I’m not quite sure why exactly this spin-off didn’t do it for me as much as Life on Mars did. Is it that Sam Tyler (who was neurotic bordering on hysteria at times, but relatable) is replaced with an anoying, sententious woman who dresses as a hooker even though she’s something like the only female D.I. in London? (And yet I liked her in Spooks.) Or that they’ve removed any ambiguity from Gene’s character, not so much because the topic has been exhausted in the previous show, but so that we can be subjected to the most unbelievable sexual tension ever between two protagonists? Or that the heroine, being aware oh what happened to Tyler, and what’s happening to her, doesn’t care all that much about the whole coma thing, and the show treats her story more as a vacation in her past than a life-and-death situation? Or is it just that she has too much of an anchor in real life, so that there’s no doubt, really, that she’s eventually going to come out of it?

Or, well, it could be all that at the same time — I had to check on IMDb that the writers were indeed the same as for Life on Mars. When you think about it, it’s very realistic that a story imagined by another character would have a very different feel; problem is, when you do that, you run the risk of losing what made the first version work.

When I first read that Ashes to Ashes would be about a psychologist who read all about Sam Tyler’s experiences, I thought it was an amazingly clever pretense; in retrospect, I wish they had dropped it, and just decided that Gene Hunt was the universal boogeyman who lurks in everyone’s subconscious. If not Death himself.