Smash hit

Ashes to Ashes is back yet again, and it’s still a format that’s tied up like a Christmas turkey by the tiresome complexities of its ridiculous back story. Who is dead? Who is from the future? Who is coming? Who is going? Who cares? If you go into this without having seen the previous series, it will be utterly mystifying. The thudding styling re-creates the 1980s with props piled up on the screen like a car-boot sale. It still can’t make up its mind whether it wants to be a camp send-up of old television or a tough pastiche. What we get is panto police with limp plots and Punch and Judy action.

On the plus side, this new series is improved by Roger Allam, a marvellously overqualified actor, playing some sort of inspector; and by Keeley Hawes, also an actor who deserves far better than her fruit salad of a sci-fi character, who was completely overshadowed by her hairdo and Philip Glenister in the last series. But she’s taking control of her corner of the script and has amplified her performance so that she now owns the screen. Though it merely reminded me that I’d far rather see her in something interesting and profound, with better clothes.

The exuberant violent and casual bending of the rules of the 1980s cop show may well have been rewritten as some ironic comment on today’s politically correct, inclusive, neighbourhood-watch, public-relations coppers, but the recent footage from the G20 riot makes this nostalgia seem prophetic.

It has always been a popular truism that the police grow to be like their fictional depictions on telly, that Z Cars and The Sweeney rewrote the canteen culture. So we don’t need any more coppers behaving like Gene Hunt. We could do with a more high-minded police series. The genre seems to be falling out of popular favour, but the cops need to be shown how to behave and to be made to feel good about themselves, and the public ought to love a pig a bit more. They should remake Dixon of Dock Green. Could someone give Martin Clunes’s agent a call?

Britain’s Got Talent (ITV, Saturday)

Henry VIII — Mind of a Tyrant (Channel 4, Monday)

Reggie Perrin (BBC1, Friday)

Ashes to Ashes (BBC1, Monday)

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