Category Archives: John Sexy Simm

Questions Raised By Ashes To Ashes Episodes 1.1-1.3

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1. Isn’t it lucky that all of Britain’s race problems were solved between 1973 and 1981?

Life On Mars occasionally addressed the racial issues that Britain faced in the mid-1970s, notably in episode 2.2 when Sam Tyler offered support to a black detective who had joined the division, and episode 2.6 in which the team investigated violent incidents involving south Asian drug dealers. It also had Nelson, the barman who disguised his Northern accent with a Caribbean one so as not to confuse his Mancunian regulars. In Ashes To Ashes, we have already met Viv (Geff Francis), the black desk sergeant in the London station, and seen a couple of other non-white officers lurking in the background. In episode 1.3, a white man was accused of raping and murdering one black woman, and raping and assaulting another, and not a word was said about the racial aspect of the crime. Hmm.

Are the showrunners attempting to contrast 1973 and 1981? Or Manchester and London? Or 1973 Manchester and 1981 London? No doubt race relations had improved in the intervening period, and I’m inclined to believe London would be ahead of other UK cities in diversifying its police personnel successfully – but not enough that viewers should be prepared simply to accept Viv as a respected, even popular, member of the team. As episode 1.1 was at pains to point out, 1981 was the year of the Brixton riots, for goodness’ sake.


And what about the sensibilities of the characters? Is it credible that the same detective who greeted DC Glen Fletcher in Mars episode 2.2 with comments such as “You here to do the spade work?” and “First women, now a coloured. What’s going to be next – dwarves?” has been completely reconstructed in a matter of a mere eight years? We’re only three episodes in, of course, but I hope that this glib treatment of the race issue isn’t all Ashes To Ashes has to offer, because it’s far from satisfactory.

2. Is Chris Skelton now just silly comic relief?

Improbably, Ray Carling – who gave us the discomforting lines quoted above – has proven to have layers lurking under his gruff exterior. After his touching explanation of how Tyler returned to the team in its hour of need in episode 1.1, last week he took a shine to a victim of abuse who refused to leave the station and ensured that she was looked after. Skelton, meanwhile, when he’s not mooning around over the fickle affections of Shaz Granger, has variously punched an unmoving goon in the guts, sat in the midst of a horde of garden gnomes, gone to a New Romantic club in full-on eyeliner and Flock Of Seagulls hair, and dressed up as both Clark Kent and Superman at the same time.


This doesn’t even make sense. Why would anyone be Clark Kent and Superman? Skelton may be sweet, naïve, cautious, even a little slow sometimes, but he’s not an idiot and surely doesn’t need telling that Clark and Superman are never seen together. Especially within a year of Superman II’s theatrical release.

Worst of all, he threw aside his customary prudence to rush headlong into a gunfight when Granger was threatened, only to dive behind the traditional pile of abandoned crates when he realised he was in over his head. This is now repeated every week in the credits, with a freeze-frame as Marshall Lancaster’s name appears. Is this how we’re meant to think of Skelton? A slapstick stooge who needs protecting? Skelton’s progression from cheerful lunkhead to perceptive investigator as he embraced Tyler’s methods was one of the best things about Life On Mars. Don’t abandon him to a predictable romantic storyline, showrunners!

3. What is everyone’s problem with Keeley Hawes?

Various critics commented negatively on Hawes’s performance in episode 1.1. In his Sunday Times review, AA Gill said of the show’s star:

Keeley Hawes couldn’t arrest an audience if she came on naked with a “This Way Up” sticker on her bottom.

I bet you’d like to see her try though, you old lech! The Guardian’s Sam Wollaston (“awful… very unconvincing… just really irritating”) and The Observer’s Kathryn Flett (“either spectacularly miscast or woefully misdirected… just short of hysteria”) were similarly uncomplimentary and both, perhaps inevitably, compared her unfavourably with John Simm in Life On Mars.

Naturally anyone’s enjoyment of a given actor’s performance is subjective, but I think (a) Hawes has been terrific and (b) people have been exceedingly quick to forget what Simm actually did in Mars. There was enough wailing, whooping, hollering and howling in those scripts to fill a series of Most Haunted. Despite the critical carping over her “hysterical” or “shrieking” performance, Hawes has actually been relatively restrained, at least since episode 1.1. Oh, apart from that moment when she thought the car she was in WAS ABOUT TO EXPLODE! She got a bit fidgety then.

Even in the admittedly below-par episode 1.2, which tried to cram in far too much (sexual politics! The royal wedding! Class warfare! Drake meeting her mother! The development of Docklands! Drake’s liaison with the first ludicrously caricatured Thatcherite she met! He even drove a DeLorean!), we got several bravura moments from Hawes. Chief among these were when Drake refused point-blank to have her arse stamped by her colleagues, supposedly a long-standing tradition for “plonks”, and then her subsequent submission – when she was doing it on her own terms, because she wanted something from Gene Hunt in return.

The excellent episode 1.3 vindicated both Hawes and her casting in the show. Faced with a struggle to get Hunt to understand that a prostitute who reports a rape should not be dismissed out of hand, Drake’s incredulity and outrage were palpable. In dealing with sort-of-bogus complainant Trixie (a fiery guest turn from Claire Rushbrook), Hawes went effortlessly from motherly sympathy to quiet exasperation to resigned despair without a false note. And in one scene she made it clear why Drake needed to be a strapping lass rather than a diminutive type who might be easily cowed by Hunt.


I also liked her fiercely shameless response when Hunt accused her of acquiring a “reputation” after sleeping with another smarmy City trader in red braces. (Perhaps this is a fetish she was unable to indulge among the chest-waxed, floppy-fringed girly-men of 2008.) It’s no surprise that Ashes To Ashes is more upfront about gender politics than Life On Mars was, and Hawes – especially when Drake confronts Hunt’s prejudices about prostitutes in episode 1.3 – is handling this, um, manfully.

4. Will Gene Hunt get something to do soon?

Most of the publicity for Ashes To Ashes has focused on Philip Glenister and, if you watch the show on BBC iPlayer, the blurb on its front page actually says, “Drama series following the exploits of Life On Mars’ DCI Gene Hunt.” Now there’s just a tiny chance that the marketing department has told a wee fib here, having decided that an established character is more of a draw than a new one. But it seems perverse that Hunt has had very little to do yet apart from react to Drake and her crazy feminine ways. There was a funny scene in episode 1.2 in which he weeded out a villain by getting a load of blokes to strip naked in a snooker hall, but other than that Glenister has had to be satisfied with looking alternately smug and frustrated.

The trailer for episode 1.4 suggests it’s going to be a Drake/Hunt two-hander, which augurs well. Because I’m concerned that if the people who tune in to see their favourite politically incorrect old-school copper switch off when they don’t see him enough, Ashes To Ashes won’t last even as long as Life On Mars did.

5. Is Keeley Hawes related to former Sunday Telegraph editor Sarah Sands?


I think we should be told.

6. How much better is Ashes To Ashes than BBC1’s other big new drama, The Last Enemy?

Much, much better. Although Ashes lacks the slickness and high production values of The Last Enemy – there’s certainly no sign that it escaped the BBC cost-cutting that reduced Life On Mars’s budget between the first and second series – it’s tightly plotted and coherent, and everyone involved seems fully committed to it. The Last Enemy, a vaguely futuristic conspiracy thriller, is hamstrung from the start by its casting of Benedict Cumberbatch in the central role. He may have the best name in all of Equity but he also has Amazing Permanent Blankface. In fairness, he’s not meant to know what’s going on, but he could at least try to look interested in finding out.


In fact, no-one in this show seems to know or care much about the plot. Faintly familiar people keep dropping in and out to offer up moderately cryptic titbits of non-information – look, there’s Geraldine James! Hello, David Harewood! – and, even after two and a half hours, I’ve only the dimmest inkling who or where or why they are. This indecipherable hotchpotch is further disgraced by a performance of surpassing awfulness from Eva Birthistle as a misguidedly idealistic government minister. Birthistle, whose Ulster accent is even less convincing than her English one in 2006’s similarly frenetic but far superior The State Within, is evidently of the Briskness Indicates Authority school and seems to be going for a sort of distaff Don Logan effect, even when she’s trying to gently cajole Cumberbatch into doing something for her.

Thank goodness for the marvellous Robert Carlyle and Anamaria Marinca, whose emotional, wholehearted performances are keeping the show afloat for now. Their characters met for the first time in episode 2 when Carlyle forced Marinca and Cumberbatch into the back of his van and ordered them to strip because one or both were bugged, and the crackling tension between the two almost physically pushed Cumberbatch off the screen. The episode ended with Carlyle striding off through a graveyard, ignoring Marinca’s passionate entreaties to come back and tell her what was going on (and the rest of us for that matter, thanks Bob!). I fervently hope it isn’t their last meeting.

The quality of these two actors has allowed them to overcome the handicap of an app-ar-ent di-rec-tive to ov-er en-un-ci-ate at all times, presumably so our friends in overseas territories will be able to understand them when the show is exported. Those wacky foreigners and their crazy accents! Another actor who suffered this indignity was Paul Higgins, who made a brief appearance (as a professor of um ah er yes) but did not get the opportunity to forcibly insert an iPod in anyone’s urethra.

Which is a shame.

Ashes To Ashes Episode 1.1: Is There Life Beyond Mars?

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Last week we got the opportunity to find out whether the BBC could replicate the success of Life On Mars with Ashes To Ashes. The verdict is very much yes and no, at least according to the media. Critical reaction varied wildly, from AA Gill in the Sunday Times and Sam Wollaston in The Guardian who hated it, to Hermione Eyre in the Independent On Sunday and Gerard O’Donovan in the Telegraph who loved it. In between, the Independent’s Robert Hanks thought it moderately good and Helen Rumbelow in The Times said it showed promise, while in The Observer Kathryn Flett deemed it quite poor. Here in webland, the forumers of Digital Spy largely wailed and bemoaned the new show, while over at Television Without Pity it was received, almost without exception, rapturously.

But as we’ve seen, it was the press who built Gene Hunt up as the star of Life On Mars and often ignored the more cerebral sci-fi aspects of the show in favour of lionising the 1970s, so we can safely assume that literally none of those people have any idea what they’re talking about (Wollaston, you’re not even trying – see me after class). Meanwhile, it seems the web denizens who disliked it did so mainly because it was not Life On Mars, which makes you wonder why they didn’t just spend the evening with their lovely Simmful Mars DVDs instead. Many reactions, even positive ones, compared episode one of Ashes To Ashes unfavourably with the original series, which considering Mars had 16 episodes – and bearing in mind it took a good six or seven of those to really hit its stride – seems unfair, not to mention pointless. Ashes has set itself up as a different show from the start and the first episode was a cracking success, albeit with one or two missteps.

Within the first ten minutes DI Alex Drake was established as a working single mother and clever police psychologist who has made a close study of Sam Tyler’s case and subsequent suicide. She was also called to a hostage situation, terrified, captured, taken to an abandoned boat on the Thames and shot in the head. No messing around. She awoke on the same boat in 1981, wearing a fantastic outfit that all at once demonstrated she was deep undercover, showcased the garish fashions of the time and allowed Keeley Hawes to show off her ace pins.


She was taken hostage (again – d’oh!) only to be rescued by Hunt and his sidekicks, at which point she went a bit funny. Several reviews have commented on Drake’s supposedly unprofessional behaviour, fainting and shrieking and crawling over the bonnet of an Audi Quattro in an unseemly manner. Presumably when these reviewers were shot in the head and transported 27 years back in time, they weren’t disoriented at all! After the whirlwind beginning, the middle half-hour of the episode was non-stop delight, as Drake was forced to deal with the old-fashioned coppers while she came to terms with having the same fantasy as her study subject.

Although she quickly realised that the key to Hunt’s current case was the man who shot her in the “present” and used her modern analytical prowess to ensnare him, she hasn’t yet realised that – like Tyler – she has emerged from her trauma into a hugely significant period of her own “real” life. Whereas for Tyler it was the year his father left, for Drake it is several months before her parents died – an event mentioned by her captor in 2008. This is fine plotting. Not only did it give Drake a case to solve in episode 1.1, it gives the series a mystery arc that will no doubt be gradually revealed week by week.

The last 15 minutes were a bit wonky, unfortunately. The final showdown was set up by a transparently ludicrous scheme involving Chris Skelton and new cast member Shaz Granger (Montserrat Lombard from BBC1’s Love Soup), a ruse that might have been designed to get the young WPC abducted. During the gunfight that followed, I half expected Graham Chapman’s colonel character to wander on and order them to stop because it was getting far too silly.


And when Hunt, Skelton and Ray Carling turned up with machine guns on a BLOODY SPEEDBOAT to save the day (a day which in any case didn’t need much saving), the show surely tipped over into parody. But the resolution was nicely handled, particularly Drake’s understanding that she did not need simply to arrest her 2008 assailant just to get back home, prompted by Granger’s endearingly artless musings on death.


Despite the occasionally overdone 1981 touches – I think I could have done without the coppers singing Shaddup You Face to an Italian barman – the programme showed a sense for period detail as astute as that of Life On Mars; I especially enjoyed Drake’s white leather jacket, echoing Tyler’s ever-present coat in Mars. As for characters, WPC Granger (a nod to Harry Potter?) is already a decent addition – a sweet and down-to-earth figure similar to Mars’s Cartwright, but clearly meant as a love interest for Skelton – and I thought it was a nice touch to have the bluff Carling tell Drake about how Tyler had returned to them in 1973, which she couldn’t know because it was his death in 2006 that precipitated this. I was, however, a little disturbed by 1981-vintage Carling’s resemblance to Reed Rothchild.


He has other interests – he’s a magician! Dean Andrews handled this well. Philip Glenister was his usual larger-than-life self, although with a few reflective moments that suggest Hunt may have been through changes (or, as the programme would probably have it, ch-ch-ch-changes), and bounced nicely off Hawes, who was excellent in the main role. Some critics hammered her for all the shrieky stuff, seemingly forgetting that John Simm spent much of Life On Mars grabbing his head, talking near-gibberish and howling like a bereaved Noddy Holder. And for pity’s sake, she’s been shot in the head and sent back to 1981! Hawes did absolutely fine with everything the role threw at her, and even fleetingly displayed a hitherto unseen talent for comedy.


So episode 1.1 was by no means flawless, and at times it was trying a bit too hard to attract viewers, even for a pilot. Props to my girlfriend for pointing out that it also ignored its own internal logic by having scenes that did not feature Drake, which should be impossible if you accept that it’s her fantasy – unlike Life On Mars, which went out of its way to ensure Tyler appeared in every single scene. I suppose this might be due to the growing perception that Hunt is the real star (Glenister has also moved up to the top of the credits). But overall it was a great episode, both in itself and as a setup for the rest of the series, and I have every confidence that it can become as good as Mars did – and will possibly get there more quickly.

ETA: I feel I would be remiss if I did not mention Ashes’ replacement of Tyler’s test card girl with a clown, or strictly speaking a pierrot, from the eponymous David Bowie video. Although I don’t go along with the current coulrophobic consensus – seriously, it’s just a dude in a suit with some white slap on – I found this vision much more explicitly nightmarish than the little girl with the doll, especially when he took a run at Drake in the junkyard. I also liked that Drake was prepared to turn and face the pallid fiend, just one of the many subtle bits of character portrait that were scattered through the episode.


Hunt’s line of the week

Has to be his opening line, delivered to the sleaze who takes UndercoverDrake hostage:

Today, my friend, your diary entry will read, ‘Took a prossie hostage, and was shot by three armed bastards’!

Speaking of which…

Sleaze of the week

Life On Mars had a few memorable villains, notably Marc Warren in episode 2.1, but for me Ashes has already beaten them hands down by casting Adam James – last seen in the Extras Christmas special as slimy agent Tre – as a City boy/drug dealer. James almost smells of the 1980s; he could, and possibly does, teach a degree course in Advanced Sleaze at the University of Sleaze:


Eugh.

Most disturbing announcement by a one-handed childhood icon of the week

Zippy: Forget your mum, Molly. She’s never coming back.


Gorgeously cinematic/silly/genius/hilarious/unbearably pretentious shot of the week

Amusing 1981 reference of the week

Drake: There’s nothing on this hard drive but the time and date.
Hunt: Pong! I’ve got Pong.

Inappropriate Hunt moment of the week

It would be his pronouncement that an armed Drake in leather gave him “the horn”, had it not been for his reaction to Drake’s feeling of his heartbeat. Which was somewhat different from Cartwright’s when Tyler did the same to her in Life On Mars.

Speech we’d better get used to hearing over the opening credits every week of the week

My name is Alex Drake. I’ve just been shot and that bullet has sent me back to 1981. I may be one second away from life, or one second away from death. They say that as you die, your life flashes before you. All those memories and mistakes that form us. Well, bring it on. My life can flash away as much as it likes because I am not going to die. I’m coming back to you, Molly.

Complex Sci-Fi/Fantasy Is From Mars, Gritty Police Drama Is From Venus

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I’ve spent the last week and a half watching the BBC show Life On Mars, the first series DVD box set of which was a gift from friends this Christmas. (We introduced them to Veronica Mars last Christmas, so there was a certain symmetry to this.) My girlfriend and I were sceptical about the show at first. We reasoned that it had never appealed enough to encourage us to watch it when it was on TV, and that we generally find current British drama uninspiring and inferior to US programmes. We also heeded the words of Admiral Neck, who had not watched much of the show but mentioned how much Britain’s rightwing newspaper pundits loved its supposedly joyful evocation of policing in 1970s, largely free from such “politically correct” concerns as sexual equality and citizens’ rights. Meanwhile leftwing groups such as the NASUWT condemned its use of homophobic language. Despite the assurances of the friends who gave it to us (whose recommendations are normally reliable), it didn’t seem an attractive prospect.

It took us a few weeks to get around to it, but when we did crack open series one, it lasted a matter of days, and we immediately bought and consumed the second series too. It is terrific for a number of reasons, but the main one is that it’s a thoughtful slice of complex sci-fi masquerading as a knockabout police show. And its creators got it on BBC1 in prime time. And it was a huge hit. This was an astonishing achievement.

DCI Sam Tyler, the modern Manchester copper who wakes up in 1973 after he is hit by a car, is not the simplistic Connecticut Yankee the premise might suggest. I assumed there would be some ambivalence throughout about whether Tyler was really stranded in the 1970s or imagining it, but it quickly becomes apparent that he is in a coma – he hears the beeping of the life support machine and the voices of doctors and family members imploring him to hold on – and we are left in no doubt that Tyler’s journey is about finding a way “home”, or back to his real life. Whether his comatose fantasies would really take place in traditional hour-long three-act form is beside the point. Creators Matthew Graham, Tony Jordan and Ashley Pharoah have delivered a classic sci-fi/fantasy platform used by everything from The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz to ET: The Extra-Terrestrial to 12 Monkeys to The League Of Gentlemen: the stranger in a strange land, trying to negotiate the unfamiliar and get home safely. They do this to enable the show to perform that other classic function of science fiction, especially when it’s time travel-based: portraying, and satirising, a clash of civilisations.


The conflict in Life On Mars comes mainly, as you’d expect, from the difference between sensitive, educated Tyler’s approach to police work and the instinctive, often brutish methods of his boss Gene Hunt. (Tyler’s presence in the station is explained by a convenient “transfer from Hyde”.) But the aforementioned rightwing columnists were wrong to suggest that the show delights in the, ah, direct methods employed by the 70s cops. Rather, these are employed as blackly comic relief – we’re invited to sympathise with Tyler, even despair along with him, as Hunt or his sidekick DS Ray Carling takes pleasure in kicking in a “nonce”.

Tyler occasionally admits that the 70s way is better in some respects – it gets results and is certainly speedier than the tedious bureaucracy of the 21st century – and, in the series one finale, he’s exposed as a hypocrite: he trusts his instincts and desires rather than the cold facts when his own father, whom he meets as a young man, becomes a suspect. This isn’t a one-way street, either. Hunt may be boorish and sometimes thuggish but he’s not stupid, and he frequently appreciates the logic and clearsightedness that Tyler brings to the job (not that he likes to admit it). It’s usually left to the virtually stone-age Carling to provide the quaint values we associate with the era, such as casual racism and suspicion of anything resembling good sense.

All the while Tyler is struggling to make sense of the world around him, both the apparent reality of Hunt and the hallucinations he suffers – as well as hearing voices, he is visited in dreams by the TV test card girl, offering cryptic advice and scaring the bejesus out of him. Tyler confides in WPC Annie Cartwright, a down-to-earth sort who demonstrates remarkable patience as well as considerable intelligence, leading to her promotion to detective in series two (at Tyler’s instigation and against Carling’s wishes, naturally). He also builds a rapport with young detective Chris Skelton, who is open to “modern” ideas, and Nelson, the black barman of the local pub who covers his Yorkshire accent with a Caribbean lilt that he thinks will comfort his regulars. Each episode starts out with a standard police-drama plot – a dead body, a hostage crisis, a bomb threat – but Life On Mars uses these as a framework for skilfully woven drama that examines the culture clash astutely, again in the best sci-fi tradition.


We are never allowed to forget Tyler’s desire to get home, although Mars slips up with this strand occasionally. Some clunkingly awful dialogue reminds the audience that he is trapped in the “wrong” time: when Skelton refers to someone as being “like David Janssen in The Fugitive”, Tyler says, “You mean Harrison Ford”. This in the tenth episode! When Tyler has been going on about being stuck in 1973 for months! Of course he doesn’t mean Harrison Ford, you idiot! Tyler is also unnecessarily smug at times, even bearing in mind that he has three decades more progress under his belt than the other officers. It takes an intensely charismatic performance from a likeable actor to get you on Tyler’s side, and not surprisingly John Simm delivers. He’s thoroughly convincing as he swings between confusion and terror on one hand and dignified professionalism in adversity on the other. He’s also pretty sexy, something I didn’t believe until I watched this.

It’s Philip Glenister as Hunt who has proved the breakout star of the show, though, and this isn’t surprising either. I expected Life On Mars to be more of an archetypal two-hander, a classical dialogue between the enlightened man and the fool, but it’s Simm’s central turn that carries it. Even so, Glenister casts the longest shadow with a peformance of rare energy and wit. Sometimes the show lacks the courage of its convictions – it tries to address racism in series two and dares to use the term “Paki” but shies away from any stronger insults, which must have been in currency – but Glenister never does. Hunt truly believes in his methods and his motives, and you don’t doubt it for a moment.

Life On Mars isn’t perfect. As well as the aforementioned daft dialogue (the prosaic Hunt improbably refers to himself in the third person as “the Gene Genie” for no other reason than to continue the David Bowie motif) and occasional reticence about the big issues, some episodes are oddly directed and – especially early on – somewhat flabby and overextended. During series one, I often felt it would have benefited from the 45-minute runtime of a Doctor Who rather than a full hour. (I did come to find some of the flaws endearing, particularly the clunky expositionary lines, which reminded me that this was broadcast in primetime on BBC bloody One.)

But the show’s problems are largely corrected in series two, especially by the time it reaches the final three episodes. Episode 2.6 is close to being my favourite, not only because it guest-stars the breathtakingly hot Alex Reid – last seen getting really, really stabbed in the neck during the most horrific caving trip in history (she definitely would not rather be spelunking) – but also because semi-legendary comedy writer Guy Jenkin provides the cracking dialogue.

Skelton: I wonder what killed him?
Hunt: That’ll be the bloody enormous hole in his chest where the bullet went in!

Cartwright: Boss? There’s a viscous yellow liquid in his ear.
Hunt: No, that’s a drip from my fried egg butty, love. Well done, Miss Marple. That’s why we need women detectives.

Tyler: I think we need to explore whether this attempted murder was a hate crime.
Hunt: As opposed to one of those “I really really like you” sort of murders?

Hunt: Now, yesterday’s shooting. The dealers are all so scared we’re more likely to get Helen Keller to talk. The Paki in a coma’s about as lively as Liberace’s dick when he’s looking at a naked woman. All in all, this investigation’s going at the speed of a spastic in a magnet factory.
Tyler: I think you might have missed out the Jews.

But it’s the superb final two episodes that crystallise what Life On Mars is about. In 2.7, Hunt is accused of murder and while he’s banged up, acting DCI Frank Morgan (a splendidly creepy turn from, of all people, Ralph Brown) tells Tyler that the reason Tyler is there is to force Hunt out. Once he does, he can come back to Hyde. Tyler seizes on this, believing it to be his subconscious’s way of telling him how he can wake up, but he finds he can’t help but prove Hunt innocent. This raises all sorts of questions – can Hunt’s means-to-an-end methods be justified? What does Tyler believe in? Where does he belong? Is Morgan the surgeon from the hospital where Tyler is lying comatose? Does Tyler owe his 1973 colleagues loyalty even if they’re figments of his imagination?

Before these are answered, Morgan tells Tyler – in a clear echo of Terry Gilliam’s superlative time-travel fable 12 Monkeys – that everything he thinks is wrong. He is not in a coma in 2006; he has amnesia; his persona is an undercover one they constructed between them using names from gravestones; and that this, 1973, is reality. Tyler has no way of knowing whether this is truth or his mind telling him that he is slipping away, that he has accepted his fate. The questions are still unanswered when he awakes – at the worst possible moment. Episode 2.8 is a thrilling, dizzying, heartbreaking, ferociously intelligent hour of TV that should stand as an exemplar to everyone else making drama in this country.

The review quotes on the DVD boxes say “The best police drama since the 70s” and “A thumpingly enjoyable piece of television”. Neither is wrong, but they don’t even come close to describing the triumph of the show. Obviously I meant the title of this post as a rather convoluted bit of punning whimsy, but it does apply. Just as men and women can learn to live together (despite those oh-so-significant differences!), Life On Mars is a wonderfully harmonious marriage of sci-fi and police drama. So harmonious, in fact, that – at the risk of repeating myself – it drew between five and seven million viewers to BBC1 at 9pm, even when up against the ratings behemoth of Champions League football on ITV. The end of series two was watched by 7.7 million. Such a large mainstream audience must have included a large number of people who never thought they’d watch sci-fi, let alone such complex, thought-provoking sci-fi.

The spin-off/sequel to Life On Mars, Ashes To Ashes, starts this Thursday. It’ll be fascinating to see how the show will do without Simm. I’m a fan of his replacement, Keeley Hawes, and making the central character a woman should certainly provide a welcome twist, as will shifting the action to Thatcherite London in 1981. But can it survive the artificial recreation of its original premise with a different character? Possibly. Let’s face it, the concept is artificial enough as it is, and I hear that the writers have got around the problem of why Hawes’s Alex Drake ends up in the same fantasy as Tyler by making her a student of Tyler’s case. But there’s a danger Ashes won’t thrive in its Simmlessness; Hawes, though talented, has never demonstrated comparable warmth and presence, and it remains to be seen whether she can carry off the deranged, dislocated despair that lies at the show’s heart, or whether she’ll even be asked to. I’m hopeful, though, and I’m remembering that I didn’t expect much from Life On Mars.