Lawks a mercy! That was a camp confection and no mistake!

As a writer, Mark Gatiss doesn’t so much wear his influences on his sleeve as parade them like a popinjay. So it should come as no surprise that he is singularly suited to assembling such a preposterous patchwork of period pastiche.

Mark Gatiss is a man who knows his Who and – as his past BBC documentaries attest – he’s also a scholar of horror. After the tension of ‘Cold War’ Gatiss blends his twin passions together into a frothing tankard of a script, ‘The Crimson Horror’; a bonkers draught of fun and scares. It’s ‘Whorror’. Oh, no… no, we’re never saying that again…

After a run of Doctor Who episodes which have made a play of character riddles and tricksy story twists, ‘Cold War’ represents something of a thaw in proceedings.

There are no paradoxes here to send you hurrying to the internet to speculate about what you have seen and why. There’s probably less subtext than in last week’s, altogether more awkward, instalment.

Ahh, 1983. M*A*S*H, the moonwalk, ‘Mawdryn Undead’. Oh, and Mutually Assured Destruction. Good times.

But a bad time for The Doctor and Clara to land aboard a stricken Russian nuclear submarine. At the helm is Liam Cunningham, being all authoritarian and troubled, just as he was in BBC One’s short-lived space oddity Outcasts; while in the hold is David Warner, toting naught but a Walkman and a loveable grandfatherly nature.