John Simm as DI Sam Tyler in Life On Mars. Photograph: BBC
When Life On Mars reached the end of its first season in the spring of last year, news that a second series would follow was met by universal jubilation. But not all successful TV dramas earn the right to have another go.
When tireless Jack Bauer saved the world from nuclear attack at the end of series two of 24, he had nothing left to prove and you wished that he'd go home and have a good, long lie down. Instead, the show has since laboured into its sixth series, despite being the biggest load of hokum on the box. Then there's Prison Break. When Michael Scofield and his cohorts broke out of jail at the end of series one, that should have been that. Can we expect them to spend the next 25 episodes attempting to break back in again?
Prison Break and 24 should have been put out of their misery as soon as their plots began stretching credulity way past breaking point. But Life On Mars is different. At the end of the first series, all its multi-layered plot mysteries remained to be solved, leaving us gasping to find out what happens in the second and final season. Will DI Sam Tyler make it back from 1973 to the present day? Is he in a coma or actually living in the past and simply going bonkers? If he does make it back to 2007, will he, ahem, cop off with WPC Annie Cartwright first?
It's not just the cracking, riddle-packed plot that keeps us hanging in there. Unlike the one-dimensional 24 and Prison Break, Life On Mars presents us with well-rounded characters that we can easily identify with. We share the mounting bewilderment that Sam Tyler (played by John Simm) feels at being swept back to a world so monumentally odd that events might as well be playing out on a distant planet. We might abhor the boorish attitudes of DCI Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister) but we forgive him because he's simply a product of his time. Not only do we identify with these characters, we care about them and long to find out what happens to them next.
Not least, our appetite for more is fostered by the show's meticulous attention to period detail. As Glenister recently said to me: "In the hands of the wrong directors, you might have seen Tyler and Hunt dressed as Wombles and chasing criminals around on Space Hoppers." In other words, the delicious detail in the show is never knowingly oversold. Part of its charm lies in those fleeting glimpses of the fondly remembered dross of early 70s Britain: eight-track cartridge machines, Austin Allegros, Fanny Craddock and cans of Party Seven that could only be opened with an industrial drill.
Now, if only the writers of 24 came to their senses and stuck Jack Bauer on the back of a Space Hopper, I might start watching it again.
