Life on Mars

From Manchester to New York

Stephen Lacey, Ruth McElroy, Stephen Lacey, Ruth McElroy

• Editore: University of Wales Press
• Anno: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781783161126
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoria: Television

This is the first full-length academic study of Life on Mars (and its successor, Ashes to Ashes), and seeks to account for the series' innovative form and popular appeal. Paying attention to issues of genre and hybridity, the book examines televisual and cultural memory, press and reception contexts and analyses the ways in which both series represent Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. The book also discusses the remakes of Life on Mars in the USA and Spain, acknowledging both the specific address to particular situations and the ways in which key elements are re-worked in different national contexts.

PART I
QUALITY TV

FORM AND AESTHETICS

1
LIFE ON MARS

HYBRIDITY AND INNOVATION IN A BRITISH TELEVISION CONTEXT

Robin Nelson

‘Just your regular run-of-the-mill time-travelling cop show’.
(Matthew Graham)

IN THE RECENT PAST, both in the academy and in broader culture, much emphasis has been placed upon ‘American Quality TV’ (shows such as Sex and the City (HBO, 1998–2004), Six Feet Under (HBO, 2001–5), The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007) and The Wire (HBO, 2002–8)), so it’s good once again to have an opportunity to celebrate a British TV drama success. Life on Mars (Kudos for BBC Wales, 2006–7) is the case in point. Indeed, so successful was the series in Britain that an American version, based on the UK format, has subsequently been made and screened in the USA (see Lavery, Mills, and Bonaut and Ojer below). This chapter, however, focuses on the British original and argues that much of its appeal lay in a specifically British context in its evocation of Britain in the seventies and, specifically, the police series, The Sweeney (ITV/Euston Films, 1975–8).

Though many people enjoy overseas imports as part of their television diet, audiences worldwide are known to want some programming with local resonances. In today’s global marketplace for television, such home-grown product is increasingly becoming a rarity, as producers have one eye on transnational sales potential. In the first instance, however, Life on Mars came into production after a number of false starts to fill a slot in the UK schedules.1 Thus the final production team’s focus was on finding success in a UK context, and local resonances of Britain in the seventies increasingly informed the details of the realisation of the script. Format sales to America were only an afterthought. Accordingly, this chapter unpacks and celebrates textual aspects of Life on Mars as a distinctive and innovative product but located in British television traditions.

It is well known that some of those aspects of Life on Mars which have become highly significant to viewers were not part of the original production concept. Most notably, the possibility that DCI Sam Tyler (John Simm) is a coma victim, and that the entire series is a fiction constructed by his unconscious mind, was not part of the primary concept. Indeed Matthew Graham has acknowledged that initially, ‘there was no coma angle at all’. In his words, borrowed for the epigraph for this chapter, Life on Mars was conceived as ‘just your regular run-of-the-mill time-travelling cop show’ (Graham 2008).

In an industry context where producers are always seeking to replicate successful programmes, albeit with that all-important twist, it is unlikely to have escaped the notice of the creators of Life on Mars that another ‘regular run-of-the-mill time-travelling cop show’ has achieved considerable success in the British television schedules. The reference, of course, is to Heartbeat (ITV, 1991–2010) which, having moved from its original Friday night slot in 1991 to Sunday night in 1993, sustained substantial audiences for seventeen years. For readers unfamiliar with the series, Heartbeat is set in the sixties and centred on the police station in the rural North Yorkshire village of Aidensfield, with the first episode being set in 1964 and the most recently broadacast set in 1969 (time evidently travels very slowly in Aidensfield). Heartbeat is not strictly time-travelling between one time zone and another, though its loose representation of the sixties in music and clothes draws also upon a nineties postmodern retro fashion interest in the sixties. In summary, Heartbeat is a police series, set in the past in a regional UK location, with a soundtrack that draws upon popular music tracks of the time and thus resonates with the idea of ‘your regular run-of-the-mill time-travelling cop show’. Moreover, Heartbeat claims (in terms of audience numbers) to be the most enduring and successful British TV drama series of all time (see Nelson 1997).

Whether or not the creators of Life on Mars had Heartbeat specifically in mind when dreaming up a new police series, the earlier police series is evoked here as a benchmark in differentiating a ‘quality’ British TV drama, Life on Mars, from Heartbeat, which may be seen as a popular, but formulaic and sentimentally nostalgic, drama. In making the comparison, attention will be drawn to how treatments of a standard television genre, the police series, can differ markedly in their use of hybrid generic mixes to afford a new twist. The more creative treatment, in Life on Mars, produces a text which is thought-provoking and, albeit to a limited extent, culturally challenging, although it remains entertaining to a broad audience. In contrast, the more sentimental treatment in Heartbeat invites indulgence in a vision of a mythologised past which may well attract a substantial British audience on a Sunday night after Songs of Praise and the Antiques Roadshow,2 but eschews any invitation to critical engagement or ‘complex seeing’ which is integral to ‘quality’ drama.3

To start with some basic characteristics, most contemporary TV drama combines genres, or aspects of genre, partly in the hope of attracting a broad audience made up of different target market groups. Focus group research on Heartbeat, for example, yielded three such groups – Green Mums, EastEnd Girls and Lager Lads – which led respectively to the foregrounding of soft social issues, a romance narrative and police detection stories featuring classic vehicles – all set to the refrains of sixties pop music tracks (see Nelson 1997: 79–85). As noted, Heartbeat is not strictly time-travelling between the 1960s and the present, certainly not in the way that Life on Mars affords in its very structure a double cross-perspective between the seventies and the early noughties. Particularly among the forty-five-plus age-group, as we shall see, Life on Mars has a special appeal in evoking remembrances of times past. However, unlike Heartbeat, the element of nostalgia is not sentimentalised. Where Heartbeat, partly because of its rural location in the north York moors, is very loosely located in the sixties – evoking more, perhaps, the Dixon of Dock Green (BBC, 1955–76) television policing ethos of the fifties4 – Life on Mars is time-specific both in its evocation of the seventies police series, The Sweeney, and in the accuracy of production detail (a few anachronisms notwithstanding).

Heartbeat is something of a TV drama by numbers to serve the perceived needs of its focus-group-identified target markets (see Nelson 1997: 73). Life on Mars, though it is much less mechanical in its approach, also affords a range of appeals to different sectors of a potential audience (as indicated by a small audience research project conducted by the author).5 It has varied appeals to different viewers because it is a hybrid mix of a police-detective series (with action-adventure overtones of The Sweeney), a telefantasy (from the stable adjacent to Dr Who (BBC Wales, revived 2005) and Torchwood (BBC Wales 2006–)), with aspects of documentary realism (in the seventies domestic setting), and a touch of romance (in the possibility that DI Sam Tyler and WPC Annie Cartwright (Liz White) might get together). The dual time frame, moreover, gives rise to consideration of issues of cultural change such as gender, race, social policy and policing. It is also funny.

Indeed the humour of the series is part of the subtle mix that gives Life on Mars its distinctive feel. Most notable, perhaps, are DCI Hunt’s (Philip Glenister) apothegms and epithets, his well-turned – though definitely not PC – summaries of the situation: ‘You so much as belch out of line and I’ll have your scrotum on a barbed wire plate’ or ‘We’re looking for a short skinny bird, wears a big coat lots of gob’ and the almost prophetic, ‘There will never be a woman prime minister as long as I have a hole in my arse.’ Reflecting a macho culture, one that was already in fact in question by the seventies, Hunt gets to say what some men used to say – and possibly what some still wish they could say – about women, sex, life’s frustrations and social pressures in general.

But Hunt does not have the monopoly on humour: in their size 14 approach to police procedurals DS Roy Carling (Dean Andrews) and Chris Skelton (Marshall Lancaster) afford some Keystone Cops action. In a telling sequence (in episode 2.7), they chase Hunt through an old warehouse building, having announced that they are obliged to arrest him. He eludes them by simply donning shades and then swapping his camel overcoat and shades with a friend. As he remarks when Carling and Skelton chase the decoy, ‘I can’t believe they fell for the same trick twice: they really are stupid.’ There is visual humour, too, in the car chases in Life on Mars, the direction undercutting Hunt’s driving style and macho swagger. In a famous sequence, Hunt’s progress is obstructed by a brass band, so he takes a shortcut through the back alleys, mowing down washing lines, and almost some local women, in his recklessness. Some of the characterisation in the set-piece comic sequences is two-dimensional, and the action almost slapstick. Carling falls in behind his DCI with flailing fists and a blind loyalty, whilst young Skelton’s failure with women is matched only by his lethargy and incompetence in policing. But the performances, built on glimpses of backstory, breathes life into what would otherwise be caricatures.

Besides their intrinsic entertainment value, the comic capers of Carling and Skelton serve as foils to DCI Gene Hunt whose swaggering, swearing, unreconstructed character captured the popular imagination. Though ‘Gene’ is an unlikely name for the 1970s, it seems highly appropriate for Hunt, evoking something of the cowboys illustrated in the posters on his office wall (Gene Autrey, possibly) and something of the rock and roller (Gene Vincent), which, chronologically, might have informed the choice of name. However, Hunt’s image and his ‘hit out first and ask questions later’ approach to policing most strongly references DI Jack Regan (John Thaw) of The Sweeney.

An overt intertextual play between Life on Mars and The Sweeney, foregrounded in the imagery of the signature camel overcoat and the Roman bronze Ford, is matched in the self-consciously comic dialogue. As Anthony Clark has remarked:

[D]ialogue was as important to The Sweeney as action and many of Regan’s best lines, often delivered through gritted teeth, have become famous. ‘Get your trousers on, you’re nicked’ and ‘Shut it!’ have both passed into popular usage, while quotes such as ‘We’re the Sweeney, son, and we’ve haven’t had any dinner yet, so unless you want a kickin’ …’ … demonstrate how the show blended humour into the action. (http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/473709/index.html)

The same summary of linguistic attractions might be made of Life on Mars, except that, from a twenty-first-century perspective, the character of Hunt is placed almost in inverted commas, in its parodic formulation. The intertextual play with The Sweeney keeps modern, media-savvy viewers aware that Life on Mars is a detective series situated in the tradition of British police-detective series. But the parodic pleasure is not available to all. The intertextual play works fully only if viewers saw The Sweeney in the seventies and feel the resonances, which is why the fifty-somethings in my audience survey locate Life on Mars in traditions of both British television and British cultural life. For those who recall the earlier police series and its popularity, a ‘Sweeney awareness’ heightens the pleasure in Hunt’s more elaborately forced expostulations. He even outdoes Regan, with phrases such as ‘She’s as nervous as a very small nun at a penguin shoot.’ But played with conviction by the excellent Philip Glenister, the character of Hunt is simultaneously grounded, giving maximum impact to the tension between the double vantage points of the series.

The initially two-dimensional character of Hunt is fleshed out, almost literally, by the charisma of Glenister’s swaggering but motivated performance such that, in the penultimate episode, Hunt’s near-alcoholism as a metaphor of his conflicted personality is explained by his sense of failure at being unable to find – and save the life of – his brother. In retrospect, this backstory might be seen to inform his attitude both to life and to policing. Like his Sweeney predecessors, Hunt is constructed initially as a flawed, but basically honest, police officer, doing a dirty job against the odds. His rage at ‘the scumbags of the world polluting his city’ is palpable and indicates a moral purpose, however misguided his methods might be. Hunt’s crude but direct form of justice has had popular appeal in British drama since the consolidated state agencies outlawed direct revenge under the reign of Elizabeth I. A line can be drawn all the way from Hamlet (1601) and The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607) through to television’s Trial and Retribution (ITV, 1997–2009). But the popular trope is ultimately enriched in Life on Mars in the rounding of a familiar, stock figure with a deepening of character motive to produce the memorable icon that Hunt has become. But DCI Hunt represents more than a character with viewer appeal. From a twenty-first-century point of view, Hunt’s behaviour is unacceptable. Thus any attraction to him emotionally is offset by an awareness of today’s cultural standards and the distance marked by the evident change in social attitudes between the seventies and the present day. It is the simultaneous offering of such multiple perspectives which invites from viewers a mixed response encapsulated in the phrase, ‘complex seeing’.

John Simm might equally be applauded for the quality of his performance as Sam Tyler, his vulnerable thoughtfulness in marked contrast with Hunt’s brash aggression. However, Tyler is not quite the ‘Dorothy’ of Hunt’s construction, since he holds his own in the action sequences and in many direct confrontations with Hunt, both physical and mental. Though their policing methods are poles apart, a mutual respect between the two detectives grows throughout the series, building up to the penultimate episode of series two when Sam helps get Gene out of a very sticky situation. Because of his position between two time zones, however, the character of Sam Tyler was always destined to be an even more complex figure than Hunt. Over and above finding himself on another planet in respect of policing methods and other aspects of culture (the lack of mobile phones, computers, databases), Sam Tyler is suffering the anguish of not knowing how he got to be where he is and whether he will ‘get back home’ to the twenty-first century.

One motivation for a possible amnesiac trauma is the abandonment of Sam by his father who, if we are to believe the final episode of series one, runs away, having become involved in some minor criminality. The significance of the loss of a father is prefigured in episode 1.5 where a Manchester United fan is killed by a supposed fellow fan in order to incite a battle with Manchester City supporters (the two football teams being legendary rivals). Sam identifies strongly with the bereaved boy, ultimately finding his father’s killer and giving the boy the match ticket he has taken from the guilty fan. The repeated appearance to Sam of people from his former life – he meets his mother and father, his Auntie Heather, and the mother of his girlfriend, Maya, not to mention the little girl in the red dress with the clown from the seventies BBC test card – makes family loss the prime suspect in the search for the cause of Sam’s predicament. However, to add another layer of character and plot complexity, the ‘coma angle’ emerges to offer an increasingly viable alternative explanation. John Simm’s ability to convey internal emotional turmoil allows these various possibilit...