Yet another disappointing entry in this hit and miss 'New Who' season. Russel T.Davies commented that this season was to be lighter - by that I now gather he meant crap incognito.

After last weeks emabarrasment, the less mentioned on that the better, we have a story that notches up the dramatic intensity to nothing more hotter than a tepid cup of milky tea.

As in my opinion last years 'Boom Town' , its one of those stories that really didn't matter if it had been aired or not, a definate 'skip' forward on the forthcoming DVD releases.

The syrupy reason for the children disappearing was not particularly scarey (to see how its done properly see last years 'Father Day'-kid on a swing). Another major let down was the monster in the closet , a crude etching with red glowing eyes that puffs smoke.

Obvious to us all that the money for effects has run particularly dry by now but there was at least one redeeming instance 'the graphite attack' which moementarily built up ones' hope that this would be a good story, from then on it went completely the opposite and plodded along lamely with a few bits of 'fizz' scantily dotted here and there. The rest of the effects on display were feeble attempts at keeping us awake or not go and do something else.

I am sorry but the 'Flower Jelly Fish' - a sort of poor mans 'Matrix' worm did nothing for me either, it was awful, its' main purpose it seemed was to provide the story an ending to a wholely lacklustre affair.

With the cringe worthy vanishing spectator scenario and the Doctor lighting the flame of peace so the aliens could be released to go home this made me want to reach for the sick bag.

Nina Soonaya did a a good job as the fretful mother but her acting ability seemed seriously underused just like the main cast. Most of the time the script called for her to be worried and weirded and....very little else.

The child actress who played Chloe achieved admirable acting capability in and out of her 'possessed' scenes. These scenes were crudely executed however and on the whole were cheaply carried out by getting the child to hoarsely whisper when the alien speaks through her - this was bargain basement effects that caused potential vigour and robust thrills in these scenes to go completely out of the window. So all we had was a child sounding like she needed a good gargle with salt water and that folks was the 'menace'.

Tennant seemed hyperactive as usual squeaking and spitting out his lines throughout the irksome narrative, he seemed more happier and 'bouncy' than normal - probably a lot more than the viewing audiences.

'Fear Her' could have had potential if more care and effort had been applied to it, it wasn't creepy, menacing or scarey just wishy-washy sci-fi soap that seems to epitomise the style that T.Davies wants and is seeminglycontent with - how selfish.

I have drawn to the conclusion that this seasons scripts with the exception of a few rare beauties are to blame for the sheer lack of quality and enthusiasm this time around. Tennant and Piper can and have achieved vignettes of super drama in previous stories but this is constantly let down by unnecessary 'over-the-top' stupidity and far too many 'IN YER FACE!' moralist preachings. This instalment was a prime example of such shoddy fayre.

Jacob Clifton, who writes the Doctor Who recaps over at the Television Without Pity website – and very good they are too – has a theory about the series. Well, actually he has many and varied theories about the show, which are often expounded upon at length in his pieces – never one to shy away from analysis and subtext, is Jacob – but perhaps chief amongst them is the idea of Doctor Who as an unconscious depiction of the United Kingdom’s low sense of self-esteem. “The Healing of Albion,” the idea than Britain and the British should be put through the wringer and subjected to all manner of evils before they come out clean on the other side.

He’ll certainly have a field day with Fear Her, if and when the US Sci-Fi Channel ever gets around to showing it. For one of the chief ideas the episode carries – and probably one of its most accurate – is the boost to national self-esteem and sense of worth that hosting the Olympic Games in 2012 will provide. We have seen before in just about every other country that’s held the Games that the pride and patriotism which comes from being chosen to be the custodian of the grand tradition of sportsmanship and something great and good about the human condition can be a boost to even those who are not directly connected with anything going on at the Games. Merely being there, in the country and seeing the verve and joy it brings to the nation, is enough.

Occasionally such pride and patriotism can go too far – I know that the Atlanta Games of 1996 made some people feel almost physically ill, and it’s perhaps very appropriate that this episode first aired in the UK the day before England played their second round match at the 2006 World Cup in Germany. An episode based against one of the two greatest and most-watched sporting events on the planet, being shown while the other one is taking place – no accident on the part of the production team, you’d think.

But the World Cup, like the Olympics – although the Olympics suffers this to a lesser degree, being mainly about individuals rather than groups – is often criticised for the flag-waving patriotism being only a stone’s throw away from nationalism, which leads us down the ugly path of superiority complexes and racism. In Fear Her we see the streets bedecked with Union Flags, although the number of them around and about is pretty tame compared to the swathes of St George’s Crosses currently covering English front room windows, car aerials and pub beer gardens.

There’s nothing wrong with getting behind your country and its representatives in a sporting event, and flying a flag to show your allegiance – indeed, the pride and passion and love and emotions of all kinds that such sporting events bring out in us all, the sense of togetherness and unity as we bind together to celebrate our nation is one of the few times when such a thing as Englishness ever exists – Britishness too, perhaps, as the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish seem strong enough in their own identities as individual nations even without the aid of sports teams.

Often a minority of morons will spoil it for the many thousands who do no wrong; they take it too far, sing the racist songs, get drunk and start violence. Less so now, but still idiotically. It’s happened the weekend this episode aired, with a tiny, tiny minority in Germany ruining the good reputation English fans have been building up there, so it was good to see Fear Her taking a stand and showing that sports events en masse can be a good thing.

That said, however, it did almost feel on occasions as if the episode could have just as easily been sent in the present day, with the 2012 setting used merely to provide that Olympic backdrop and the chance to throw in a few audience amusing novelties such as the idea of Take That, complete with Robbie, performing at the opening ceremony, or Shayne Ward bringing out a Greatest Hits CD. And whoever’s idea it was to get Huw Edwards doing the commentary ought to hang their heads in shame – getting real people in to play themselves sometimes works, as Andrew Marr showed back in series one, but Edwards is pretty awful here.

I do have to admit that Fear Her was not an episode I was especially looking forward to, mainly because of its writer. While I did very much enjoy Matthew Graham’s work on Life on Mars earlier this year, the previous effort of his I’ve seen – ITV’s 1999 post-apocalyptic serial The Last Train – was a clunker, and in every interview I’ve seen with Graham I’ve got the distinct impression that he doesn’t really ‘get’ Doctor Who. I know that’s a terrible arrogant and fannish thing to say, and many of you will doubtless think it’s simply because he’s not an out-and-out fan like most of the other writers on the current incarnation of the show. Not so – I never got the same sense of unease with Toby Whithouse or Tom MacRae when I read interviews with them before their episodes aired. Graham, however, just seemed too… Well, ‘ordinary’, I suppose. I’m not saying all Doctor Who scriptwriters ought to be hand-crafted by Telefantasy Angels, touched by Grace and handed down to us from high on a mountain top with their CVs carved on tablets of marble, but… Well, it’s hard to explain.

Anyway, the important point is that on the whole I was pleasantly surprised. The central concept of the episode is pretty damn good – the idea of a little girl who can snatch people into her drawings. Very Sapphire & Steel. The nightmare vision of her dead father, trapped in the wardrobe, was also superb, and probably conceptually the high point of the episode. I would not be at all surprised if the father was not featuring in a few real nightmares after this episode went out. There is also some very good interaction between the Doctor and Rose – when he thinks that she’s holding her hand out to him made me smile, and just before that when he reveals that he was, indeed, once a father. We’ve always known he must have had children at some point, in fact it’s practically the first thing we ever do learn about him, but it’s nice to have it referred to again for the first time in a very long time.

Mind you, not all of the Rose and Doctor scenes are spectacularly good. The very end of the episode, for example, where the Doctor broods on an approaching storm could not have been less subtle had it been painted luminous yellow and leapt up and down on the spot, singing Three Lions by Baddiel, Skinner and The Lightning Seeds in a screeching falsetto while holding up a large sign saying ‘This is foreshadowing events in the season ending two-parter!’ We do get the idea, you know – there’s no need to sledgehammer it home.

Aside from that, there was little to complain about – only the Doctor lighting the Olympic flame, which was ridiculously over the top and made even less bearable by Edwards’ continuing awful voiceover, really irritated me. The guest cast were all good – the girl playing Chloe especially, and it was good to see yet another Casanova co-star of Tennant’s in the form of Nina Sosanya, who I’m a fan of.

So, certainly not a stellar episode, and probably not one that will live long in the memory of the general audience or rate highly in the fan rankings. But a solid enough stop gap, marking time in the schedules before we come to what looks like a truly epic adventure to follow.

I'm sorry, boys and girls, but for me that was quite possibly the dullest episode we have had since the series returned.

It's a real shame too. The story actually had some really great ideas in it, not all original, but good, strong ideas that were simply frittered away. The idea of a child's drawings coming to life was brilliantly built up in the pre-credits sequence and then very badly sidelined throughout the rest of the story. And this was symptomatic of the whole feel of it - cost cutting and down sizing to the degree that strong ideas are very sketchily developed.

And Euros Lyn seemed, for me, to be struggling to present the material in a dynamic way without blowing the budget. His direction had some very interesting touches - big close-ups moving into frame for example - but I just felt that the 'Brookside Close' feel of it all undermined any attempts to be visually interesting. There was a real struggle to generate tension too. Rose being attacked by the 'scribble' was great but it was a momentary flicker of a tangible threat within the story. And I'm sorry, but for a series that actually prides itself on being televisual, to reduce what should be the overwheming threat and fear of an abusive father to a lacklustre bit of red lighting and a shadow looming on the landing seemed to be really dismissive of the sheer visual power that the series has harnessed since its return. All that good work was undone with that cliched 'less is more' directing, lighting and editing in an ill -judged denoument.

I didn't feel that the 2012 Olympics setting was quite working either. It seemed very tacked on and a rather weak vehicle to move the story on. It was also highly predictable that the Doctor would swan off with the Olympic torch too. And Huw Edwards did this scene setting no fsvoours with his ham-fisted role as commentator.

I loved the sprinklings of humour, from the parking of the TARDIS, the mock Inspector Morse exchanges and to running gag of the cakes with the ball bearings on. Great little riffs that helped to lift it but not really enough to save it from wearing far too much of its message on its sleeve. The nods to the Doctor being a dad and the Shadow Proclamation were welcome too. The performances were, on average, very good, especially Tennant and Piper, and from Edna Dore and Nina Sosanya.

It's influences and inspirations were perhaps a little too obvious; much was lifted from 'Marianne Dreams' by Catherine Storr ( later televised as 'Escape Into Night' and the inspiration for the film 'Paperhouse' ) but also Wyndham's 'Chocky' kept nagging away at the back of my mind. There were also touches of 'The Excorcist' and 'The Omen'. However, I felt that there was too light a touch in both directing and scripting to really be able to generate any genuine scares on the back of these influences. It all felt very pale in comparison. The Doctor Who story it most resembled for me was 'Survival' and that story, as an example of the utterly fantastic erupting into mundane surburbia, wipes the floor with this. For me the fantastical elements really didn't have enough impact within the story to make it truly startling and convincingly menacing and exciting. The excitement seemed to rapidly drain out of the episode through a combination of small budget, muddled direction and variable acting.

Thematically, the episode is on stronger footing. There was an attempt to try and discuss child abuse and its affects on wives and children and the 'blame culture' that currently exists in society. I particularly thought the scene in the street where the residents seem happy to make the council worker the scapegoat for the events was strong and there was an undercurrent of racial intolerance mixed in too that made this a little more truthful.

The subsequent 'fingers on lips' scene was also for me a really good indication of how Tennant can be authoritative without resorting to a gimmicky performance.

I very much enjoyed the ideas about creativity and the mother/father complex. The child's drawings could be seen as projections that occur as the child/alien gets 'inside' other people, gets to know them and to 'create' them as characters around it/her. It's something we all do throughout our own lives. We invest life in the people around us from material in our own inner selves and this process allows us to discriminate between what is observed and what is invented to the degree that we can assemble sketches of our own personal complexes. Our own inferiority complexes can be assembled from people we end up despising. The living drawing of the father is a huge inferiority complex made tangible. And it lives in the wardrobe - the dark of the unconscious mind. A wonderfully rich notion tapping into both imaginary childhood fears and real family traumas.

The alien is symbolic of a creative impulse that must be utilised in order for it to remain healthy. Failure to use your inner potential can lead to impotence and a damaged personality. The alien uses the human girl to activate this potential in order to find 'love', to be replenished and to survive. Likewise, the creative act of singing, of using music, by mother and daughter to express positive feelings and reassert reality.

These are very strong ideas but they are rather under-developed in the story. I would love to have seen the drawings all come to life, which I believe was the intention, as I feel this would have been the powerful visual statement that, sadly, the episode excused itself from doing.

Low budget should not equal poor episode. Here, the script, full of good ideas, progresses in a very linear structure and the location is too confined. Ironically, this seems to have hemmed in the 'creativity' of the production team and despite some brief flashes of life, the way the story is delivered lacks pace and seems oddly joyless in counterpoint to the rather joyful resolution of its themes.

Good concept, good script and good performances but it ultimately fell flat.You sometimes find you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear and no amount of back-pedalling can save you! It's a neat summation of what is wrong with this episode, I'm afraid.

There's been something missing in this first David Tennant season up until now, which was present in the Eccleston one. Last season, there was a sense of daring about the whole idea of bringing back "Doctor Who" to mainstream audiences and making them love it again. Last year they weren't content to just do original series ideas with today's money and techniques... they wisely also used some of the writing tricks and innovations that the writers of the books and the audios developed in the wilderness years, like featuring Rose's extended family and seeing the consequences of her TARDIS travelling on them, or of her going back to meet her dead father, or getting rid of Gallifrey and the consequences on the Doctor, and so on. While the majority of the stories this year have been very good, as a whole, this year has felt like just more of the same of last year... until "Love & Monsters," where Russell T. Davies has chosen to go out on a limb and do one of the "rad" styles seen in the books and the audios at least a few times every year. It's been shocking to a lot of hardcore fans, who perhaps gave up on supporting the series when it was off TV and didn't pay any attention to the books and the audios in the wilderness years, or else they would've seen innovative material like this before. Fans with a narrow focus on what they think "Doctor Who" should be (like, say, the Troughton or early Tom Baker years) and should always be are not going to enjoy this story. Fans with a more eclectic and open-minded range of tastes of the sort the Doctor himself would probably have will, I hope, agree with me and have had a lot of real fun while watching this very successful experiment.

When you think about it, it's actually not that much of an innovation; seeing the world of "Doctor Who" through the point-of-view of one of those ordinary people who get caught in the background of the Doctor's adventures. It's been done in other genre TV series, and it's really just something this TV series has never done before, and it's high time it did, if you ask me. The really clever part is in writing these formerly background characters so even-handedly and well-balanced... never making Elton seem too geeky, or else he'd just be a Clive-from-"Rose" clone and not very sympathetic to the at-large audience...never making the others in LINDA too obsessive either and in fact having them get more interested in each other than they are in the Doctor. Until our villain turns up, they're very close to being a "Doctor Who" fan club, and I'm sure the regular gatherings so many of us around the world have were Russell's starting point. It's only when the fat collector who wants to absorb the Doctor himself turns up that it stops being fun, which again is a parallel to fan groups... there's often that one who joins who ruins it for everyone else out of his own greed, when everyone else just wanted to have a good time talking about how weird it all is. Sure, he introduces you to the lost sound file of the TARDIS you've never heard before, but he's done it for his own ends, not to help you, and didn't you have a lot more fun making your own crap music (for this read "amateur fan video")? Russell's found the truth behind the best and the worst of we our communities and dramatized it in "Doctor Who" itself, and that's the really original part that I can't recall anyone doing before.

I think this was the best guest cast the series has assembled yet, which was quite important since Tennant and Piper are on a 60s-era-style almost-not-in-the-episode schedule. It's hard to pick a favorite, and the only reason I'm going to single out Shirley Henderson as Ursula Blake here is because I love her so much in the "Harry Potter" movies, and she brings much the same "strong wallflower" energy to this part here. She's fantastic. Our main protagonist and antagonists were excellent as well, them being Marc Warren as Elton and Peter Kay as Victor Kennedy and the Absorbaloff. Warren's got a sort of vulnerable intensity about his face, particularly in his eyes, and he reminds me a lot in looks of Mark Strickson (Turlough from the Davison era). So he was fun to watch, as was Kay the Absorbaloff. Again, I'm American, and Kay's act that's so well-known in the UK hasn't reached me over here, but I can see how he's so successful as a comedy actor because he's clearly a talented actor first and foremost, and knows exactly how to time and pace a scene for maximum effect. I loved watching the glances he'd throw in concert with the gestures from his cane when telling people not to touch him.

I'm also in that corner of people who love the idea of the Absorbaloff, and especially how the faces of his victims are not only visible but still active (and Ursula's complete with her glasses!). He's also a bit rubbish and easy for the Doctor to defeat, which in a comedy episode is exactly what you want, and his comeuppance is quite amusing, but also touching at the same time as LINDA unites to fight back against him.

Now, some of you undoubtedly are so attached to the Doctor and Rose that you're a bit upset that they're not in this very much. This is true, and there shouldn't ever be a steady diet of that, but this once is very interesting, and in any case their effects on the story are everywhere. Rose is present through her connection with her mum, and how she and Jackie defend each other from what they think are Elton's less-than-noble advances into their circle. Jackie had quite a bit of time, and while it started out with the typical almost sitcom-style humor from lusty Jackie, it turned 180 degrees to her genuine love for Rose after she phones, and to her protective instincts of both her and the Doctor now when she finds that photo in Elton's pocket. Again, there's touching truth hidden here behind the humor, and I should add that Camille Coduri in these sequences gave what was by far her best performance in the series to date. And I love that when Rose does finally turn up, she's so ticked with what Elton did in upsetting her mum that she has a go at him before she even acknowledges the Absorbaloff is there. And then there's the Doctor's more direct influence on Elton's life... his failure to save Elton's mum when he was a child and how that memory has been blocked out of Elton's mind, until finally the Doctor tells him all about it and we get that tear-jerking home film footage set to what I assume is another ELO song. There must be countless people like Elton who were affected by the things going on around the Doctor, and it was long past time we saw the situation through one of their eyes. But best of all was the lesson that Elton took from all of this, which is that although the Doctor's life (and life in general) is so much darker and so much madder than we're ever taught, he also thinks it's so much better than we're taught as well. I think Russell just wrote what he's going to have on his own tombstone when he wrote this line. Intellectually, I'm not at all sure I can agree with it. People who get caught up in historical events usually get literally trodden on... ask a war refugee, a tsunami victim, an amputee from a bomb attack, or Ursula-the-paving-slab at the end. Emotionally, I would really like to believe in this "isn't it exciting" philosophy again, the way I could when I was a child. Elton also tells us that "we forget because we must" and quotes Stephen King saying "salvation and damnation are the same thing," and these are my problems these days... there's too many things I can't simply forget anymore, and I can't often ignore the damnation for the salvation. But I do know this... I was smarter as a child than I am as an adult, and every great "Doctor Who" episode reminds me of that, and with every one of these that we get, it gets easier for me to listen to my smarter, younger self.

Other random observations... I love that the twin planet of Raxacorocofallipatorius is simply named Klom. I've never listened to ELO before and am now thinking I should start... Ursula-the-paving-slab is a very funny idea, so much so I'll forgive the obvious science problems. I loved the little flashbacks to the three alien invasions we've seen in the present day since "Rose," and how Elton tried to portray these as him being in on the big secret, even though most everyone in the world must have heard of at least the last two. The TARDIS sound effect truly is the most beautiful sound in the world.

I do have one small niggle with this episode which will prevent me giving it a full 10 out of 10... how did the Doctor know where to find Elton at the end? I'm sure there are many ways to explain this, but we need at least a clue as to how this happened. I will say 9.5 out of 10 for "Love & Monsters." More like this please, Russell... just plug that plot hole next time.

After the accomplished space opera of The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit we come crashing back down to Earth with arguably the most self-indulgent RTD script to date: one egocentrically centred around the producer’s previous Who efforts (with inevitable flashbacks, or reconstructions, of scenes from Rose, Aliens of London and The Christmas Invasion; and a central plot which derives itself directly from the first episode Rose) and featuring what resembles a fat, flatulent Sil with a Bolton accent from, surprise, surprise, the twin planet of the Slitheens, the contrastingly monosyllabic Clom, courtesy of an admittedly generally straight performance from Peter Kay. Kay is reasonably believable as the villain Victor Kennedy, rising subtly above the fairly cheap quips and one-liners from RTD. What is absolutely absurd however is how once Kennedy reveals himself as an alien, Kay suddenly slips into his native Bolton accent. Well, we’ve had a Mancunian Timelord previously, so why not a blob from Bolton? I don’t think it’s being a snob to prefer aliens speaking in non-regional accents – remember the stick the fans used to chuck at Stor the Sontaran in Invasion of Time for his slight London twang? And, indeed, the vaguely Glaswegian Vardans in same story? And the Canadian Cyber Leader in Revenge of the Cybermen? Not to mention the Brummie Vervoids? As far as I recall though, those were the only comparable examples to the Bolton Abzorbaloff. RTD also gifts us with the first ever alien to have its name chosen for it by the incidental characters, which further gifts us with probably the funniest moments in this fairly comedic story as Kay remarks with a hand gesture, ‘Abzorbaloff – I like that’. I suppose though this was fortunate as I was thinking prior to screening that to have a name so obviously descriptive of one’s primary function would be absurd. But what we actually have in the Abzorbaloff is a comic-book alien that smacks, particularly vocally, of the Vogons from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, wherein ‘it’ would more appropriately sit. But not in the essentially straight sci-fi of Doctor Who; well, mostly straight anyway.

The scene near the beginning in which the Doctor and Rose are chased back and forth from behind the conveniently placed walls of a corridor – the set clearly structured purely to achieve this pantomime effect – is utterly ludicrous and slapstick in the true Scoobie Doo vein. Literally, this is like watching a cartoon. It might be vaguely amusing if it wasn’t such an utter cliché. Other scenes which sit incongruously in the Who cannon for their sheer comedy include the shot of the Abzorbaloff hiding behind a newspaper as he burps from his latest absorptions, and the inevitable scatological moment when one of his absorbed victims says ‘you don’t want to know’ (where she is) as the monster lifts its hefty rump to a fart sound (or has Kennedy been buying chairs from Sunshine Desserts?). But by far the most ludicrous scene in this entire story is that of the sweating, heaving Abzorbaloff chasing after Elton Pope in broad daylight – if I’d just switched on at this point I would have assumed this was some repeat of The Tomorrow People or even Rent-A-Ghost. Well, almost anyway. Yes, this is a fairly well realised monster visually, though utterly comic-book in design, and the effect of the victims’ faces straining out from his stomach is very well done and pretty sinister in its own way (reminding me of the Timelord faces on the tomb of Rassilon in Five Doctors), but come on, this is stuff. Yes, I know the monster was created by a kid, but that doesn’t mean in turn that the entire episode has to be scripted and directed as if playing to a purely juvenile audience.

Having said this however, Love and Monsters (a title uncannily like a certain Ian McKellan film) is in other ways certainly not geared towards a juvenile audience. The obvious and tedious flirtations between Jackie and Elton aside, we have as a grand finale a rather blatant allusion to fellatio at the end when, holding the face of Ursula precariously close to his crotch, Elton inevitably ejaculates (excuse pun), ‘We even have a bit of a love life’! Or is that my own murky imagination at work there? I think not. Such innuendo might be the common fodder of most modern TV programmes post 9pm, but it has absolutely no place in what is essentially an escapist family programme. The polar – or rather, bi-polar – swings between slapstick juvenilia and libidinous innuendos are becoming uncomfortable trademarks of RTD scripts, and betray an imagination – or in some instances, lack of one – which quite clearly doesn’t fit within the parameters of Doctor Who; is misplaced in the medium altogether. This isn’t to say that RTD doesn’t display a certain flair in snatches of sharp dialogue and a certain understanding of zeitgeist, but these assets to his writing – hyperbolically inflated beyond rationality though they are – are simply not suited to Doctor Who.

Love and Monsters goes some way beyond RTD’s previous attempts to give Doctor Who a complete face-lift beyond recognition into the Noughties: it is an episode which is the true distillation of this producer’s vision for the programme, one sodden in egocentrically plugged authorial self-references, an innuendo-laden, scatological comic-strip which manages just to have the edge over previous atrocities such as Aliens of London due to its unique narrative slant via the sufficiently appealing central character of Elton Pope (who, thank God, actually likes a reasonably good band too) who draws us into his obsessive little world of Doctor-spotting, shot through his home video camera. Ostensibly this unusual directorial approach works: it is refreshing to view the Doctor through the eyes of someone else, a stranger, and ironically the few brief glimpses we have of the Doctor reveal him as a more interesting and subdued enigma than the majority of this season’s episodes so far. Maybe we actually need a little less of him in a way in future; to catch him in glimpses as one often felt with the early Tom Baker performances. What I mean is, the Doctor should be on screen as much as possible, but not always so pivotally as he has been in recent episodes. Let the incidental characters take over from time to time. Love and Monsters then serves a similar function to the penultimate Sherlock Holmes episode, The Mazarin Stone, which too only featured the central actor Jeremy Brett in scenes at the beginning and the end of the episode (but due to Brett’s ill-health). As a one-off experiment this was an interesting idea, but was inevitably blasted out of the water of credibility by too many OTT (remember that term, once seen as synonymous with the Graham Williams and latter JNT era/s?) moments. And what on Earth were those snatches of LINDAs’ extra-curricular activities all about? The shot of them jamming was not only very embarrassing, but also completely and utterly superfluous to the storyline – so why do it? Because you can? That’s not enough reason, especially within the tight confines of 45 minutes. The inevitable price of such frivolous indulgences is the lack of time to explain anything about the alien menace in question – apparently the Abzorbaloff just wants to scoff a load of Timelord and then nick the TARDIS to plague the universe with his pointless appetites. How interesting. Nothing about how did he get to Earth or anything as mundane as that.

The sub-plot of Elton recalling the Doctor appearing in his house when he was a child was nicely woven in, with a lightning-quick explanation from the Timelord regarding the nature of the menace he came to deal with: ‘a shade escaped from the Howling Halls’. It would have been better perhaps to have featured more of this sub-plot, lifted though it sounds from the Sapphire and Steel train station story.

For me this episode was a pointless gap-filler, and in the main, quite embarrassing and disturbingly reminiscent of Season 24’s comic excesses. On the conceptual and scriptural level it was evidently experimental for the Who format, which did not entirely misfire, but did serve to show that here RTD wanted to indulge himself once again, at the expense of all Who convention, but I’m left wondering, what for? Did this episode add anything to the legacy of Doctor Who? I don’t really think so. Nothing worth a third viewing anyway. This concept might have suited a Who spin-off production, but not Who itself. Love and Monsters’ boasts a uniqueness of approach which is not engaging or compelling enough to justify itself, due to its essential silliness and mawkish attempt at sentiment. It only just has the edge over the facile New Earth due to its unconventionality and knowing humour, but is a close runner up for worst episode this year so far.

4/10

This must be the worst "Doctor Who" episode of all time (makes the Horns of Nimon look outstanding). Where was the Doctor? Where was the plot? The Abzorbaloff was a fantastic creation, could be one of my favourite monsters, apart from the dodgy northern accent (well done to the Blue Peter competition winner), but the rest was simply dreadful. Real "car crash television" - I couldn't stop watching this out of disbelief that it could get any worse, but it did.

The episode was reduced to cheap slapstick from the start, with the Doctor and Rose chasing around after a pantomime alien like something out of Scooby Doo. After the first Eccleston story (Rose), I always thought it was a shame that the writers didn't do more with the conspiracy theorist idea (Clive the anorak tracking the doctor's different appearances in history via the internet, etc), and it was nice to see the idea resurrected through the LINDA group. Shame this was wasted on such a rubbish "story", and some moments like the band performing ELO covers just made me cringe. Most of this episode was irrelevant to Doctor Who.

The only light relief for this viewer was Jackie Tyler's attempted seduction of Elton, though probably I should keep my own personal fantasies about older women out of this J. Even the moral background of the Doctor was undermined - given his love of humanity, he would never reduce a human being to a life as a face grafted onto a paving slab. Another ridiculous ploy just to get in a cheap knob gag. Davies should be sacked for this!

Overall, this was embarrassing filler - surely it would have been better to extend one of the other stories into a two-parter (The Girl in the Fireplace?), taking more time to build the story, as in the classic series. The quick editing and high tempo of many of the episodes in this series has left me cold, and I would much rather have some suspense and proper character development than this kind of cartoon comedy. Truly awful.