let's do the time warp again

I may have thought the patient had died, ladies and gentlemen; but if so, the corpse is about to get a darned good burial. I've just seen the first episode of Ashes to Ashes, in which the Bad Cop DCI Gene Hunt from Life on Mars is resuscitated for another trip through time - this time to the wilds of London in 1981. Double creepy! I was here! Remember that weird orangey-red lipstick? The clothes are looking horrible, yet strangely normal, and the locations are looking fab.

But the problem is, once you see it on telly it really does start feeling like it was just yesterday. How odd that you can't just step through somewhere and be back then. (Oh - and that's what time-travel stories are all about...)

And with a sultry (yet, in this episode, mainly rather hysterical; I'm hoping that will change) female time-travelling sidekick, it's looking like Gene Hunt's going to get to be the Bad, Sexy Cop this time round. Is that going to be fun, or tedious,or is it an eighties hommage á la Moonlighting?

The papers are talking about its black comedy, its surreal weirdness, and its soundtrack.

So hurrah! Dennis Potter it may not be, but it is cracking good fun, it's put together with cleverness and sophistication, it's original, and it actually has a bit of the Zeitgeist about it. As I recall that was a word we used to like, back in 1981.

I take it all back...