Having returned from another trip to Australia and New Zealand with my fellow Doctor Who actors, I have had time to reflect on the business of world travel in the 21st century. I don’t suppose there are many people who relish the process of ‘getting there’, even when the journey is short. I dare say that those who travel to holiday destinations with the prospect of relaxed days by aquamarine seas, sipping cocktails and dining in a warm breeze under the stars are more disposed to endure with equanimity the stresses of air travel than those of us who travel at the behest of our employers and have to sing for our less exotic suppers in places of employment rather than leisure.

Even those of us who remember shorter, less stressful check-in processes are now resigned to the shuffling indignities of security checks and identity checks and luggage checks and clothing checks. But that resignation is born of necessity; we all know the excellent reasons for all those checks.

So there are increasingly more hoops to jump through to test our passive compliance. For instance, there are the tape lined walk channels that we are obliged to trudge through in order to reach somewhere only four paces from our original starting point. As I approached one such, an official turned the eight serpentine twists into twelve with the flick of an imperious wrist. Eleven of the channels were empty. I smiled at her and said ‘You think I need the exercise don’t you?’ She raised an amused eyebrow and went off to challenge other victims in another rat run.

The bored scanner operators wait till you take off your belt before telling you that you don’t need to; they then ask you to put your phone, coins and wallet in the tray. On the next flight it’s the reverse – they want the belt not the coins.

It’s all designed really to ensure utter compliance when you board the plane to spend 14 hours ignoring the ever intrusive elbows of your similarly compliant neighbour in the silent battle for an extra millimetre of space. It’s also designed to take your mind off the food, which is always prepared carefully with the sole aim of ensuring that you leave the plane with some of it on your shirt, due to the physical impossibility of guiding it accurately to your mouth unless you’re in first class.