Has the popularity of Life On Mars ushered in a new appetite for less 'realistic' police dramas? Here’s Karen’s view...
A skint, over-worked Metropolitan Police Force takes time to ask a 'consulting detective' to help them solve the case of a collection of people seemingly being forced to commit suicide. A strangely 'white' working class East End of London is being terrorised by a pair of men claiming to be the result of Ronnie Kray's desire to continue the Kray dynasty, and are killing those men who turned Queen's evidence to nail the brothers in 1969.
A detective who has already been suspected of trying to murder a suspect is allowed to conduct interviews without the presence of another officer, solicitor etc. He is also followed by a beguiling, but evil beauty who obviously killed her parents, but due to her astounding intelligence and guile, has got away with it.
All of this is a world away from PC Stamp chasing suspected drug dealers through a grimy South London estate, or Jack Regan kicking a blagger in the nuts and declaring him to be 'nicked'.
What has happened to police dramas in the past year or so? Sherlock, Whitechapel and Luther have all been successful new series, and yet they are so far away from actual policing that, at times, they border on science fiction.
As a viewing nation, we have gone from wanting to watch the reassuring authority of Dixon of Dock Green, Regan and Carter or Sergeant Bob Cryer trying to keep order at Sun Hill, to our detectives being almost mythical, the worlds they inhabit nonsensical, but at the same time oh so familiar.
To me, the roots in this shift lie squarely at the feet of the creators of Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes. Ashley Pharoah and Matthew Graham managed to create weekly police procedurals that took place in a world that we weren't even sure existed. We didn't know if the leading characters were alive or dead, figments of the imagination of a comatose detective, or some other elaborate prank being played on us all. But still, we invested our time in the stories.
Was Alex Drake in her fictionalised 1981, trying to find the murderer of prostitutes, any less enthralling than Jill Gascoigne doing the same thing in the gritty The Gentle Touch, set in the real 1981?
No, because the key to a good detective story is that human beings like to work things out for themselves.
It doesn't matter if it's a crime committed on Mars in the year 2184, or in Peckham in 2010. As long as there's a baddy, a victim and someone to uncover the truth, that's all people are interested in. They can be the detective in their heads.
They can hit their foreheads when Sherlock points something out that's been obvious from the beginning. They can imagine that the Krays, who created such a myth and a legend around them, didn't just die sad and lonely old, incarcerated men, but instead saved their sperm to try and maintain their dynasty. (I'm wondering if the next series starring Rupert Penry-Jones will be called Berlin, where he goes to Germany to investigate a funny looking little man with black hair and a moustache who was made by a sperm donor, and now has the urge to commit genocide).
Unlike John Luther, we know who the killer is, but we can watch Luther using his genius to work it out.
We're living in the most austere times since the seventies, and people want a little fantasy in their lives. Who wants to watch The Bill when all it does is represent our own miserable society, and the poor overworked police who have to deal with it, when we can have Sherlock Holmes working with Lestrade to stop Moriarty from blowing people up, by solving a series of bizarre crimes?
Even the very gritty Thorne, recently seen on Sky1, used elaborate flashbacks where DI Thorne was watching his younger self confronting a killer.
Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes gave us the chance to come out of ourselves for a while and get lost in the illusion, and has now created a trend. People are starting to get bored with reality, and I'm just wondering how long it is before Shameless is replaced by an updated version of Dynasty, and EastEnders by a remake of Blake's 7!
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