Stamp On All Your Toys – Life on Mars is here – Good Kids!
It’s Back to the Future meets The Sweeney! The first part of BBC One’s latest drama aired last Monday, and thnaks to a little boxout on the BBC News site (Would You Survive in 1973) a show I spotted in the trade mags back in October was only a few clicks away using the new NTL/Telewest ‘Watch Again’ feature – it can stream a repeat of a show up to seven days after transmission. Those wishing to watch this new show from the same team as Spooks and Hustle might want to look elsewhere (cough I s o hunt cough).
I’m pretty sure that the writers all got round a table, took a dollop of BBC Money to make a 21st Century Cop Show, looked at each other and went “we’d rather do The Sweeny, how can we get away with that?” Well, short of a blue Police Call Box, you could immerse yourself in a huge Phillip K Dick like plot where your 21st Century Cop (Sam Tyler) gets hit by a car in 2006, and wakes up in 1973, all to the strains of David Bowie’s Life on Mars, with the in-car iPod being replaced by an 8-track.
There’s no whizzy time travel machine here, just a camera down to an iPod, the car crash, some trippy Flatliners-esque forest walking, and bang! We’re in 1973. Only one real ‘fourth wall nudging’ knowing moment is the jump over the desk when the final piece clicks into place.
Of couse now we know where the “lots of planets have a north” time travelling leather jacket that Christopher Eccleston hung up has gone.
I love this show. Though I find his name intereting, do you think they got his name from two famous human time travellers;
Sam Beckett from Quantum
Rose Tyler from Doctor Who
But the two together and what have you got, Rose Beckett….. or Sam Tyler!
And the best bits about the show? It’s gotta be all the era-authentic classic rock, lashings of Deep Purple’s Lazy in episode 2, what’s coming up in future shows?
Will we hear the eponymous Episode 6 featuring Ian Gillan?
Can’t wait till it airs Down Under. I still believe the best Brit shows were made in the 1970s. Like American automakers redoing the 1960s, I welcome these British glimpses back at the 1970s.