Tonight, sandwiched between the two parts of the spectacular Strictly Come Dancing final, with Mark and Karen worthy winners, we had an equally exciting episode of Robin Hood, which found the band of outlaws breaking up on the news that King Richard is returning from the Holy Land. Unfortunately, that also meant that Marian, who had previously only agreed to marry Gisborne when the King returned, was now going to have to go through with the marriage. As a result, Marian decides to have one last hurrah as the Night Watchman, and steal some of Gisborne’s money. Unfortunately it all goes wrong, and although the outlaws escape, Marian is critically injured.

The real surprise in this episode is that by the end of the episode, Marian is apparently dead, with Robin trapped in a cave with her body, and the Sheriff coming in. The reason it is a real surprise is that Lucy Griffiths is on the case list for next week – could it be a cunning bit of misdirection from the BBC, making sure that it is a real surprise when she dies, or is it all an elaborate ruse? I guess we’ll have to wait to next week to find out.

Much as with the new style Doctor Who, this was a real edge of the seat cliff-hanger – as with Bad Wolf and Army of Ghosts, this really was everything going wrong, and really left me wanting to see next week, which is a surprise in itself. Certainly if you look back two months I didn’t think much, and I was surprised when it was re-comissioned four weeks ago. Having said that, I genuinely think that it has improved over recent weeks. Keith Allen definitely seems to have hit his stride, with a Sheriff who has shown himself to be truly evil and sadistic at times, and yet incredibly weak, pitiful and snivelling when begging for his life as he has done in recent episodes. I still don’t think that it holds a candle to Robin of Sherwood, but as a bit of Saturday evening entertainment it is now pretty good. It still has the occasional annoying cheesy arrow sound effect with the captions though.