‘My name is Sam Tyler. I had an accident and I woke up in 1973…’
Life on Mars, created by Matthew Graham, Tony Jordan and Ashley Pharoah, was broadcast on BBC Television in 2006–07. It told the story of today’s Detective Chief Inspector Sam Tyler, transported back to the Manchester of 1973 (as a DI). It was part of a fashion for period detective shows, along with Foyle’s War (2002–15) and Endeavour (2012–23) and, like them, probably tells us more about its own time than it does about the past.
Here’s a guide to what we learnt in each of the sixteen episodes.
Episode 1
Fresh from his accident, Sam Tyler isn’t in peak condition. ‘You’re as white as a ginger bird’s arse,’ says DC Chris Skelton. DCI Gene Hunt is less sympathetic: ‘I couldn’t give a tart’s furry cup if half your brains are falling out.’ Tyler’s real problem, Hunt tells him, is ‘You got principles.’
On the TV news Robert Dougall announces: ‘Mr Enoch Powell has called for an increase in taxation to deal with inflation.’ Women coppers are known as plonks, which is a little disrespectful to the likes of WPC Annie Cartwright, who has a degree in psychology. But some things are familiar: there’s a record shop called Vinyl Heaven, where a ten-year-old Sam will one day buy his first single, Gary Numan’s ‘Cars’.
‘I want a lawyer,’ says a suspect, and Hunt retorts, ‘I wanna hump Britt Ekland.’
Episode 2
Visiting a colleague who’s in a coma in intensive care, Gene Hunt stubs a cigarette out on the floor next to the bed. Later he mocks a deaf man, and while undercover in an ice-cream van, he flicks V-signs at children, making them cry. He also hits suspects and plants drugs. Sam Tyler disapproves – ‘Nothing puts things right quite like a punch, does it?’ he sneers – but Hunt does have some standards: ‘I’ve never fitted anyone up who hasn’t deserved it.’ Despite a fundamental difference of opinion, the two men get on much better after they’ve had a bit of a fight.
In the pub, the lights flicker, and the bartender Nelson tuts: ‘These cuts are getting worse, you know, man. Mr Heath had better sort himself out.’ Tyler experiences an excremental echo of Proust’s madeleine. ‘White dogshit,’ he notes. ‘Takes me back.’
Episode 3
There’s trouble at the mill, where new machinery will make large numbers of workers redundant. Which raises the question of who’s going to get laid off. ‘The immigrants, well they’re a little brown army,’ says the boss. ‘But our lads – different story.’ Certainly, they’re demoralised, unconvinced that even the new looms will save the business. ‘The whole community could go down if the mill closes,’ says the union rep, who’s trying to defend jobs, but his son has no class solidarity: ‘Textiles is doomed. What’s the point of fighting it?’
Gene Hunt disapproves of ‘fancy science and tape machines’, and insultingly accuses DCI Litten of wearing Blue Stratos aftershave – actually it’s Paco Rabanne. No one comments on a pregnant woman smoking. DSgt Ray Carling refers to ‘the coloureds’, and Sam Tyler has to correct him: ‘Can we please call them the immigrant workforce?’
Episode 4
There’s a nightclub called the Warren, where footballers like Bobby Charlton, Francis Lee and Denis Law are to be spotted. As Gene Hunt points out, ‘Half a million pounds wouldn’t buy you that lot.’ Marc Bolan, currently riding high in the charts with ‘20th Century Boy’, is there as well, busily impressing the girls. ‘If God were to appear in my room, obviously I’d be in awe, but I don’t think I’d be humble.’ Sam Tyler is starstruck, and offers some advice. ‘Drive carefully,’ he says. ‘Especially in Minis.’ Bolan clearly took his advice, because he never did learn to drive. Hunt prefers Roger Whittaker.
The club, incidentally, is run by Stephen Warren, a gangster who’s got most of the local police force on the payroll. He’s also ‘a bum bandit,’ according to Hunt. ‘A poof, a fairy, a queer, a queen, fudge packer, uphill gardener, fruit-picking sodomite.’ Surely this goes against Warren’s Catholic upbringing. ‘Isn’t there something about “Thou shalt not suck off rent boys”?’
Annie Cartwright suggests going to the flicks – to see Mean Streets, perhaps, or Carry On Girls.
Episode 5
Sam Tyler is doing some cooking and wants some olive oil and coriander. ‘This is Trafford Park,’ replies Hunt. ‘You’ve got more chance of finding an ostrich with a plum up its arse.’ In similar vein is his view of politics. ‘There will never be a woman prime minister as long as I have a hole in my arse.’ Oh, and he thinks ‘They should bring back National Service’.
Tyler’s timelines seem a bit confused. ‘I used to go to football with my dad,’ he tells a violent hooligan in 1973 (when he would have been four years old). ‘United and City fans used to walk to the match together. Kids used to play together in the street. Red and blue. And then people like you came along, and you took it away from us.’
DSgt Ray Carling is not the most sensitive of men. Standing over the body of a murder victim, he asks, ‘Shall I let his old lady know she can join the singles’ club?’
Episode 6
You got a better class of psycho in 1973. A deranged caretaker takes the editor of the local paper hostage at gunpoint, and describes himself as ‘a man out of time, stranded in a heathen world’. He suggests a parallel with Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur, and he quotes Bertolt Brecht.
Gene Hunt doesn’t like hacks – they’re always sticking their noses into police business – but Sam Tyler takes a more tolerant view: ‘If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to hide.’
WPC Annie Cartwright reveals a hitherto unknown tendency to malapropism, with a reference to David Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Episode 7
‘I think I can trust the police,’ says a woman whose brother has died in the cells. Sam Tyler doesn’t look convinced, but Gene Hunt understands that most people don’t want to enquire too deeply. ‘The public don’t give a damn what we do as long as we get results,’ he says. ‘They’d piss their pants if they knew what we went through to get collars.’
Tyler points out that one in twenty British prisoners are innocent. ‘Which means we got the right villain nineteen times,’ deduces Hunt. ‘That’s 95 per cent success. Better than most rubber johnnies.’ Tyler is still concerned at a system that’s ‘awash with institutionalised corruption’.
‘I want a solicitor,’ says a suspect, and Hunt retorts, ‘I want Fiona Richmond as a secretary.’
Episode 8
There are new gangsters in town and they’re making ‘hardcore porno’, 16mm movies with titles like The French Letter Connection and On Her Majesty’s Secret Cervix. Also A Fistful of Donnas and Once Upon a Time in Her Vest. Gene Hunt is outraged. ‘You dare to pollute the genre of the American Western!’ he exclaims. ‘If Sergio Leone knew what they were doing!’
Sam Tyler calls Hunt ‘an overweight, over-the-hill, nicotine-stained, borderline-alcoholic homophobe with a superiority complex and an unhealthy obsession with male bonding’. Hunt replies, ‘You make that sound like a bad thing.’
Episode 9
There’s been a violent hammer attack and the public are worried, but Gene Hunt’s got a plan. ‘We pull in someone from the We Don’t Like You list. We put their dabs on the hammer, charge them, whip it past the beak. There’s loads of scum out there deserve another spell inside.’ As he says (indeed, as he’s said before), ‘The people want the job done, they don’t want to know how.’ And while he’s running through the old routine, this is Hunt on journalists: ‘Bloody parasites.’
There are fly-posters still up for Lulu in Peter Pan last Christmas, along with notices for the King’s Singers at the Free Trade Hall. The former will have a hit with ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ in 1974 – which was very cool – and the latter will release a single of ‘Life on Mars’ in 1975, which wasn’t.
A black woman describes herself as ‘a coloured bird,’ but Tyler doesn’t correct her.
Episode 10
WPC Annie Cartwright has become a detective constable and is welcomed into the team with a gift: a pile of calendars featuring topless women. She’s unhappy carrying arms when she has no training. ‘You see, this is why birds and CID don’t mix,’ says Gene Hunt. ‘You give a bloke a gun, it’s a dream come true – you give a girl one, she moans it doesn’t go with her dress.’
Also seconded to the team is DC Glen Fletcher, who’s black. DSgt Ray Carling isn’t impressed. ‘First women, now a coloured. What’s going to be next? Dwarfs?’ Fletcher does bantering jokes about Enoch Powell and about his skin-colour. Sam Tyler reprimands him for the Uncle Tom act, and Fletcher retorts: ‘You know how it feels when the monkey sounds start? When the bananas are piled up outside your locker?’ Tyler perseveres. ‘I’ve got a good feeling about you,’ he says, and Fletcher’s horrified: ‘Oh god, you’re not a poof, are you?’
Working undercover as a bank clerk, DC Chris Skelton sympathises with a customer: ‘I know, love, I miss shillings too.’ DSupt Harry Woolf shares Hunt’s view of the political future. ‘If Margaret Thatcher ever becomes prime minister, I’ll have been doing something a lot stronger than whisky.’
Episode 11
There’s a bomb threat from the IRA, and DC Chris Skelton isn’t happy. ‘Why do they have to blow up our city? Why can’t they blow up somewhere else, like Cleethorpes?’ When the bomb explodes, injuring DSgt Ray Carling, Gene Hunt knows what he has to do. ‘Let’s nail these Paddy bastards.’ Sam Tyler worries about losing public trust, but Hunt is confident. ‘We’re the police. Everyone trusts us.’
‘Maybe we’d be better off if a woman did run the country,’ says WDC Annie Cartwright. ‘She couldn’t make a worse job than what the fellas have done.’ But Tyler knows better: ‘I’ve got a feeling you might regret saying that one day.’
Hunt’s response to an implausible suggestion – ‘Maybe Enoch Powell’s throwing one up Shirley Bassey!’
‘Oh, I love this one,’ says WPC Phyllis Dobbs, as David Cassidy’s ‘How Can I Be Sure?’ plays on the 8-track cartridge machine in the pub.
Episode 12
DSgt Ray Carling has some dating advice for DC Chris Skelton: ‘Get a pint of Pernod and black down her. Do what you like to her after that.’ Carling’s less enthusiastic when it comes to women police officers. ‘Fine behind a desk, shit on the streets.’
‘The TUC have got Heath on the rack and they’re doing their best to destroy us all,’ says a man who owns a car dealership. He takes his mind off the nation’s woes by throwing parties. ‘Nothing fancy, just some nicely chilled Blue Nun and a few vol-au-vents.’ Other snacks include ‘hedgehog’ – ‘pineapple, cheese and a silver onion on a stick’ – and there’s Santana on the hi-fi. A woman who’s been to some of these events fills in the details: ‘You know, car keys on the table stuff.’ When Sam Tyler and WDC Annie Cartwright go undercover, they use the names Tony and Cherie Blair. Gene Hunt goes as Gordon Brown.
As they fit a bug in a suspect’s office, Tyler predicts, ‘One day soon, something like this will bring down Richard Nixon.’ The press give a serial killer the nickname Manc the Knife. Gene Hunt is full of one-liners. ‘Murderers do not play tennis.’ ‘I hate people who give to charity.’ ‘I once hit a bloke for speaking French.’
Episode 13
WDC Annie Cartwright suggests that Hunt’s methods may be a tad heavy-handed, and he’s incredulous. ‘Are we about to get a recital from The Female Eunuch?’ he ejaculates. Tyler invites her to go to see Roxy Music playing at the Free Trade Hall, which is a step up from the Kings’ Singers.
In a flashback to 1972, DSgt Ray Carling is looking forward to the Olympics: ‘I reckon the Munich Games will be one for the history books.’ DC Chris Skelton has hopes for the British squad: ‘I like David Hemery, me.’ And indeed Hemery got a bronze in the 400m hurdles (it had been gold in 1968) and a silver as part of the 400m relay team – though that’s not necessarily what Munich 72 is remembered for.
Episode 14
There’s a lot of racism around, and the National Front are exploiting public concern over the Asians expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin. Some of the graffiti – ‘Wogz go hom’ – would seem to implicate Slade fans, though actually it’s the skinheads who are the problem.
An Asian man has been shot, and a suspect was seen running from the scene. ‘He was a Paki,’ says DSgt Ray Carling, but he can’t be any more specific. ‘They all look the same.’ He’s not sure about immigration at all. ‘All them bloody Ugandan Asians, why do they have to come over here? Why don’t they go to Asia?’ But he’s not racist. ‘I’ve got nothing against Gunga Dins.’
The victim and his brother run a record shop – ‘to pull chicks,’ according to the latter. Funny place, though. There are posters of Bowie, Dylan, Hendrix, Janis, the Velvets and Zappa on the walls, which is one thing, but the records on display are by Perry Como, Engelbert Humperdinck, Jack Jones, Des O’Connor, Donny Osmond, Jim Reeves, Lawrence Welk and Slim Whitman. And that’s something else altogether. There’s also Speedy Keen’s Previous Convictions, and Hot Licks, Cold Steel & Truckers’ Favorites by Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, which don’t really make sense.
Sadly absent is Gene Hunt’s favourite, Roger Whittaker, which may be why Hunt is so grumpy. ‘The dealers are all so scared, we’re more likely to get Helen Keller to talk. The Paki in a coma’s about as lively as Liberace’s dick when he’s looking at a naked woman. All in all, this investigation’s going at the speed of a spastic in a magnet factory.’ He’s none too impressed with Tyler’s contribution, either. ‘You great, soft, sissy, girlie, nancy, French bender, Man United-supporting poof.’
‘Power cuts are now inevitable,’ says the TV news. Tyler tells off a pregnant woman for smoking.
Episode 15
‘What I call a dream involves Diana Dors and a bottle of chip oil,’ says Gene Hunt. And DSgt Ray Carling would probably agree – he’s all in favour of the fuller-figured woman: ‘There’s nothing wrong with a little bit of meat in the right places.’
In a story about boxing, Gene Hunt asks, ‘Who does he think he is? Joe Bugner?’ WDC Annie Cartwright dresses up as a squirrel to teach kids about road safety, though the name ‘Tufty’ is not mentioned.
Episode 16
Ray Carling gets shot, but it’s not all bad. ‘I met a bird, medical bird,’ he says. ‘Big tits, arse like two Cox’s Pippins in a bag.’
An unlikely saviour emerges for Sam Tyler, in the shape of Jimmy Savile’s voice on the radio. ‘Fix it for me, Jim!’ exclaims Tyler.
The fundamental difference of opinion still remains. ‘Grab ’em by the balls, and their hearts and minds will surely follow. That is policing,’ says Gene Hunt, but Tyler sticks to his principles, ‘You can’t uphold the law by breaking it.’ To which there can be but one reply: ‘Oh shut up, you noncey-arsed fairy boy.’
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