey. I was young and easily influenced.

But by far the biggest bug to hit me was collecting Doctor Who merchandise. I have spent a fortune over the years and have picked up bits and pieces from many dealers only too willing to relieve me of my money. As time progressed, so my collection grew, and with it the need to keep up to date. This wasn't so bad in the eighties when there were not so many things to collect, and what there was, was generally quite reasonably priced. I still drew the line at some of the more expensive items, simply because I couldn't afford them - £35 for a rubber mask was, and, in fact still is, quite expensive.

All this brings me to my current frustration: the new Doctor Who collectible card game published by a company called MMG. Unlike the excellent Doctor Who trading cards released by Cornerstone (three sets released to date with a fourth on its way), you cannot buy a set of cards for the collectible card game. It appears that the only way to get a set is to buy the individual packs and to try and collect one.

Now this is by no means straightforward. The problem is that there are 300 cards (well, there are actually 302 cards - a special was given away with an issue of a gaming magazine called Scrye, and no one seems to know why there are 301 'standard' cards) and they are arranged in the packs that you buy so that there are a predefined number of 'Common', 'Uncommon' and 'Rare' cards in each pack.

What this means, of course, is that the Uncommon and Rare cards are only categorised as such because there are less of them in each pack. Consider that, as well as the Common cards, a 'Starter' box of sixty cards contains 3 Rare and 11 Uncommon cards and that a single 'booster' pack of 12 cards contains 1 Rare and 3 Uncommon cards. On top of this, consider that there are ninety eight different Rare cards and ninety five different Uncommon cards. This means that you have to buy at least ninety eight booster packs (at around £2.00 each) or thirty three starter boxes (at around £6 each) to even hope to get close to a set. This works out at around £200.00 and even then there is no guarantee of getting every card.

I had bought around 12 starter boxes and something like thirty booster packs and I still needed fifty cards. But then a fellow collector in Cornwall (hi Mark!) came to my aid and I now only need three cards. As if all this wasn't complicated enough, there are three cards which have been designated as 'Extra Rare'. These are the fourth Doctor, Davros and Doomsday Machine. No-one knows just how rare these are, and no-one appears to have seen the fourth Doctor card at all. It is also not known whether these cards only appear in the booster packs, or whether they can also be found in the starter decks - I only have one of them (Doomsday Weapon) and it came in a booster pack.

There is one final collector's nightmare. There are twenty seven special cards called 'Time' and 'The Watcher' which feature computer-generated fractals and other patterns. None of the 302 cards is numbered so you cannot know which you are missing unless you have a full list (thank goodness for the Internet!), and these 'Time' and 'The Watcher' cards have to be described in order to know whether you have them or not. Also, these special cards only come with the starter boxes - they are not in the booster packs.

If you are still with me, then what all this boils down to is a frustrating nightmare for anyone foolish or enthusiastic enough to want to get a full set. I am both foolish and enthusiastic and, at the moment, I'm stuck.

MMG have the rights to release a further set of cards based on the recent TV movie. Therefore just as we get close to completing sets of the 'standard' cards, along will come another set and, joy of joys, we get to start all over again. Apparently MMG are also looking at developing a Doctor Who board game and there is a set of small gaming miniature figures waiting in the wings.

Who'd be a collector?

***

At the start of February this year, BBC Video announced that, pending the release of the new Doctor Who TV Movie on video, all the other, regular Doctor Who releases would be put on hold, and that the most recent tape, The Hand of Fear, would only be available for two weeks. I'm not entirely sure why the BBC felt they had to do this, but that is what they did.

Now that the TV Movie has been and gone, there is no sign of the BBC starting to release the old stories once more. They have since 1984 released around ninety different stories (although not all are currently available due to titles being deleted from the catalogue) and there are approximately forty stories which could be released.

To try and get to the bottom of this, I telephoned BBC Video's press office. I eventually managed to speak to someone who, after checking, confirmed that The Green Death, a Jon Pertwee tale involving industrial pollution and giant maggots in a Welsh mining community, is currently scheduled to be released in October this year. They are also 'thinking' about a tribute tape to Jon Pertwee who died earlier this year, but there are no firm plans or details available at this time.

Aside from this there are no other BBC Doctor Who releases scheduled for 1996.

I think this is a great shame as there are a great many fans who would like to buy them and who feel upset that the BBC has seen fit to cancel a publishing programme which has seen nearly every Doctor Who release go straight into the top ten best-sellers chart for the week of release.

For the moment, we're going to have to be patient.