We love Gene Hunt. That’s just a fact. As soon as Life on Mars broadcast, Hunt become that rare thing, in these creatively timid and threadbare days for British drama: an instant icon. The first since Anna chopping out lines of coke in This Life, perhaps, or Mr Darcy and his big wet nightie.

Let’s face it – he’s why Ashes to Ashes has been made. Neither we nor, more importantly, the BBC, could let him go quite yet. Even though Sam Tyler jumped off the rooftop in Life on Mars, and ended his coma-version of 1973, the idea of bringing Gene back was too irresistible.

A five-minute perusal of the David Bowie back-catalogue revealed a loophole in the lyrics to Ashes to Ashes (“Do you remember a guy. . . from an early song?”) and, well, here’s Gene again, now in 1981. And this time playing opposite a Sexy Lady Cop time-traveller (Keeley Hawes), so that Hunt can extend his repertoire of drinking, smoking, swearing and fighting to include chat-up and fornication, too.

Personally, I am, in theory, pro a spin-off to Life on Mars. I can’t understand people who go “Oh it’s a bit silly. A bit too much.”

Come on! Once you’ve invented a time-travelling copper living in Camberwick Green, suddenly shifting it to 1981 and putting that bird from Spooks in it is neither here nor there. You can set it during the Reformation and cast Dev from Corriein it for all it would stretch my credulity envelope. BRING IT ON!

Alas, however, on watching Ashes to Ashes, it’s quite clear that my envelope is far more tender than I had presumed. It’s no longer depressing, threatening Seventies Manchester, but bright, brash Eighties London, and – in 200 miles, eight years and one sequel – Gene has gone from being a complex antihero to a cartoon hero.

It’s not Phil Glenister’s fault – he continues to play Hunt with malicious, controlled glee. The problem is with the show itself. It has lost its innocence. It’s gone from being a little bit in love with Hunt – as any rational programme would be – to borderline stalking him. Every Hunt entrance is a “Hero Shot” – slow pans, moody lighting, orchestral upswell. Every scene is waiting for Hunt to enter, or animate, or conclude it. The show will give him anything he wants – machineguns, a speedboat, a ludicrous plot resolution.

Most crucially and, I think, eventually fatally, Hunt’s just not being serviced with the kind of dialogue he should be getting. On The Thick of It, Armando Iannucci and Jesse Armstrong employ a third writer, solely to come up with imaginative swearing for the Alastair Campbell figure (“Wake up and smell the c*ck!”) For Ashes to Ashes, Hunt sorely needs an equivalent specialist in sexist, racist, homophobic northern alpha-male dialogue. His epithet for the posh Alex Drake (Hawes) – “Bollinger knickers” – is as close to sparky as it gets; and while the much-vaunted sexual tension between them works, you feel their eventual shag will be a hollow victory, given how poor the preceding chat-up lines have been. In episode one, in his opening speech, he’s already using dialogue (“armed bastards”) that he has used before. A Gene Hunt greatest hits package, so soon? It’s inexplicable laziness.

While, in the event, the new time-travelling cop, Keeley Hawes, more than holds her own – she does the old “on her knees in front of a television weeping ‘Talk to me!’ ” thing like a trouper – it scarcely matters, because the clown ruins everything in the end. Oh God, the clown. The pierrot from David Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes video fills the role the “spooky Test Card girl” provided in Life on Marsand, so far, stands as the most mortifying thing to happen on TV in 2008. Although it has tough competition from various cast members having to sing, deadpan, the lyrics to Ashes to Ashes at crucial moments.

You do wonder why on earth – after the first, excited script-meeting in the pub – they insisted on calling it Ashes to Ashes.Naming it anything else would have made it unnecessary to crowbar in a) the singing of chart hits during an armed siege and b) a malignant shouting Bowie clown – scarcely two of the easiest briefs within a serious drama.

On this showing, Gene Hunt – tragically – isn’t going to make it to the 1990s, and Hello Spaceboy.

Ashes to Ashes, Thur, BBC One, 9pm

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