Life on Mars — final episode, BBC One

Life on Mars — the series, BBC One

In the final episode of Life on Mars, Sam Tyler woke from his coma and returned to the present day from his tormented sojourn in 1973. His surgeon, Frank Morgan (Ralph Brown), had cut away at a tumour that had caused Tyler’s epic hallucination. Within that hallucination, the same Frank Morgan played the part of a progressive detective chief inspector who had identified the rough and fumble Gene Hunt as the “cancer” that must be removed from British policing. For the “operation” to be successful, Tyler needed to be “strong” and betray him. By surviving a Butch Cassidy-style shoot-out aboard a train and leaving his colleagues wounded, he proved he was.

With ten minutes of the episode still to go, however, only the telly-illiterate would think the case of Sam Tyler closed. Like many an intricately made case, it contained a false bottom. Sam, who had spent 16 episodes feeling isolated in 1973, discovered in 2007 what real alienation was. Maya, his girlfriend, having deserted him, he made do with a cup of tea and sympathy with his mother. The only policing he saw was a committee meeting on ethics. It was so literally numbing that Tyler felt nothing when he cut his finger with a letter-opener during it.

He recalled the advice of Nelson, the barman from 1973, who said that once you stopped feeling you were dead. Tyler threw himself off a tall building and, like Alice through the looking glass, found himself back in wonderland. What with Annie’s love, the camaraderie of his much recovered colleagues and the prospect of marginally more enlightened policing, life in the 1970s no longer seemed so Martian. Gene Hunt was a tumour, yes, but a benign one. Even DCI Morgan admitted that the dinosaur Hunt was “impressive in his way”.

In contrast, Life on Mars was impressive in every way. John Simm as Tyler and Philip Glenister as Hunt helped to create characters at least as memorable as Barlow and Watt from Z Cars . It is not so easy to spit out with rhythmic credibility lines such as “you great big nancy, sissy, girly, Manchester-United supporting poof”, and even harder to know how to react to them as Simm needed to. But the casting was generally superlative, not just within the copshop but in inspired cameos such as that by Hunt’s manic lawyer (Jason Watkins) last week. Ditto the design, which, having got so much detail right from Hunt’s caramel-coloured Cortina to Tyler’s Ski Yoghurt pots, three weeks ago surprised us by turning the pair into Camberwick Green characters. For a series critics foretold would run out of ideas before the end of its first season, Mars continued in its second to find new things to say about racism, Asian immigration, Irish nationalism, heroin and wife-swapping.

The detailed working out of the timeslip conceit was, in truth, one of its less important aspects. Lifers, as the obsessives call themselves, will have felt variously satisfied and cheated by last night’s tying up of loose ends. The mysterious telephone number “Hyde 2612” turned out to be Tyler’s ward and room number. Mars was an acronym for Metropolitan Accountability and Reconciliation Strategy. Other “clues” were false leads. The name Gene Hunt, for instance, contained no genetic hint about Tyler’s real father. But although the hermeneutics will continue to be debated by Lifers, the rest of us can be thankful that the series was so much less nerd-friendly than Lost .

Nevertheless, since every episode opened with Tyler asking whether he was mad, in a coma, or a time traveller, the final episode had to answer him. It chose the middle option. After all, we had seen him lying in a modern hospital. A 1970s policeman recovering from concussion would not have known the name Tony Blair. And time travel is for Saturday nights and the kiddies. So what did the end mean? Was the 1973 to which Tyler returned after his suicide, death? More likely it was heaven, copper heaven, or TV copper heaven.

At the very end, the Test Card Girl eyed us knowingly. In the old days, she appeared at the close of a night’s viewing. Here too she announced closedown, but she also reminded us that this was a TV drama that had another TV drama, The Sweeney , at its heart. The critic Logan Smith once wrote, “People say life is the thing but I prefer reading.” Life on Mars preferred television.

Why did they ask Evans?

Chris Evans, the Radio 2 DJ, is not allowing five years of failed TV shows to affect his self-esteem. “Turned down several more TV offers,” he blogs. “I am getting rather good at this nowadays. Chris Tarrant and Mr Ramsay will have to go knocking on other peoples doors’ [SIC], I’m afraid, as will ITV, MICHAEL GRADE or no MICHAEL GRADE.” Am I missing something here? Wasn’t his last telly effort, ITV’s OFI Sunday in 2005, just about the worst thing ever?

London’s provincial view

A reader, Lester Cowling, chides me for being too kind (and I wasn’t very) about Sunday’s NorthEast drama George Gently. Noticing its lack of feel for Durham, he checked the credits and found it was filmed in Ireland. “It’s the old London-centric thing, which would have it that one bit of provincial England is much the same as another and come to that, if money is involved, much the same as a bit of provincial Ireland.” Mr Cowling adds that he was born and lives in Dorset.

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