Radio Times

We never found out what the monster of the week really was - and I couldn't care less if you paid me to. The monster, the jokes, those gorgeous landscapes on the planet of Midnight - it was all there just to get people in a room shouting at each other. Fantastic.

And add it up. There were six ordinary passengers in the luxury cruise bus, plus a hostess and, of course, the Doctor. Add in the driver and mechanic who stayed in their control cabin, bung in this thing banging on the hull and top...

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I called it on River Song, you can't say I didn't. True, writer Steven Moffat thought of it, wrote the script, and in part one pointed us very firmly toward a type of tragedy the show has never done before. But I guessed.

I reached this conclusion after a cascade of deducing, which you were probably doing too, especially if you happened to have studied the extended trailer that ran on Eurovision night and has zoomed around YouTube since.

But even if you'd worked out what would happen to her, there was still plenty to keep...

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Best story so far - and I'm not just saying that because writer Steven Moffat is taking over. No, I'm saying this next bit because writer Steven Moffat is taking over: you're the greatest writer in all the land, Doctor Who is in tremendous hands, we've all put the US version of Coupling behind us, now gimme a job.

I first met him on the set of Press Gang and in the last couple of years we have disagreed on countless things, every last one of which I now completely accept I was wrong about.

That's the creeping...

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Admit it, you want to read Agatha Christie novels now. Tonight's Doctor Who was a 43-minute advert for her and I'd have said there could be no harder customer to convince than me. Miss Marple leaves me looking at my watch, the Orient Express is just a train and Poirot makes me crave slapping people. Mostly Poirot himself.

But put the woman herself into a Doctor Who comedy murder mystery with a jewel thief called the Unicorn and a ten-foot wasp and I'm sold. It's only a surprise that ITV1 didn't go the same route when it revamped...

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The Doctor wouldn't tell you in tonight's episode, so I will: the answer to Donna's question is that a woman Time Lord is called a Time Lady.

It wasn't a hard answer, you could argue she might reasonably have worked it out herself, and it's true that the Doctor was occupied. But still, it sounds somehow naff. They definitely did not think of Time Lady first and then work out the male equivalent. Time Lord sounds a little posh, Time Lady is just somehow dismissive, like you married a Time Lord for his Tardis. And Time Ladies is...

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Second parts are a killer. I know this because I once wrote a Tuesday episode of Crossroads and the sole fun part was standing in my kitchen talking to the writers of Monday and Wednesday's episodes about how they fit together.

But as good as it was to see actors saying my lines on TV, we three were only chatting because we needed a social life. There was no real need to compare notes like that because when you're on a soap, you are all lumbered with an intensively detailed outline, I mean preposterously detailed. When you're on...

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OK, so, yes: watching Doctor Who is a collective experience, sure it is. We're all there on Saturday nights and that's a great thing, whatever. But stuff what I said about that - this week I got a preview DVD! I only mentioned preview discs to you before as an aside and now here I was, the gold-dust parcel in my hands: tell me honestly, what would you do?

I borrowed headphones, got a bowl of chilli con carne from the BBC canteen and tried very hard to watch quietly. Sixty pairs of eyes burnt into my back...

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So this time when someone stopped me in the corridor, I was ready. You'd like this guy, it was Moray Laing: tall, smart, and he edits Doctor Who Adventures magazine, so he knows everything. Including how I would react to this week's episode.

"You'll cry," he warned me. And I don't want to say whether he was right or not but, cough, the rest of this blog is about football.

He did have one thing to ask me, though: "Do you write your blog immediately after the show?"

What does he think I am? What kind of social...

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No. You can't see the photo of me playing chess with K9. Thanks for asking, phoning, emailing, stopping me in corridors, but it will not happen. You're thinking that I'm embarrassed, uncomfortable and maybe even ashamed, to which I can only say: what else would I be? But, look, if I showed anyone, I'd show you.

There's really just a small practical problem. The guy who took the photo used to think I was a bit of an eejit, so in my very first national newspaper article I tried my best to get him arrested and sent...

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There's a photo of me somewhere playing chess with K9 in the 1970s. It's not my proudest Doctor Who moment, I'd have done better to pick Scrabble, but it is the earliest I can remember. Since then I've written about Who for BBC News and Radio Times, I've been to the Doctor Who offices in Cardiff, I've sat in on recording sessions and I dare not watch the new Five Doctors DVD because I might just be visible in one of the featurettes.

Break it to me gently if I am. I'll be the guy wearing...

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