IF you missed it, you must have been on a visit to the moon - though even then it would have been hard to avoid.

Last weekend, a TV listing by our acclaimed television critic Damien Love, sending up the Trump inauguration as a ghastly episode of the Twilight Zone, went ultra-viral.

A reader of the paper tweeted a picture of the review early on Sunday and by the end of the day literally millions of people around the planet had read it.

The furore became turbo-charged when George Takei - Star Trek's Mr Sulu - singer-songwriter Billy Bragg, and Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane all started chatting on social media about the review.

It was Takei who really sent the whole thing into warp speed when he tweeted to his two million followers "The Sunday Herald TV section wins today". His post was retweeted 28,000 times and liked by 48,000 people.

MacFarlane also heaped praise on the review to his 11.8 million followers.

A Facebook post by singer-songwriter Billy Bragg called the listing a 'preview of things to come' and was shared more than 190,000 times.

The BBC, CNBC, CBS News, The Independent, Huffington Post and scores of other media outlets around the world picked up on Love’s piece after social media users all over the world hailed it as a “masterpiece” and the “the most brilliant TV listing ever conceived”, and praised the Sunday Herald for its “terrifying sense of humour”.

With unflinching deadpan, Love’s listing imagined Trump as the lead character in an episode of the popular 1960s TV series The Twilight Zone which was loved for its weird and spooky stories of science fiction, the supernatural and uncanny, often with a twist ending.

In his usual TV weekly lookahead, Love wrote of the Trump inauguration: “The story begins in a nightmarish version of 2017, in which huge sections of the US electorate have somehow been duped into voting to make Donald Trump president.” He went on to describe it as a “feature-length opener” that concentrates on the “gaudy inauguration of President Trump”.

Love finished with: “It’s a flawed piece, but a disturbing glimpse of the horrors we could stumble into, if we’re not careful.”

Yesterday, Love was still bemused by the Twitter and media storm surrounding his spoof review. “I’m not on Twitter and it wasn’t me that tweeted it. The day it appeared, I was at home making dinner and checked my emails. A friend told me that the piece I’d written had caught on fire so I went on Twitter to see what he was talking about.It had been picked up by George Takei, the god of Twitter.”

Love watched with growing incredulity as his review trended in the USA and was picked up by Variety, Vanity Fair, Time Magazine, and the Hollywood Reporter, and became the second most popular story on the BBC home page.

“It was bizarre. When I wrote it I didn’t plan to cause a stir, I was just doing what I do. It seems to have touched a chord with people when there is so much anxiety and uncertainty around Trump as President. It put the finger on the way people were feeling and because it was a bit funny – there’s not much you can do about Trump, so you can either laugh or cry.”

Love welcomed that George Takei’s tweet included a photograph of the newspaper listing. “I think that lent it credibility and power rather than if it had been said online,” said Love. “And there was something nice about seeing the printed word going viral in these changed days for print journalism.

“The George Takei tweet really turbo-charged it all. Aside from all the great stuff he’s done as an activist, like all right-thinking people around my age I grew up watching Star Trek, so having approval from the bridge of the Starship Enterprise was pretty amazing. Also, as a fan of good TV, it was great to see The Twilight Zone getting talked about a lot.”

Sunday Herald editor, Neil Mackay, said: "Damien is one of the stars of this paper. I have said for years that he is the best TV critic in the business - and now the world knows that to be the case. You've got to love Love."