Writer: Ashley Pharoah
Director: Johnny Campbell
Cast: Philip Glenister (DCI Gene Hunt), Keeley Hawes (DI Alex Drake), Dean Andrews (DS Ray Carling), Marshall Lancaster (DC Chris Skelton), Montserrat Lombard (WPC Shaz Granger), Joseph Long (Luigi), Rupert Graves (Danny Moore), Amelia Bullmore (Caroline Price), Christopher Fairbank (David Bonds), Amelda Brown (Elaine Bonds), Stephen Wright (George Bonds), Geff Francis (Sgt Viv), Andrew Clover (The Clown), Campbell Moore (Evan Stephen), Perdita Avery (Fiona), Nik Howden (Scared Youth), Sophie Franklin (Clown Woman), Lucy Cole (Young Alex) & Steve Strange (Himself)
Director: Johnny Campbell
Cast: Philip Glenister (DCI Gene Hunt), Keeley Hawes (DI Alex Drake), Dean Andrews (DS Ray Carling), Marshall Lancaster (DC Chris Skelton), Montserrat Lombard (WPC Shaz Granger), Joseph Long (Luigi), Rupert Graves (Danny Moore), Amelia Bullmore (Caroline Price), Christopher Fairbank (David Bonds), Amelda Brown (Elaine Bonds), Stephen Wright (George Bonds), Geff Francis (Sgt Viv), Andrew Clover (The Clown), Campbell Moore (Evan Stephen), Perdita Avery (Fiona), Nik Howden (Scared Youth), Sophie Franklin (Clown Woman), Lucy Cole (Young Alex) & Steve Strange (Himself)
Alex helps Gene control local unrest over a docklands redevelopment, on the eve of Charles and Diana's royal wedding...The main difference between Ashes To Ashes and Life On Mars is becoming clearer. You could invest in the reality of Mars as an accurate depiction of the 70s (with nods to the cop shows that era inspired), but Ashes is preloaded with knowledge this isn't really the 80s, merely a fantasy created by modern cop Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes). The result is that Alex is stuck in a 80s "television show" she knows she's imagining, whereas Mars' Sam seemed to be genuinely stuck in the 70s.
It's an inevitable change to audience perception (because Ashes couldn't pretend time-travel might be involved when Mars revealed otherwise), but it has created an odd vibe. Alex views everything as figments of her imagination: treating people with a cavalier attitude, and life-and-death investigations are little more than "mind-puzzles" for her to solve. The kicker is: she's actually right!
However, with Alex and the audience fully aware nothing is "real" here, why should we care about anything? She can't alter time and cause a paradox by killing her grandparents, nobody who dies actually existed anyway, and when Alex meets her mum Caroline (Amelia Bullmore), she's only really meeting a construct of her memory – not the real person.
Indeed, Alex's reaction when her lawyer mother (who apparently died in a car bomb attack when she was a little girl) is curiously limp. Compare and contrast with scenes in Mars when Sam met his parents and kicked a ball around in a park with his dad. The emotional disparity, purely because we believed Sam was a genuine time-traveller, is very high.
The ambiguity Mars revelled in has now disappeared, meaning Ashes can only dazzle you with its oh-so-80s vibe and scene-chewing Gene Hunt (Phillip Glenister) character. Fortunately, Ashes To Ashes' premise may be emotionally-flawed, but it still knows how to deliver nostalgia by the bucket-load, and Hunt is one of the best TV creations of recent memory.
The Happy Day is set on the eve of Charles and Diana's royal wedding in 1981, but mainly concerns the redevelopment of the London docklands – a scheme that will uproot the people living there. Someone is so incensed by the plan they threaten playboy redeveloper Danny Moore's (Rupert Graves) life, after detonating a bomb strapped to a dog as a warning. Yes, you read that right.
Despite Alex's continual eye-rolling at what her 80s fantasy throws at her, she slowly decides to just have some fun with it – perhaps hoping to invoke the viewers at home to do the same? And it is fun, in small doses. Alex takes a shine to multi-millionaire yuppy Danny (despite his inherent oiliness), and they dance the night away at a party full of New Romantics (watch for a Steve Strange cameo), where she finds DC Chris Skelton (Marshall Lancaster) wearing eye-liner on a date with WPC Shaz Granger (Montserrat Lombard).
The series has the usual quirky links to Alex's 2008 "reality", although instead of coming through TV and radios exclusively, Alex tends to have vivid hallucinations (primarily of that spooky Clown) that pop up in the everyday. Which makes sense, seeing as she totally believes everything is already a near-death "dream", a nanosecond away from being shot in the present-day.
Keeley Hawes herself is an interesting screen presence; imagine a slightly more talented Keira Knightley, 10 years from now, and that's the vibe she gives me. Alex is less of a buffoon here than in the premiere, but she's still breezing through events (often half-drunk), and making little sense to any of her '81 colleagues. Does anyone else think it's weird Gene hasn't noticed the similarities between Alex's behaviour and the ramblings of Sam back in '73?
As with Mars before it, Ashes is actually a fairly limp police drama. The plot this week is wafer thin, and once again cursed by an absence of mystery about the bomber's identity: is it one of the three characters we meet in the whole episode with a motive to kill Danny Moore? You bet. To shake things up in the last 10 minutes, the culprit flits between father and son, but I doubt you're particularly interested anyway. These people are all figments of Alex's imagination, remember...
The limp investigation mainly serves to enable Alex to have some fun with her rich DeLorean-driving playboy, block attempts to be "initiated" as a female police officer (having her arse rubber-stamped), and have it confirmed that the mother she disliked as a child is even more dislikeable adult-to-adult. Potentially a problem if we're supposed to want Alex to save her parents from a looming car bomb – as I could quite happily light a stick of dynamite under Caroline Price myself.
Overall, The Happy Day makes it clear to me that Ashes To Ashes will be intrinsically unable to reach the heights of Life On Mars, on an emotional level at least. Like Alex, we're frustratingly constrained by its fantasy-world trappings, but I'm hoping there's a brainwave that will reveal to me how Alex stands a chance of surviving a bullet fired at point-blank range – simply by solving so-called "puzzles" her mind is dreaming up in a '81 fantasy before impact. Good luck with that.
I still enjoy watching Glenister do his Gene Hunt schtick, while Hawes is barmy enough to keep me glued to her – but I'm yet to sense any camaraderie between the two. The plot may not be very compelling or rewarding, but at least it keeps rolling along at a fair clip, and the production are doing a brilliant job evoking early-80s Britain.
Mind you, any show that features a DeLorean and doesn't make a Back To The Future gag has to be viewed with suspicion...
14 February 2008
BBC1, 9.00 pm
