Ashes to Ashes, rubbish to rubbish

What is going on at BBC1? How did Kudos, one of today's top drama-producing independent companies, manage to get away with this?

Life on Mars (2006, 2007) originally had a clever(ish) idea. Take a cop from the present, full of today's PC attitudes and the latest police know-how, and put him in 1970s Manchester, full of booze, fags, racism and sexism and as low-tech as The Flintstones. What really made it work was the acting, especially Philip Glenister as Gene Hunt, one of the great TV drama creations of the past decade, the nostalgic soundtrack and the first-rate production design. But Life on Mars also had two other clever things going for it. First, it was a smart mix of The Sweeney and The Singing Detective. It took Dennis Potter's idea of treating illness (or in Sam Tyler's case a coma caused by a car accident) as a kind of detective story, moving between two worlds, one of which has clues about the other. The Singing Detective was a kind of Freudian detective story, dressed up in a popular genre (detective fiction), playing both genres off against each other, all with a memorable 1930s-40s soundtrack. Life on Mars took the same idea, a character tries to cure himself by finding out the secret of his mysterious childhood, all set within a hugely popular genre, in this case, 1970s TV cop dramas, based on The Sweeney.

Life on Mars added something else to the mix. By putting the series in 1970s Manchester the writers not only had fun with nostalgia (spot all the references in the design, script and soundtrack), they could also say something interesting about the changes in Britain, especially in the industrial north, between the 1970s and today. It worked on so many levels that it was one of the most interesting new drama series for years.

What happened then was itself a sign of the times. When Potter wrote The Singing Detective in the 1980s, no one asked him for The Singing Detective Two (though there was a second soundtrack album). What would be the point? Yes, it was hugely original and much acclaimed, launching the screen careers of a number of the actors—Michael Gambon, of course, but also Patrick Malahide, Joanne Whalley, and even Imelda Staunton and Jim Carter, unforgettable even in quite small roles. But it was a one-series idea. Potter, Trodd and everyone else moved on. Today, of course, television is different. The BBC were so excited that they had an hit on their hands that they commissioned Kudos to make Life on Mars 2. The second series had no new ideas to offer and kept ticking off the 1970s "issues" (everything from football violence and the NF to the industrial decline of the north and trade union conflict), but they just about got away with it.

The problems have come home to roost with Ashes to Ashes. John Simm (Sam Tyler) has gone and so has Liz White (WPC Annie Cartwright), hopefully onto greater things. But Hunt, DS Ray Carling and DC Chris Skelton are all still there, all as gormless and neanderthal as ever (cue more sexist jokes than Bernard Manning ever dreamt of). There are two changes. Tyler's been replaced by DI Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes). Big joke: smart policewoman psychologist (full of up-to-date jargon) meets unreconstructed Gene Hunt. Or "la-di-da posh bollocks" meets "northern flatfoot." How could it go wrong? Let us count the ways. Or rather, just one way: bad script. A real stinker. One of the worst ever.

Secondly, 1970s Manchester has given way to 1981 London. We know this because last night's opening episode hit us on the head with a porsche-full of verbal, visual and musical clues. The Italian restaurant has pictures of Al Pacino (The Godfather, Scarface) and John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever. We see posters of Adam Ant and David Bowie, we hear The Clash and '"No More Heroes" on the soundtrack, they make jokes about Chris de Burgh, we even get a cameo from Zippy and George from Rainbow. Every jacket sleeve is rolled up, just so, one of the villains uses phonecards (how 1980s is that?)—you get the idea. The problem is there was an interesting difference between 1970s Manchester and today. The differences between 1981 London and today are less obvious, harder to draw out. So they either repeat themes from Life on Mars (the sexism, the computer gags) or rely on endless references to popular culture.

The bigger problem is that this is really Life on Mars 3 with Keeley Hawes instead of John Sim. He was hit by a car; she is shot, both end up in the past, trying to work out if there are any clues in the past to how to get back to the present. He ended up in the year his father disappeared; she ends up in 1981, the year her parents were killed. Er, and that's it. Oh, and the Guv's wife has left him.

Everywhere the plot creaks. Almost everything is implausible. Every conceit is third-hand and it doesn't even work as a cop show any more. And yet BBC1 bought it. Which brings us to the final question. How come HBO produces The Wire and BBC1 gives us Ashes to Ashes?