Regular readers (all 12 of you) will be well aware of my general weariness of freebies and the apparent frenzy they inspire (see Pastry Gate). Perhaps one of the most expensive marketing moves for a DVD I've ever seen, though, unfolded last weekend, when my Twitter timeline was suddenly filled with photos of people drinking martinis on a new Skyfall-branded train.

Let's be clear. The train looks awesome. But not content with just wrapping the whole of an East Coast locomotive in Skyfall posters, Fox went the extra step and hired out the 11 carriages for a day, ferrying journalists up to Edinburgh and back while they interviewed Naomie Harris and writers Neil Purvis and Robert Wade. It prompted comments such as this:

And (shock, horror) I find myself in agreement with Mr. Blohm once again. But my main reaction - aside from weary disdain of the "throw free things at people to get publicity" tactic - is bewilderment. What on earth does this kind of thing cost?

So, after putting The Avengers' box office takings into everyday perspective, I attempted to do the same for Skyfall. Here's what I managed to work out on my lunch break in what I shall call Movie Maths Vol. 2:

That's almost seven grand, not including the martinis, catering and other hospitality bits and bobs for their junket guests.

I bought Jammie Dodgers for dinner today. It cost me £1 for 20 biscuits. Now, everyone loves Jammie Dodgers. If 20th Century Fox decided to seat its journalist guests on a park bench somewhere and feed them jam-filled sandwich biscuits (which they could easily do given the current level of public awareness), they could've bought 6,780 packets of Jammie Dodgers - or 135,600 biscuits.

Maybe it's because I watched a documentary this week about the fight to lower the price of drugs to help treat millions of people around the world who die from HIV and AIDS each year. Maybe it's because I'm hunting for a flat right now and feel poorer than normal. Maybe I just really like Jammie Dodgers. But all that money to raise the profile of a DVD that's already the highest grossing movie in UK history?

The mind boggles. After all, that's a lot of biscuits.