Ashes to Ashes

[RunForTheHills]

Ashes to Ashes

 

 

Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 04/02/2008

 

Stars Philip Glenister and Keeley Hawes tell Andrew Pettie about perms, prozzies and bringing the 1980s back to life in BBC1’s Ashes to Ashes

 

Watch a clip from Ashes to Ashes

Philip Glenister is trying to park his car outside the Saudi Arabian embassy, when an irate policeman stops him dead in his tracks. “You can’t park here!” bellows the policeman, brandishing a machine-gun. “And you of all people, Gene, should know that!” Glenister says real policemen are continually confusing him with DCI Gene Hunt, the rough-hewn Mancunian copper he played in time-travelling drama Life on Mars, which also starred John Simm as a modern-day DCI who falls into a coma and wakes up in 1973.

 

Over two series, DCI Hunt, the devil-may-care Seventies dinosaur, and his fudge-coloured Ford Cortina became cult figures. On Thursday, Hunt drives screeching back onto our screens in Ashes to Ashes, somewhere between a sequel to and a spin-off of Life on Mars, this time at the wheel of a sunset-red Audi Quattro. It won’t just be the automotive experts among you who realise that times have changed. For one thing, Hunt has moved to London. For another, the year is now 1981.

 

Keeley Hawes and Philip Glenister with the Audi Quattro “Gene has gone from being the big fish in a small pond in Manchester, to a small fish in a much bigger pond,” says Glenister. “But scum is scum wherever you are, and Gene knows how he likes to deal with that.” But as the action moves forward to 1981 – the year that Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer, and Bucks Fizz won the Eurovision Song Contest – the public’s attitude to the police is about to harden.

“The writers were very clever in setting this in 1981,” says Glenister. “It’s very specific. You need the tail-end of the political movements that were so important in the late Seventies. You need the Brixton riots. Gene has the Scarman Report [an inquiry into the riots that identified a loss of public confidence in the police] hanging over him. What we see is a man losing his grip on the power he had as a policeman. Gene’s trying to do the right thing but finding it extremely difficult to fit in with the changing times.”

 

The biggest adjustment Gene has to make, however, is to his new partner, DI Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes). Drake, to Hunt’s visible consternation, is a woman. She also, like John Simm’s character Sam Tyler in Life on Mars, belongs in the present. As Ashes to Ashes opens, Drake, a police psychologist who spent months studying Tyler, is shot in the head after a hostage situation goes awry. She wakes up on a party boat, dolled up as a prostitute, in 1981.

 

“The clever thing about it,” says ex-Spooks star Hawes, “is that because Alex already knows Sam Tyler, she already knows the characters, like Gene, who Sam talked about meeting in 1973. She’s convinced that they are merely part of her own fantasy world. And, a bit like Sam, she thinks that everything happening to her ‘in 1981’ is only taking place in her own head.”

 

Hunt and Drake strike up an unlikely partnership, built, says Hawes, on “sexual chemistry, as well as a grudging respect”. In the opening episode they try to crack an east London cocaine ring – a mission that leads to frantic wheelspins in the Quattro and Hunt roaring along the Thames in a speedboat spraying petrified suspects with a machine-gun. But beneath the knockabout action sequences and in-jokes is the same attention to period detail that viewers responded to so nostalgically in Life on Mars. The crew spent hours scouring eBay for props. George and Zippy, puppet stars of Eighties children’s TV series Rainbow, make a disturbing cameo in one of Drake’s dreams.

 

Surprisingly, it proved easier finding locations in Manchester that hadn’t changed since 1973 than it was to find London locations unaltered since 1981. Considerable amounts of CGI were needed to erase modern landmarks such as the Gherkin and Canary Wharf. Glenister is especially proud of Gene Hunt’s new computer. “It’s absolutely enormous,” he says. “And all Gene can get it to do is display the time and date, and play Pong.”

The Chinese also provided culinary challenges. “You’d go to lunch and there’d be a plate in front of you with bits of duck’s tongue arranged like flower petals,” he says. “Followed by mountain frog stew. That was a real meal – and you had to eat it! You had to say, ‘Gosh, this is delicious! Wow, I’m full now after just one mouthful!’”

 

Hawes had just as much fun with Drake’s costumes. “Almost everything Alex wears is red, grey or black,” she says, “and most of it’s made of leather. Some of the clothes have dated horribly, but I was flicking through a copy of Vogue last week and there was Alex’s white leather bike jacket priced at £600. It’s exactly the look people are going for in trendy bars in Hoxton [east London] right now. Except maybe for the massive perm.”

Fans of the BBC’s painstakingly authentic period dramas will be heartened to learn that Hunt’s politically incorrect attitudes to women remain as “old-fashioned” as they were in 1973. He greets DI Drake, dressed as “a prozzie”, with the words: “Christ. If your skirt was any shorter I could see what you had for breakfast.” Nowaways, Hunt would be up before an industrial tribunal. In 1981, that almost constituted a chat-up line.

 

Ashes to Ashes is on BBC1 on Thursday, 7 February at 9.00pm.

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I'm gonna have to buy a TV to watch this now, damn.

[Space Cadet]

Thanks for the article.

 

I ADORE what I've seen of Life on Mars. (John Simm! :heart:) Want to see the rest before I watch this, but really hoping it lives up to it's predecessor.

[Black Rose]

I have bad news for you then, it doesn't live up to Life on Mars.

[RunForTheHills]

^ Yes, it doesn't really come close I'm afraid. 1 or 2 good episodes so far, but the lead character is rather annoying at times, and the show itself comes across as slightly cheesy.

 

And after Stage 6 shut down, this is the only fix for Gene Hunt goodness. Thats until I can be bothered to go out get the LoM DVDs.

[Bonus_mosher]

I never watched Life on Mars, but my flatmate got me into watching this and I loved it, so I can't compare, but am I the only one pissed off at having to wait til next year for the next series? considering it's only the beginning of this year really?

 

bummer.

[RunForTheHills]

^Yeah, I had to wait a whole year for Life On Mars series 2 to be shown, so I know how you feel. I don't really mind waiting for this one, though.

You should really check out Life on Mars, its at least twice as good as A2A.

Having said that, the last episode was good though. Best of the series so far I think.

[Bonus_mosher]

yeah I liked the finale, I was left shouting "NO!!" at the tv when it ended though and she wasn't back in her own time! haha

 

My flatmate keep's telling me to check out Life on Mars.

I think I might have to, although I know what happens in the end so that's kinda spoiled it.

[RunForTheHills]

Even if you know the ending, the series is still brilliant, trust me. I still enjoy it alot, just for the fact that its still great entertainment and its very well written. Its very funny in places too. I really recommend you check it out ASAP!

[mc_squared]

^Yeah, I had to wait a whole year for Life On Mars series 2 to be shown, so I know how you feel. I don't really mind waiting for this one, though.

You should really check out Life on Mars, its at least twice as good as A2A.

Having said that, the last episode was good though. Best of the series so far I think.

 

Life On Mars was definitely better, but I still enjoyed A2A.:cool: