Three weeks into darker Doctor Peter Capaldi’s reign here’s a light-hearted fun romp which plays to the leading actors comedy roots.

It’s almost pantomime.

The Doctor amuses us by believing that he’s in a medieval theme park trying to prove the inhabitants of Sherwood Forest are fakes. His heated interactions with Robin Hood are hilarious.

“I have no sword. I don’t need a sword. Because I am the Doctor and this is my spoon! En garde!”

Ben Miller’s quietly spoken Sheriff of Nottingham steels from Alan Rickman’s film portrayal of the same role. Jenna Coleman shines once again as she avoids the Sheriff’s seduction and instead finds out all his secrets.

Robin Hood and his Merry Men are… Well. Merry.

It’s well-played and funny but hardly a classic episode. I’ve not got much more to say about other than the scene they cut.

The BBC announced that they excised a scene where Robin Hood beheads the Sheriff only for the Sheriff’s head to continue talking revealing that he is in fact a robot. They performed the edit in sympathy to the brutal real life murder of a woman in London a few days before transmission.

You can find the cut scene on the internet if you look for it. And actually the title of the story makes more sense if you know the Sheriff is a robot.

But in truth the story works just as well with the edit. The Sheriff’s motivations are just as plausible if he was fully human than if he was half machine.

What I question is the BBC publicity machine’s real intention in making such a big deal about the edit in the media.

If they hadn’t mentioned it none of us would have been any the wiser. But by promoting the cut they drew attention to it and arguably upset the murder victim’s family more than had they left the scene intact but unpublicised.

Now it’s your turn:

Do you agree with my brief review of Doctor Who Robot of Sherwood? Please leave a comment or post a link to your own article or blog.