FORGET the kerfuffle over Harry and Meghan or Man United’s wobbly back four. The true crisis orbiting Britain is What’s Gone Wrong With Doctor Who? Once a reliable ratings magnet for BBC1, the latest series is shedding viewers faster than they swap partners on Love Island.

Ironically for a show called Doctor Who, the problem is essentially an identity crisis. For who, or more precisely what, is Doctor Who any more?

Once a space adventure neatly undercut by universal themes embracing morality, philosophy and the answer to the universe and everything, now it’s become a tub-thumping issue crusade, with the adventure a distant second.

Which is fine if your idea of sci-fi entertainment is to be clubbed around the head with a message. But where Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror deftly combines musings on futuristic societal developments with a sophisticated and thought-provoking approach, under new Doctor Who showrunner Chris Chibnall what you get is a half-cooked pastiche trying way too hard to feel big and important but simply ringing hollow.

The opening two-part episode Spyfall was a case in point. This was Armageddon on a CBeebies budget, any sense of genuine jeopardy drained by the efforts to shoehorn as many key historical figures as possible into an absurdly overcrowded narrative.

As historical figure after historical figure made bizarre cameo appearances, Doctor Who’s trademark sense of time-ticking jeopardy got buried under a school-project lecture on forgotten war heroes.

In a way you have to admire the way recent Doctor Who regimes have attempted to ramp-up production values to give a sense of epic, big-screen excitement. But they simply don’t have the budget to compete with the sense of scale mustered by the likes of Altered Carbon on Netflix, The Expanse on Amazon Prime or any number of Hollywood blockbusters.

Doctor Who is at its best when it plays chilling mind games but it’s been a long time — 13 years to be precise — since we got anything as subtle and chilling as The Weeping Angels in the classic episode Blink.

This is not a Jodie Whittaker issue. Although I’m a fan of the more eccentric, cerebral Doctor Whos (it’s the Bakers, Tom and Colin, for me) and Whittaker’s bouncy enthusiasm is more Peter Davison, the problem is that she isn’t put front and centre enough to dominate.

The show should be about Doctor Who, not This Week’s Big Moral Issue. And three companions is not a surfeit of riches, it’s precisely two too many, and the dynamic would work much better if Bradley Walsh as Graham was Whittaker’s sole sidekick, neatly reversing the traditional older doctor/younger companion formula.

Doctor Who has hit rough patches before (coughs, Sylvester McCoy) but time has moved on and, in a universe where sci-fi TV has come of age, if Doctor Who can’t get back to what it does best — making hiding-behind-the-settee adventures — then maybe it’s time we called time.