The maxim “never go back” was advice ignored by Detective Chief Inspector Sam Tyler in the final episode of Life on Mars. He jumped from an office block in the here-and-now and found himself back in the Seventies, a golden age of brutal coppering, at least on television. In the sequel, Ashes to Ashes, which had its press preview in Soho last night, we learn what happened to him. It is not, I hope, giving too much away that come 1981 Tyler is no longer around to provide the Jeff to DCI Gene Hunt’s Mutt.

The question is whether the writers Matthew Graham and Ashley Pharoah were right to revisit the most enjoyable crime drama of the Noughties. Would this be a daring leap back to Hunt’s future or déjà vu déjà vu all over again?

The time traveller from today is this time a woman, Detective Inspector Alex Drake, a psychological profiler who counselled Tyler during his brief, postcoma, sojourn in the present-day. Shot by a deranged criminal, she wakes up dressed as a prostitute with Ultravox ringing in her ears. It is not long before her forensic brain works out she is in the same fantasy as Tyler’s. To his intense pleasure, she greets Hunt like a hero – or antihero – from mythology.

There is a snag. Drake knows roughly what has happened to her and so do we. The engine of Life on Mars was Tyler’s quest to discover whether he was dead, insane or living in the past.

The ex-Spook Keeley Hawes is a worthy replacement for John Simm who played Tyler. She makes Drake, a single mother, a character of subtlety: you yearn to know how deep her veneer of tough is.

We have lost Manchester but gained London at the moment of its 20th-century ripening, its first yuppies about to be named. There are some lovely touches: I don’t know why filling a glass to the brim with red wine in a trattoria should be so Eighties but it is. The replacement for Hunt’s caramel Cortina, a red Audi Quattro, looks if anything more fun to abuse.

But much is secondhand and when Hunt, played as gleefully as ever by Philip Glenister, shouts an insult as lame as “hoity-toity poofter” you wonder if the writers should have thought again. Old conceits are reworked. A sinister clown (is there any other type?) stands in for the test-card girl of Mars. Worse, the action-scenes are no longer taken seriously. Shoot-outs are played for laughs. The direction sends up Clint Eastwood. The knowingness may be form reflecting content (remember Eighties “irony”?) but Mars was itself a parody of The Sweeney. And it’s hard to parody a parody.

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