Of the many things about the 1970s that I really disliked living through, cop shows and movies that glorified police violence and disrespect for the law were pretty high up on the list. Starskey & Hutch, Dirty Harry, and Serpico all depicted police officers who worked on the premise that the ends justified the means. Who cares if you had to beat the crap out of a suspect, lie to, or threaten them in order to obtain a conviction; as long as you got the bad guy in the end that made it all right. I couldn't help wondering then, and now, what kind of example those shows were giving when their message was it was okay to break the law as long as you were doing it for the right reasons.
Needless to say I don't share any of the nostalgia for the 1970s or early 1980s that has fuelled movie versions of Starsky & Hutch or Miami Vice. All of which might make it seem odd that I would have been interested in checking out a police procedural that was set back in those dark days. However, all you have to do is watch the first of eight episodes in the four-DVD pack Life On Mars: Series One put out by Acorn Media earlier this year, to know this is going to be a completely different take on 1970s' policing.
The premise of the show might sound a bit far-fetched, a modern-day British cop falls into a coma in 2005 and wakes up to find himself having been transported back to the mean streets of Manchester England in 1973, but the result is some of the most brilliant television that I've seen. Not only does it depict the tension you would expect between cops of the two eras, it does a credible job of having them conduct investigations into crimes, all the while sustaining the question as to what the hell is going on with the central character. Is Sam Tyler (John Simm), the cop from the future, lying in a coma thirty odd years in the future and is all this is a figment of his imagination?Or maybe he has somehow fallen through some chink in time that has allowed him to travel into the past? On the other hand he could be an officer from the 1970s who has suffered a head injury which has left him delusional. For although episode one opens in modern day Manchester with him going about his duties as a Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) in the Criminal Investigation Division (CID), by the time it ends his new reality as a Detective Inspector (DI) thirty years back in time, is every bit as convincing as the former.
Part of what makes 1973 so believable are the people populating it. Chief among them are Tyler's new boss DCI Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister). On the surface Gene appears to be your stereotypical 1970s' copper, leading with his fists and filled with every racial and gender bias in the book. Gene isn't above planting evidence on somebody in order to get a collar -"Anybody I stitch up deserves it". Needless to say twenty-first century, scientific, and very clean Sam Tyler doesn't see exactly see eye to eye with Gene about his methodology which leads to quite a bit of yelling and the occasional punch up.
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