TV: Ashes to Ashes (series 3, contains spoilers.)

Series three is where Ashes to Ashes really gets weird. At the end of the Series two finale, Alex is shot in 1982 and wakes from her coma in 2008... only to find Gene Hunt talking to her through her TV screen. Up until this point, it seemed fairly straight-forward. Even if in some respects the time-travel was real, it is a parallel reality reached through being in a coma. But if Alex is in a coma in the coma-world, just what is real?

In this final season, it is not only time-traveller Alex who would have strange hallucinations and experiences, but also Ray, Chris and Shaz. Each saw stars in the sky "as if they were standing on the edge of the world." Also, each had a significant character-defining episode in the series, where they faced challenges, and overcame them and proved themselves worthy coppers. And when this happened, the screen went dark, they heard a couple of seconds of the song "Life on Mars," and laughter, voices, the sound of a pub. Not just any pub, but the Railway Arms, that gang's hangout back in the Manchester days.

For the first two series of Ashes to Ashes, I found Alex Drake an immensely irritating character, unable to get past her idea of the world existing only to serve her purposes. In series three, she has mellowed and is more likeable - but perhaps that is because there is an even more annoying character: Jim Keats. (Daniel Mays.) Keats is an officer from the Discipline and Complaints department, investigating Gene Hunt's department and spreading discord throughout his team. He brings up the subject of Sam Tyler's (1979) death and tries to persuade Alex that Gene Hunt had a hand in it.

When series three was being shown on TV, but before I had caught up and was avoiding it, I couldn't help hearing my family and friends discussing the character of Jim as a character designed to question what we thought we knew of Gene Hunt. However, there was no such ambiguity. I could never take seriously the suggestion that Gene was a murderer - or even that he was less than the morally-dubious-but-ultimately-good person we'd come to know. Especially not coming from such a character as Jim Keats, who was just plain creepy. Just watching him smarm around, making pronouncements and insinuations with his rubbery, sneery mouth and unsubtly trying to persuade Gene's team to come and join him, made me want to take a long shower.

I started to have my theories about Keats' identity when he made sure that he was present when two police officers died: first a one-episoder, then a supporting member of the team from the beginning. In the first death scene, he was creepy, but seemed that he was at least trying to be comforting. The second was frankly terrifying. The dying policeman was obviously in pain and distress, and Keats did nothing but held his head still, and waited. Was he some kind of Grim Reaper, I wondered? Or worse? And then it was pointed out that both officers failed.

In the grand finale, when all is revealed, I both had an inkling of where the story was going, and simultaneously had to do mental gymnastics to keep up. It seems that everyone was dead: Alex died from her gunshot wound, Ray, Chris and Shaz all were killed at various points in time before ending up in this world, which must be some kind of purgatory. And Gene Hunt. Not only is Gene dead, but he died as a very young policeman in 1953, and has been here ever since as a guardian angel sort of figure, training up his team until they are ready to "move on." (Oh, and in this world Heaven is a pub!) Jim Keats, his nemesis, is revealed to be either the Devil himself, or one of his minions.

When I was watching Ashes to Ashes, I had wondered if "the answers" to the series' mysteries were hinted at by the titles: Life on Mars showed Sam Tyler finding his life's meaning in a strange world, and Ashes to Ashes, from the funeral service, had an awful lot of death themes in it. However, I dismissed the idea that it was actually set in the afterlife, because the epic series Lost had its conclusion on the same weekend, and revealed to have that same explanation. Actually, Ashes to Ashes aired first, but I insisted on being told nothing about it. I wasn't a fan of Lost, but my sister had told me enough to keep me curious.

My first reaction to the great revelation was "Where did that come from?" But after a few moments' contemplation, I realised I wasn't disappointed, because the clues had been woven in from the start, if I knew to look for them. However, I would be interested to watch the whole five seasons of two series with that extra knowledge of what was going on, and see how it changes my understanding of the story.

TV: Ashes to Ashes (series 1-2)

Let's fire up the Quattro.

After the phenomenon that was Life on Mars, it was not too surprising that Gene Hunt would appear on our screens once more, in another Bowie-song-titled series. This time it is 1981 and the much-loved anti-hero and his team have been transferred down to London. The series has undergone a glamorous makeover and now we land at the beginning of the New Romantic movement. The new titles blare with squealy guitars, and of course Hunt has a shiny new car: the iconic Audi Quattro.

One member of the Life on Mars team is notably absent: protagonist Sam Tyler ended the series 2 finale by committing suicide, sending himself (temporarily) back to 1973 where he felt he belonged. Time moves differently there, and he spent six happy years in the seventies before his fate caught up with him. This time it is police psychiatrist  psychologist Alex Drake in the fish-out-of-water role. Back in the 2000s, Alex had been investigating Tyler's death, and therefore when she arrives in 1981, she has a little background knowledge of DCI Hunt, DS Ray Carling and DC Chris Skelton. Seeing that, as far as Alex is concerned, they and their world were dreamed up by a comatose Sam Tyler, and considering that her last memory was of being shot in the head, it is not unreasonable for her to assume that she too is unconscious and dreaming. Unfortunately for her, Hunt, Carling, Skelton and newcomer Sharon "Shaz" Granger won't accept their roles as sidekicks in her story, and object to this newcomer strutting around as if she is the only person who matters - or even really exists.

Introducing a strong-willed female counterpart to Sam Tyler - and one whose first 1980s outfit is that of a prostitute - adds a new angle to the love-hate relationship between old and new methods, and of course between the characters themselves. As far as Gene is concerned, Alex "Bolly-Knickers" is a posh, smug - but strangely sexy - know-it-all, and Alex considers Gene a misogynistic neanderthal (but ditto the strangely attractive factor.) 

In Ashes to Ashes we get to see deeper sides to the characters introduced in Life on Mars. Ray Carling, (Dean Andrews,) who was not portrayed wholly sympathetically in the original series, softens in his attitudes, showing more respect to Alex than he did to Sam. The moment where I found myself warming to him was in the third episode when he is awkwardly compassionate towards a young woman taking refuge in the police station. Chris Skelton (Marshall Lancaster) has matured from the nervous and rather dim youngster he was in Life on Mars and is in a romantic relationship with the rather lovely Shaz Granger (Montserrat Lombard.)

As in Life on Mars, while Alex tries to get used to her new life in the '80s, surreal happenings keep imposing on her, cementing her belief that she is in a coma and dreaming. As well as seeing her daughter Molly in a time before Molly even existed, every so often the clown from David Bowie's Ashes to Ashes music video turns up taunting her, like the Test Card girl in Life on Mars. She also has to deal with meeting her parents, who died when Alex was a little girl. In 1981. The first series deals with Alex trying so desperately to change her past and prevent the bomb from exploding and killing her family. But alas, as we saw in Life on Mars, it seems that you just can't change your own history.

Or so it would seem. In series two, Alex meets another time traveller from the early twenty first century. The plot around Martin Summers challenges everything you think you know about the rules of time travel in this story's world, when he does something that really, really screws up his own timeline.

TV: Life on Mars

My name is Sam Tyler. I had an accident and I woke up in 1973. Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time? Whatever’s happened, it’s like I’ve landed on a different planet. Now, maybe if I can work out the reason, I can get home.

Despite myself living practically on a different planet when Life on Mars was first broadcast in 2006 (I was a student in a house with no TV,) I was aware that it was a refreshingly original drama series: a new take on an old genre, the 70s cop show, but with a mystery. However, it wasn’t until this year that I finally sat down and watched the two series of Life on Mars and three of Ashes to Ashes in about a month.

Life on Mars began as the sort of TV programme that you really couldn’t make these days! A modern-day police show is far removed from the high-action cops-and-robbers chase shows that were around in the good old days, or so they say. Police officers have to be careful, professional and respectful - all well and good, but not so much fun to watch.

Until they get hit by a car, sent back in time to the ‘seventies and introduced to the Gene Genie. Make no doubt about it, although Sam Tyler (John Simm) is the protagonist of Life on Mars, Gene Hunt is who we watch the show for. Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister) is Sam’s new boss, and he has very different ideas about how a police force should be run. Rather, Sam’s ideas are the new ones: Gene runs his department on the tried-and-tested method of brute force and ignorance… and an unlimited capacity for creative and outrageous verbal - and physical - abuse. The differences between their styles of policing is most concisely shown when trying to gain access to a flat: while Tyler fumbles around attempting to pick the lock, Hunt kicks the door in: Crude, but efficient.

While at first 1973 seems a rather random date for Sam to be sent to, with great music and lots of nostalgia for a rather iconic era, as the story unfolds it is revealed that something significant happened to the Tyler family at that time and it’s up to Sam to change his family’s history. But is time changeable? In some ways it seems possible: in the very first episode, Sam manages to influence a chain of events that eventually help to save his girlfriend in 2006. But other events are inevitably, tragically doomed. Evidence suggests that one can’t change one’s own timeline in this version of time travel.

Life on Mars isn’t, however, a straightforward time-travel show. Even while in a fully-formed 1973, with flared jeans, awesome music and a lot of brown, Sam experiences strange, out-of-place phenomena that make the series far more complex, thought-provoking . The Test Card F girl comes to life and walks out of his TV screen to talk eerily to him, and he hears voices that he recognises from his life back in the 21st century.

So, is he mad, in a coma or back in time? Is 1973 real or in his mind? (Or, as Dumbledore suggests in the final Harry Potter book, both? Life on Mars in some respects reminded me of Terry Pratchett’s book Night Watch. If it weren’t for the fact that the novel was published before the TV series, you could be forgiven for thinking that Pratchett had borrowed some aspects of his story from a roundworld equivalent. Watchman Commander Sam Vimes is sent back in time by a freak accident where he has to survive a major incident in his past, and in this case, mentor his younger self with his modern-style policing to keep him from being influenced by the dodgy coppers. Interestingly, it is in Discworld where there is a straightforward morality in the Watch, while in Life on Mars, although we really can’t condone everything anything - that Gene Hunt says or does, it has to be confessed, he gets results and his heart is (more or less) in the right place.