Ashes to Ashes

Ashley Pharoah and Matthew Graham had a good idea once: a detective hit by a car in 2006 wakes in 1973 and cannot tell whether he is dead, mad or back in time. Life on Mars (2006) ran two series and ended. Ashes to Ashes (2008) is what you do when the idea has ended and the audience has not. In place of that detective is DI Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes), a psychologist who has read his file, shot in London in 2008 and waking in 1981 knowing exactly what has happened. Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister) is waiting, transferred south with Ray Carling (Dean Andrews) and Chris Skelton (Marshall Lancaster), and the red Quattro is parked outside.

That knowing is the first change and the biggest problem. Sam Tyler spent two series unsure whether he was mad. Alex arrives already certain she is in a coma, and for most of the first series she says so, in a running commentary on constructs and projections that turns every scene into a therapy session. Hawes is a good actor stuck with a character who has seen the previous show. The writing gives her a head start on the audience and then asks her to be surprised, and never gets round that.

What the series has instead is a look. Fabian Wagner shoots 1981 London in hard red and electric blue, the station in strip-light white and the clubs in smoke and neon, so that a routine chase through a wet car park looks like the sleeve of a twelve-inch single. It is closer to Miami Vice than to the brown haze of the parent series, and it suits a show that has stopped pretending to be about detection. The soundtrack is wall-to-wall 1981, Bowie first and everything else after. The pierrot clown from the Ashes to Ashes video is a good image the first time and a party trick by the fourth.

Then there is Glenister. Gene Hunt in 1973 was a bigot with a conscience, and often wrong. In 1981 he is a hero in a camel coat, and the scripts, by Pharoah and Graham with Julie Rutterford, Mark Greig, Jack Lothian and others, feed him. He kicks doors, insults everyone, calls Alex Bolly and gets the last word. Glenister plays him heavier and stiller than before, a man who is tired and does not know why, and it is the only performance in the first series that seems to know where the show is going. The other three are better than their plots: Andrews’s Ray, still a pig, now with something bruised under it; Lancaster’s Chris, sweeter and dimmer than ever; and Montserrat Lombard’s Shaz Granger, the WPC who is cleverer than the detectives.

We were bored by the first series, and a little embarrassed for it, and the pierrot and the speeches about the subconscious were what did it. Then the second series (2009) began to take its own mystery seriously, and the third (2010) added Daniel Mays as Jim Keats, a soft-spoken man from Discipline and Complaints who smiles at Gene the way a cat smiles at a bird. Mays is superb and does most of it with a raised eyebrow. Every scene he shares with Glenister tightens, and for the first time the show has somewhere to go.

We will not describe how it ends. We can say that the last episode does something we did not expect, that it made sense of images we had been rolling our eyes at, and that we were moved, more than a series with this much hair gel had any right to move us. Eight directors, Jonny Campbell and Alrick Riley among them, keep the house style steady enough that the change in tone reads as growth.

It is a lesser show than Life on Mars. It is also one of the odder things British television attempted in those years. There are twenty-four hours of it, at 60 minutes an episode and a 15 certificate. If the first series makes you want to stop, we understand; hold on until Mays arrives, and then see it through.