Written by Alan Fennell and directed by David Elliott, it was first broadcast on 11 November 1965 on ATV Midlands as the seventh episode of Series One.
In "30 Minutes After Noon", International Rescue race to save a British secret agent caught up in the latest scheme of the Erdman Gang, a notorious criminal organisation.
Drawing inspiration from the spy film The Ipcress File, Elliott decided to realise Fennell's script through the use of what commentator Stephen La Rivière terms "quirky visuals".
[4] Commentators including media historian Nicholas J. Cull have noted that Elliott and Perry's cinematography emulates the visual style of 1960s James Bond films.
The stranger's true intentions are revealed when he places an unbreakable metal bracelet around Prescott's wrist, telling him that it contains a powerful explosive charge that will detonate in 21 minutes and that the key to unlock it is in his office at the Hudson Building.
At the scene, Virgil and Alan descend the lift shaft in International Rescue's new fire-fighting apparatus: a protective cage fitted with a metal claw.
[2] The Glen Carrick Castle scene opens with a tracking shot covering all three walls of the puppet set, for which Elliott co-ordinated the camera movements with operator Alan Perry.
[1] A visual illusion ensures that Kenyon and Dempsey appear correctly scaled in relation to the hand, even though Thunderbirds puppets were only 1⁄3 adult human size.
[4] Sylvia Anderson noted Alan Fennell's "vivid imagination" and suggested that "30 Minutes After Noon" was "more a vehicle for live action than for the limited emotions of our puppet cast.
"[10] Media historian Nicholas J. Cull links the episode to another of Fennell's Thunderbirds scripts, "The Man from MI.5", which features a British Secret Service agent called Bondson.
)[11] Tom Fox of Starburst magazine also praises the "hatstand homage" and names the robot guards and the Scottish castle as the episode's other highlights.
[2] La Rivière also comments on the editing, noting that the plot of the episode is effectively split into two parts (the explosion at the Hudson Building followed by Southern's infiltration of the Erdman Gang).
[6] A review in NTBS News Flash describes "30 Minutes After Noon" as a "thrilling, well-paced episode" that "brings together a very sadistic bad guy scheme and some innocent, and some not-so-innocent victims in peril".
The review compares the exploding bracelets to the premise of the Saw films, in which people are trapped in dangerous situations and threatened with death if they refuse to carry out tasks placed before them.