“Goodbyee! Goodbyee! Wipe a tear, baby dear, from your eyee!”

I split writing about The War Games into two parts for a number of reasons. Chief amongst them was that when the serial was released on VHS it was across two cassettes, the boxes of which were stuck together in the shop with sticky tape, so they didn’t come apart and end up being sold separately. This, at least from BBC Video’s point of view, justified a higher price point for what is after all a lot of material, albeit not so much that it wouldn’t fit on a single shop bought four hour tape.

In the late twentieth century and well into the twenty first, media companies were overly engaged with a metric they called “perceived value”, and the rules of “perceived value” indicated that people would pay more for (or at least object to paying the same amount for less) an item with exactly the same contents if the box was bigger, something that communicated that you were getting a lot for your money.