Sherlock.

You have to love the BBC for the full-fisted punch it delivers in Sherlock. I thought Guy Ritchie had proved himself the master of re-invention when he gave us the punch-throwing, wisecracking, devastatingly handsome Robert Downey Junior as Sherlock Holmes (2009). Then came Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat with their Sherlock last year and blew our collective socks off. I've only just finished watching both seasons and am sitting, basking in the happy afterglow, trying to pick my five favourites from the awesomeness that this Sherlock is.

1. Benedict Cumberbatch with his chiselled profile, his beautiful gray eyes and his plentiful curls could have been a marble bust. Instead, he is a 21st century, smartphone-toting "consulting detective" insistent on living in the heart of London. He looks like an androgynous, ancient-Greek-artist's muse and has a voice that would make a stained-teethed, balding, wannabe-hipster attractive. He's a sociopath. He's rude. He's sexiest when wearing a sheet. Or maybe, when he's laughing, while wearing the aforementioned sheet. He brings back nerdy-cool in a big, big way.

2. His room-mate, Dr. John Watson, is played by Martin Freeman who I can't help but remember as one half of the heartbreaking cute couple in Love Actually, the body-doubles standing in for some random sex scene. A lot of laughs and a LOT of butts and boobs. Slightly difficult to see in him the soldier from Afghanistan but well, I got over it. And he makes a wonderful Watson. Not side-kicky. Not stupid. Really smart and really popular with the ladies. How he's constantly mistaken for Sherlock's gay partner is easy enough to understand in that last scene where Watson stands in front of Sherlock's gravestone and you expect him to blurt out a too-long-repressed avowal of love. I so did. So are the makers cocking a snook at the homophoebe in so many of us? Like I said, there is so much that is brilliant.

3. Moriarty. One huge sigh. Where do I start about Andrew Scott? At the swimming pool when he walks in in that crisp suit and claims the shadowy name of Moriarty? When he sits in the Tower of London in the royal crown? Or when he cowers before Sherlock in the sicko journalist's apartment? He sheds skins with the ease of a Kingfisher model shedding clothes. The man is a stunner. And he's hardly Andrew Scott. He IS Jim Moriarty.

4. England. I loved Sherlock's England. The streets, the taxis, the multiple accents, the rain, the bleakness of Dartmoor, the picturesque country-side, the sweeping landscape. I wish I could pack my bags and just go.

5. The fact that Sherlock gave me the perfect excuse to put off writing my research proposal and immerse myself in a perfect fantasy. One that is more intelligent, far crisper and infinitely more entertaining than that research proposal is ever going to be.