‘On the first day of the year 2019, across the land and sky of Britain, an army of unlikely friends came together to face an impossible opponent and prevailed.’ Having conceded the grand prize of Christmas Day to Mrs Brown’s Boys, Chibnall goes for the runner-up slot of New Years Day which, in theory, saves us from more sinister Santas but brings its own baggage of hangovers and back-to-work blues. Apart from a brief skit at the top of the episode about visiting New Year on 19 planets and a joke about the Wi-Fi going down forcing families to talk, Chibnall avoids too much holiday spirit slipping into the 13^th Doctor’s first face-off with the Daleks.

Instead, we have Alison from Ghosts excavating the buried remnant of a Dalek that invaded Earth in the Ninth Century and was only defeated by an unlikely (read: impossible) alliance of Siberians and South-Sea Islanders. But here it is, a millennium or so later revived and very, very angry to have woken up in an episode of Bonekickers. So, it hijacks Alison and gets her to repeat the Doctor’s trick of throwing together a sonic screwdriver from bits of Sheffield steel. Except instead of a screwdriver it makes a new Dalek casing (with a super-skinny wasp waist, very chic), then it goes to GCHQ to summon the Dalek fleet where the Doctor catches up with it, busts it open with a microwave and chucks the mutant into a supernova thus saving New Year!

Oh, there’s also a B-Plot about Ryan’s Del Boy dad finally showing up and Ryan getting to say, ‘I love you dad’. Beautiful.

And that’s basically it. It’s as linear as The Ghost Monument. The guest characters are quite fun. Chibnall throws in a few spicy one-liners that set up his wider stories (the Doctor seems not to have had a father – ‘Dads are [complicated], so I’ve heard’ – giving anyone of the Lungbarrow persuasion their first frisson that the Other is coming). UNIT has been disbanded due to ‘financial disputes’ (I’m guessing there’s a political dig but it’s too subtle for me). I remain a bit confused on the logistics of this TARDIS crew’s wider lives: does Yaz even have a job anymore? Do Graham and Ryan pop home between adventures, or is the house a sitting target for the burglars that Yaz is no longer out catching?

I quite like it (though I think its clear inspiration, Gareth Roberts’ I Am A Dalek, is better), and I appreciate Whittaker getting some hero moments against the Daleks though I wish they weren’t so frequently undercut by goofy self-deprecation – she’s allowed to be kick-ass save-the-day sometimes. It went down quite well with the Alka Seltzer.

Next Time: Spyfall