After a slow start, this space race looks like it’s going to be a blast

EVERYTHING will work beautifully, the week after next. Tellies will switch on or off at a murmured command. Phones will connect your call instantly. Even your electric car will be summoned with a word, like an eager dog, primed for your unique voiceprint.

That’s how The First ( c4) imagines the future, anyhow. Some chance.

The truth is we all spend hours every week swearing at computers or sobbing in frustration over remote controls. The more sophisticated technology becomes, the better able it is to mock us.

Take the digital radio in our family car. It cuts out every ten seconds as the satnav interrupts to direct me back home: ‘At the next available point, make a U-turn!’ Silencing the satnav’s voice takes eight separate jabs at the touchscreen, any one of which might reset the air conditioning instead. I daren’t go near it.

And there’s no cD player or tape deck, so music is out of the question. The radio in my first Mini was more use, and that had a coathanger for an aerial.

In the glossy world of The First, though, all gadgets function faultlessly. Perhaps that’s why this opening episode was so undramatic for the first 20 minutes or so, as everything slid along noiselessly.

Sean Penn was a grizzled old astronaut, watching the team he had trained prepare to blast off into space on the first mission to Mars.

All went faultlessly to plan, until the rocket exploded in a colossal fireball a mile above the Earth. My guess is that one of the crew tried to switch the satnav to mute on the touchscreen, and pressed the wrong pixel.

After that, The First was a lot more interesting.

No one could call it fast-moving: this is the sort of TV where the hero spends five minutes fixing a leak under his sink and the heroine walks aimlessly round her flat, staring at her reflection in the plate-glass windows, while a sad piano plays.

But any space-race story that starts with a big bang like that obviously has some interesting plans, and this one is written by Beau Willimon, the man behind House of cards — a good omen.

Things are bound to start happening, but in the meantime Penn did a lot of jogging to a soundtrack of swelling synths and insistent drums that sounded like they were meant for chariots of Fire. Maybe he plans to be the first man to run to Mars.

I lost interest in The Big Bang Theory (E4) around the time cheesy engineer Howard (Simon Helberg) went into space, in 2012. The characters seemed to be carrying on for the sake of it, which of course you would at $1m an episode each (the recordshattering salaries of the sitcom’s five main stars).

The new series is to be the last, and the show seems to have rediscovered its purpose.

The dialogue, which had become twee and schmaltzy, is sharper. It still lacks the acidity of its first couple of years, but some of the jibes draw blood again.

Big Bang’s biggest problem was that the characters changed so little, even as they settled into relationships.

Dr Sheldon cooper ( Jim Parsons) in particular was so stale that his supposedly unpredictable quips were too easy to see coming. There’s a difference between finding a rhythm and getting stuck in a rut.

But with the focus on marriage woes, the comedy has been refreshed. And the Batman gag at the end was a belter.