What disgusts me the most about Big Finish...

Nick Briggs, Gary Russell, Barnaby Edwards, et al. may attack us on social media and claim that they don't want us as fans, but they're still willing to fleece us for every penny they can get because they know that we're their most reliable customers, not the millennial hipsters they so desperately chase.

The gulf in cost between recent NuWho releases and old TruWho releases with exactly the same runtime demonstrates that they know they can't count on the support of the fickle NuWho fanbase. The most expensive NuWho box set is The Tenth Doctor Adventures Volume 1, costing £29 for 300 minutes of content. It was released as recently as 2016, yet the Fourth Doctor Lost Stories box set released all the way back in 2011 still costs £45 for exactly the same amount of content. The only possible explanation for this disparity is the fact that they know the majority of NuWho fans wouldn't pay that much. David Tennant is vastly more in-demand than Tom Baker, and his stories had to be written from scratch, whereas Baker's are just modified versions of existing scripts, so there's no way the production costs for the latter's box set were significantly higher. Briggs just knows it's more likely that we'll care enough to shell out that much.

Big Finish still has value - for now. The fact that there are still new authentic Doctor Who stories to look forward to starring Tom Baker and Lalla Ward, written by Andrew Smith and Marc Platt, is fantastic, and however much I resent the absolute scumbags who run the company, I'm never going to turn that down, but I can safely say that I'll never buy another story not written by an original series contributor again. When Smith and Platt retire, I'm done. If imbeciles like Max Curtis and Juno Dawson are the future of the company, it's safe to say I won't be missing much.

I think I've said this before but the point where I think they most strongly demonstrated their slimy, money-grubbing contempt for their buyers was with The Four Doctors subscribers' special back in 2010.

Unlike previous subscriber specials, it was made clear this one would never get a 'general release' later. It would be permanently unavailable to everyone else. In effect to non-subscribers we were being denied content.

And it sucked, because as I said I'd really enjoyed Nick Briggs' Dalek Empire audios, and infact they'd given me real solace and comfort during a dark time in my life. I'd wanted to believe more than anything that Nick was a fan doing Big Finish for the love more than the money. And yet here I was being shown what an unpleasantly elitist and cold business he was prepared to administer.

I still preferred to buy from the shops, and this was in 2010, when I'd just begun to feel that Big Finish was worth following again after a quality lull. I'd bought and enjoyed the Colin Baker lost stories range, and the return of Jamie and Zoe trilogy, and the Klein and Stockbridge trilogies.

But this just made it feel like I shouldn't even have bothered being as loyal a buyer as I was, because apparently none of those purchases had gotten me any closer to The Four Doctors, and none ever would unless I went to the full trouble. No I apparently had to jump through their hoops to ever get it.

And it didn't even make business sense to disgruntle their buyers like this. Surely they were more likely to lose customers or incentivise piracy this way.

And so I decided for a time to boycott them altogether. I literally couldn't stomach spending on them anymore.

The stuff released as box sets is prohibitively expensive to me and so i doubt i will ever get to hear any of it. There is the possibility of it being resold on Ebay perhaps and that may give me a route in but i dare say anyone trying to flog it there will be trying to get their money back so it wont come cheap even on ebay.

Until that is BF go bust and they heavily discount their stock to clear it all and pay off their outstanding creditors.

Ofcourse, none of this would be an issue issue if the fascist running dog Tory/LibDem military junta hadn't virtually razed the torrent industry to the ground back at the start of this decade.