"Embrace the Darkness" was expected to be a close cousin of the much maligned "Sword of Orion", and sure enough it was. It's Doctor Who how we expect an enthusiastic fan to write it, a Doctor Who drawn from the "exciting space adventure" of the early video back-cover blurbs. The Doctor Who your memory told you was on while you ate fish fingers in 1974. The Doctor Who that came on after Grandstand. It's "The Ark in Space". It's "Planet of Evil". It's "Revenge of the Cybermen".

And what, I feel compelled to ask, is wrong with that? It seems to be the general consensus that Nick Briggs has never written a classic, a story that ranks up there with the best they've ever done. Instead, he's Master of the Typical. Yet it's The Typical that defines something. Doctor Who isn't fondly remembered for when it took unusual steps into the unknown. People in the street don't remember "Ghost Light" or "The Mind Robber" or think of the show as being in any way groundbreaking. They recall "Revenge of the Cybermen" and "Planet of Evil" and, yes, wobbly walls. And sometimes we forget that to be able to knock out great but never fantastic Doctor Who in your sleep is a pretty good talent to have in our midst, certainly not cause for scorn.

What it comes down to is that Briggs is too much like us, even for a fan writer. He writes what we think we all could, in our ignorance of the very craft of fashioning a story. His is a child's imagination at work, an innocent stab at the kind of Doctor Who that ordinary non-pretentious fans and Dad's would be listing as among their favourite stories if they'd been on TV with Tom Baker in. "The One Where They Lost Their Eyes" perhaps.

That "Embrace" is Doctor Who just getting on with being Doctor Who should be cause for celebration for anyone who has ever felt stifled or daunted by the weighty likes of "Zagreus" and "Neverland". Briggs' Doctor Who universe, full of service robots and clanking space ship holds, the same cloth from which "Earthshock" and "Star Wars" and a million comics were cut, is also far more interesting than their polar twins, the historicals like "Church and the Crown" that so effortless draw respect and applause. For fans of a sci-fi show, we're often oddly resistant to these bold forays into a Space Age Future. But remember it was the Daleks metal city that really wowed them back in 1963, not Za the Caveman or Marco Polo.

More-over there's a forgotten joy in joining the Doctor and Charley on what passes for them as an average day. True, the brief cameo by a fleet of Type 70 TARDISes is now an unwelcome reminder of that gargantuan story arc that straddled the season like a coleuses, but that's it. There's no pondering on whether Charley should be alive or not and (thank God) no wretched Gallifrey continuity here. In fact there's no other continuity to be found at all. There's also no majestic dialogue, or character-defining scenes either, but can you quote anything poetic from "Revenge of the Cybermen"? It's still the one most people remember from when they were nine.

It's the small insignificant adventures that the Doctor Who Universe is founded upon. "Embrace the Darkness" is just another Eighth Doctor story, but here's to the "just"! What do you do when you've worn out all your "classics" but return to the "typical"'s, and blow me aren’t they actually really rather good? It's only, after all that, the man’s name that puts you off. Nick Briggs. Perhaps he should write under a pseudonym? Maybe he already does. He might be Simon A. Forward for all we know. You never see them together.