N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!

“Forty-two minutes until we crash into the sun.”

That’s the — depending how you look at it — premise or gimmick of 42, Chris Chibnall’s first effort at Doctor Who proper, having previously been restricted to Torchwood episodes.

“It was nice not dying with you.”

Martha, 42

On the surface at least, in the capable hands of director Graeme Harper, it makes for a tense forty-two minutes aboard the SS Pentallian.

Yet it somehow manages also to be an uninvolving forty-two minutes, possibly because it never feels like it’s actually being played out in real-time. With all the running back-and-forth and stopping-for-a-chit-chat along the ship corridors that goes on, more often than not it feels like they have all the time in the universe. Maybe it needed a ship’s computer, with a disembodied head for an avatar, jimmying them along with a sardonic quip every now and them. I can well imagine Holly saying ‘Is it me or is getting hot in here, Dave?’

Once again, Martha gets the best bit. Her tapping on the airlock window across the silent vacuum of space is eerily effective. But other than that, 42 feels like three-quarters of an hour of fast, frenetic, burnt orange noise.

Meanwhile back on Earth, Martha’s Mum seems to have picked up a veritable bevy of the mysterious Mr Saxon’s lackeys.