"*ding* - Information - You are all going to die!"

Belatedly, thoughts about the Christmas Who. It had much to recommend it, although it did also contain a generous helping of cheese. Funny Thing #1 - they gave this one an extra ten minutes' run time, pretty much all of which can be accounted for by gratuitous slo-mo and Kylie Minogue's Cheesy Stardust. Funny Thing #2 - the Doctor can't take Mr Copper with him at the end because "I travel alone" - yeah, unless you've got breasts.

But there was some lovely comedy material with the Mighty Cribbins, the choice of which characters lived and died was indeed surprising (and reinforced by overt dialogue, just in case we thickies missed it) and overall it was a sturdy and entertaining episode's worth of adventure stretched lovingly over an hour and ten.

In Old Who terms, the references to The Robots of Death were pretty clear, but it felt more to me like Paradise Towers - the unscrupulous entrepreneur trapped in machine form, hiding in the bowels of his last great creation and sending out the robot serving staff to do his evil bidding. No bad thing, really. They really should have got Tony Hawks to play the villain, though, rather than hire an impersonator.

Overall, easily worth twice the points of last year's Christmas special (of which it was justly said by many reviewers that it was ideal viewing after a few large drinks and a fat Christmas dinner - translation: ideal viewing if you've rendered all your brain cells inoperative, incidentally the only condition in which I'd gladly rewatch it). Perhaps a 7 or an 8 out of 10 this year.