Love & Monsters

Aah, there you are. Thank you for agreeing to meet me at the beach, and I see you've brought binoculars as well, just like I asked. Marvellous.

Now, take a look out there. See that point, just below the horizon, that pinprick of a dot, got three corners, but you can barely make them out? It's a fin. Belongs to a Great White, must be about three miles out.

And turn 45 degrees to your left. Yes, that's right. Look down the shore, he must be about five miles away by now, the wiry gentleman in the long brown coat? Yes, that's him, the Doctor. Look at him, all snug in his deckchair with a banana dacquiri, feet up, and absorbed in his back issues of the Beano for the afternoon.

I think you'll agree, that's about the nearest he'll get to jumping that shark.

I Love Love & Monsters. I do. I really do. It was like being introduced to one of your best friend's new boyfriend/girlfriend in the pub, finding out they are *really* interested in the same sort of things you are, leading to an animated discussion about it for the rest of the night, talking about it in ways you have never done before and wishing last orders could be put back by several days.

10 Things I Loved about Love & Monsters were:

a) The Doctor and Rose trying to defeat a member of the group who won this year's Eurovision for Finland with different coloured buckets of water.

b) Klepto from 'Making Out' playing on a school piano in an ELO tribute session.

c) BBC4 showing an archive ELO concert an hour or so after Doctor Who finished, but not daring to admit there was a connection (bet there was).

d) Jackie Tyler missing Mickey and flashing her dirty under-trollies in the launderette.

e) Peter Kay chucking in a few Brian Potter ad-libs ('Avanti!')

f) Giving new viewers the chance to reminisce about past episodes (Rose, Aliens of That London, The Christmas Invasion) in a far more satisfactory fashion than showing old clips painted red in a Cyberscope.

g) The Abzorbaloff speaking like an old rip from Bolton who's too late for the first house at Mecca Bingo.

h) Ursula keeping her glasses on after being absorbed.

i) Disproving the age-old theory that relationships between a red-blooded male and a paving slab are impossible/unseemly.

j) It confirms that Doctor Who is just the most super-fun programme ever.

Do you know, I've always thought lists are a very lazy way to review things, but I didn't want to faze any casual surfers out there with an impenetrably huge block of text about how much I Love Love & Monsters.

I hope hard-core fans don't get all prissy and precious about this epsiode. There was so much warmth in there, and a clever little display of how much this series is scratched into the conscience of the British public. So far, only Sarah Jane's 'proper goodbye' tops it for me this series.

Unless of course, the rumours about the Christmas special being called 'The Santa Pit' are true. That'd be untoppable.