YOUR FIRST THOUGHT, faced with Desperate Housewives: Behind Closed Doors (TimeWarner Books £14.99; offer £13.49) might be: what’s the point? You’ve seen the show. You’re looking forward to the second season. But that’s it. Let’s not push it, eh.

Frankly, call yourself a fan? Don’t you want Bree’s recipe for blueberry muffins, or read of Teri Hatcher’s (Susan) unconvincing love for Nicollette Sheridan (Bree): “In a world filled with half-truths and shams, I appreciate Nicollette’s gift for truthfulness.”

It has all the inside scoop on how the characters are dressed, how they were dreamt up, and a handy episode-so-far guide. What joyous, frivolous things TV tie-ins are. Kind of unnecessary, but so’s the cherry on the cake and who doesn’t like to swipe that? The Lost Chronicles (Channel 4 Books £14.99; offer £13.49) comes with a red sticker: “This book contains episode summaries and character revelations for the entire first series of Lost.” Spoilers aside, it contains a DVD of the pilot episode of the desert island air-crash drama but is otherwise pretty dull. More intriguingly, a novel, Lost: Endangered Species by Cathy Hapka (Channel 4 Books £4.99; offer £4.74), focuses on the environmentalist Faith Harrington, a character who will ultimately feature in the TV show. Very multimedia.

Given the show’s high-minded appeal, it’s entirely appropriate that the end of Six Feet Under has been heralded by an academic tome, Reading Six Feet Under (I.B. Tauris £9.99; offer £9.49). Edited by two academics (Kim Akass and Janet McCabe), the book examines such matters as “Desperately seeking Brenda: writing the self in Six Feet Under”. As long as you take pleasure in sentences such as “The oscillation between isolation and community parallels that between repression and revelation in the series’s psychodramas”, you’ll be just fine.

The reborn Dr Who has spawned several books. The Shooting Scripts (BBC Books £18.99; offer £17.09) is dull and just for, well, who? It is simply, the scripts of the series which were shown earlier this year littered with a few screen grabs of exploding Daleks.

Far better, in fact so much so it will pop the buttons of even the sturdiest anoraks, is Doctor Who: The Legend Continues (BBC Books £20; offer £18). Packed with pictures and containing a detailed breakdown of every Doctor Who story yet made, this is a fantastic, nostalgic, and frighteningly rigorous compendium of storylines, characters and off-screen intrigues.

Strictly Come Dancing (BBC Books £14.99; offer £13.49) serves no discernible purpose. But there are handy guides to each dance. For the quickstep we learn: “There’s no stamping, just quick light brushes and pivot turns.”

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