Or perhaps I mean – “How intentional is “Ashes To Ashes”‘ rubbishness?”
It’s an odd show, to say the least, this Life On Mars sequel thing (they’re calling it a ‘follow-up’, but it’s a sequel). A retread, but a retread very keen to demonstrate how clever its retreading is. Spoilers below the cut if you haven’t seen it yet.
So Alex Drake wakes up in 1981 having read Sam Tyler’s case notes: she knows everything’s happening in her head, and we know it (or sort of know it, or quite possibly no longer care either way). This was probably the only way to play it and makes for some funny metabusiness. She’s essentially living in a Life On Mars fanfic – she is her own Mary Sue. Which means that the writers get to write an even more ridiculous Gene Hunt, over the top because it’s happening in the head of someone who already thinks Gene Hunt is over the top, trotting out his Gene Huntisms because that’s all Alex knows. The tone of the first series of Life On Mars (before the writers fully realised what a piggy bank Hunt was) was a mix of amusing pastiche, brutal period police show, boys’-own genre story and science fiction chiller. It played, very effectively, with its audience’s nostalgic sympathies “Ha ha it’s some flares” – “Weren’t the Seventies horrible” – “Hold on, the Seventies were kind of awesome” – “D00D THE TESTCARD CAME TO LIFE”.
Any ‘awesomeness’ of the 80s was sadly lacking in Ashes To Ashes episode one, which stuck firmly to look-a-yuppie territory and then lurched into chilliness with the Bowie clown* and evil Zippy (you knew they were coming; they still kind of worked). The tonal shift was very pronounced – there was no grit or brutality, no tension in the story and no temptation in the setting, just comedy and weirdness. Which again makes sense from the show’s conceit – the thing about LoM was that Sam Tyler wasn’t just sent back to 1973, he was sent back to a 1973 cop show. And here was an 80s show – Miami Vice and A-Team references (the bullets that miss everybody all the time, as much as the name).
But the grit worked well as a buffer between the comedy and the weirdness – here there’s nothing holding the two apart, which makes the show as a whole weirder (as in: what are they trying to do?) Oh, no, wait, there’s Alex’s story holding the two apart, but so far I’m not gripped: I’m more interested that they never found Sam’s body than in whether Molly gets her birthday cake. As, I guess, are most Life On Mars viewers. I’ll be back next week, but whether it’ll be grip or gawp I’m not sure.
*who went to my school! But they should have had it be the T Rex from 3D Monster Maze chasing her down the alley for real 1981 chillz.
“they never found Sam’s body” = door is always open PLZ PLZ PLZ for a cameo or a finale – she can conherently imagine sam coming back now.
it was very silly. they haven’t set out their stall yet though – her knowledge of the situation rewrites what the show can do. on the plus side, it’ll make it harder to get full on emo
hang on, wasn’t bowie the bowie clown!?? (later edit – oh i c what u mean – in A2A of course, duh)
Actually the show might be kind of awesome if it IS all a ridiculous metastory about fan fiction and what happens when you/Alex/we fall in love with a character (or what happens to a world created as a showcase for a character when its creator changes that character). Possibly not on prime time BBC1 though.
Clown is this dude: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0167249/bio
Nicknamed “Ron” at school for reasons I never understood, he was a few years above me.
I liked it about as much as I expected to but I was surprised by wanting to like it more (so I will probably talk myself into liking it by next week).
I’d like (them) to go with the metastory and take it out (or in) further but unfortunately Keeley Hawes’ custard pie acting performance is proving a HUGE obstacle.
What would have given me the creeps is if Adam Ant had played the gunman.
Evil Rainbow was a little too easy an option.
Pierrot pursuer less effective a scare than Rover the weather balloon.
In 1981 pedant terms The A-Team and Miami Vice would have had mimimal impact (were either even going in ’81? Hill Street Blues started screening here around about then) and in Britain we were still in Professionals/Jill Gascoine telling Limahl off in The Gentle Touch territory but if they want to extend the metastory to cover ’80s misnostalgia in general then I don’t suppose that matters much.
My dad died in ’81 and my most indelible nightmare from that period is dreaming of him chasing me a la Drake and the clown last night.
I’ll keep with it but I’m wary. For me La Jetee and the Living in Harmony episode of The Prisoner did the same sort of thing infinitely better but then these were one-offs and not full series (and if Moving Wallpaper/Echo Beach goes the way I’d like it to go they could pull off something incredible). Above all Keeley needs to stop gawping with her jaw open all the time a la Rufus Sewell when we saw him in Macbeth at the RSC/Cary Grant in Arsenic And Old Lace.
(and Alastair Gray’s Lanark definitely needs to come into consideration here for multiple reasons)
(pps: how long before they succumb to Back To The Future referencing?)
Egads Tom this was quick, you beat me to it!
I really enjoyed it actually but then again 2008 IS the year of fanfic, and also I guess for the purposes of this (and any other thread) I am a Thatcherkid so evil Zippy REALLY WORKED for me ha.
To paraphrase that contemporary model of stalwart British permanence, i.e. the security guard who sits at the desk in the new Emu series: “YOUR NAME IS GOING IN THE BOOK!”
Marcello, the trailer for next week reveals a DeLorean. So, not long.
I made the point elsewhere that as this isn’t the real 1981, and more a version of 1981 going on in the head of someone too young to really be there at the time, the fact that it’s full of inappropriately cobbled together 80s signifiers isn’t too much of an obstacle for me.
I liked the full on camp Miami Vice stuff more than the ‘OMG Zippy’ stuff. What this lacks so far is the sense of the social tension of the time and sense of impending disaster just beyond the horizon that characterised Life on Mars. Other than Gene Hunt going “everyone hates us now” and a bit of ‘lol yuppies’, that is.
“A version of 1981 going on in the head of a writer too young to remember much or anything about it first hand and too idle to do any proper research on the era morelike” some might say.
The “full on camp Miami Vice stuff” was doubtless shoehorned in with our old friend “overseas sales” in mind.
Trouble is for those of us who did live through 1981 it has to ring true because otherwise there’s nothing for us to cling to and it becomes another example of mix n’ match so what?ism. They can’t really use the “this is Greeneland” excuse since the writer clearly isn’t Graham Greene.
We should have a sweepstake on which episode Chris will spend the entirety of trying to solve a rubik’s cube.
NB Chris’ girlfriend-to-be, Shazza – is she coding EARLY INDIE?
The odd thing is about Sam. Ray is sure that he ‘came back’, and we know he did because we saw that last episode. But does Alex know that? As far as she knows, the story ends when Sam jumped. Here, it does seem there is a sense of some parallel universe in which Gene, Chris and Ray reside—or am I reading way too much into this as I did last year?
There was a reveal which dealt with that wasn’t there – Alex was all “what? He came back? That proves my theory that you can live a zillion years in imaginary-past in the blink of a real world eye CRIPES it’s like NARNIAR even though SAM heard stuff from the real world in REAL TIME in LoM”, er I may be eliding some of that with a conversation I had this morning.
I was surprised Ray said “Sam came back” – why would Ray have thought that Sam had ever been away? He only tootled off up a train tunnel for a minute or two didn’t he?
ok so who-what-where else has in fact previously tackled the issue of THE HISTORY OF THE RECENT PAST through the now dominant first-draft-of-history scrim of “hoho the 60s/70s/80s WHAT WERE WE THINKING?”
(dennis potter and lipstick in yr collar maybe? but this is borderline bcz his favoured memory terrain is before the kind of masscult address* we’re looking throujgh here… and-plus individual eps of eg dr who POSSIBLY)
(ps i didn’t watch any of A2A yet and am basing this on comments so far…)
*expandng the idea of “this kind of masscult address”: ie looking at periods of history AFTER THERE HAD ARISEN a self-conscious countercultural advocate-journalist typoe, to wrangle “good” pop from “bad’ as it happened (where journalist = “first drafter of history then AND now”; what i’m sayin is that there was post c.1968 a NEW BREED OF JOURNO) (er maybe)
haha typoe <--- SELF-REFERENTIAL TURNER PRIZE WINNER
Actually it is all the fault of yer man Leigh Hunt who in 1810s furiously scribbled away to effect of Wordsworth and Southey are REAL SOUL PASSION HONESTY and BEGONE PLASTIC COCKTAIL POPISTS Keats and Byron
(which is exactly why David Hare’s bonebrained Keats vs Dylan anti-debate hits the floor* (inbuilt hopelessness of words alone vs. words + music + grain standoff notwithstanding) because as demonstrated especially exquisitely in Motion’s biog Keats was viewed EXACTLY the same way viz. LONG HAIRED HIPPY WASTER USE AS CANNON FODDER Lord Liverpool writes)
*though to be truthful it hit the floor at my Oxon interview when I was asked the exact same question only it was Lennon or Keats (since JL had been shot the previous day and I had done Keats in depth in my A Level/Higher year at school) and I immediately answered “Cole Porter” and that got me in heh.
Mark: do you mean insertion of (in)credulous present-day character into just out of reach of memory but close enough to be familiarish into recent history? Or do you mean the this isn’t history it’s an impression of what stuff was like (THAT’S WHAT HISTORY IS DYS?)? Or something else?
(Because big chunks of LoM were basically Back To The Future with police procedurals in place of Chuck Berry guitar riffs.)
well some of what i mean is simply “people on telly never watch telly”; but it is increasingly necessary when you write fiction based in the recent past that people on telly will seem bizarrely unrealistic if they don’t have a popcult hinterland that ISN’T just a speedread value-judgement as to character
have we entered an era where eg the new “cracker” (or whoever) has to watch ACTUAL REAL brookside to understand the world: jane tennyson what is on yr walkman?
(slightly contra marcello’s point: people in books DO read books — this has never been a problematic convention — so the map isn’t exact in the way i’m incoherently worrying at; tho in other ways HURRAH PRECISELY d.hare f.off)
re LoM: sam was never “omigod is this the actual 70s or the TV 70s”, was he?
seems to me the 80s is the decade where something like that can be a wedge-issue plotwise? (is this what’s going on here?)
What always struck me about someone like BS Johnson is that he writes like a thirties time traveller who somehow landed in the sixties, couldn’t quite make sense of it (“Dear Paul MacCarthney”) but knows he can’t get back* and thus suffocates himself in his own protective shield of I AM RIGHT ROGER FRY SAID SO IN 1933 yet penetrated the process of reading the book while still writing it more successfully than any of his contemporaries e.g. Figes or Burns managed.
*and isn’t something like La Jetee proof of the futility in trying; girl at Orly airport = Graves’ White Goddess => systematic exclusion of unworthy everybody/everything else => finally incl. self?
i think what i’m arguing is that the advent of “rock-crit”* as a (new?) type of aesthetic address is a declaration that in some (recently established?) way it ISN’T futile — hence the enormous ghastly allure and/or damage of “the test of time” and like memes
*which i’m defining in a rather expansive way content-wise but a rather finicky way time-wise
ie pynchon fits into “rock-crit” in my version and so (sorta kinda justabout supers-quinchily) do larkin and amis pere, tho not necessarily in a good way (obs amis fils can bug-off as per)
(ps i am making this up RIGHT NOW and may “adjust” frantically when i find myself approving something WRONG or HORRIBLE)
i: ok so we discussed my point in the lord clue last night and it was concluded
ii: i have not yet made myself clear (!)
iii: i need to actually WATCH a2a and plumb the idea in (if possible)
iv: back to the future d00d!!??
v: yeeee-ow!
lord clue?
For the next series, send Gene Hunt back to the 1950, in
black and white. With Dixon of Doc Green, Mr Cholmondely Warner and the Lavender Hill Mob for Company.