Life on Mars and the contradictions of Postmodern TV Drama in 2023

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'But this is History. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don't see it, and because we don't see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past. And one of the historian's jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be... even on the Holocaust.”

Alan Bennett, The History Boys (2006)

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​That screenwriters Matthew Graham and Ashley Pharaoh originally came up with the concept for Life on Mars at the end of the 1990s is very telling: it reflected the wave of nostalgia that characterised popular culture at the end of the century as we approached the new millennium. Eventually commissioned by the BBC and broadcast in 2006, it found its footing in a media landscape transformed by digital culture and the internet. While the proliferation of digital TV in the early Noughties had facilitated the re-run of archive programming targeted at defined communities of consumers, the launch of YouTube in 2005 saw a deluge of user-generated artefacts.

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​These objects of historical interest (transferred from domestic collections of VHS and Betamax videos) included not just the usual classic film and television from the Seventies and Eighties, but also more ephemeral broadcasts, including advertisements, magazine shows and news reports. The opportunity to access on-demand the ‘cultural waste matter’ of a lost era had a singular allure for a generation of consumers accustomed to the regulation of media history by official gatekeepers and cultural intermediaries (broadcasters, distributors and production companies etc.). Typical of this was the fanfare with which Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange (1972) was given a theatrical re-release after his death in 1999. For nearly thirty years it had been almost impossible to see the film in the UK after the director withdrew amidst controversy over its citation in a number of criminal prosecutions. However, in an age of digital file sharing, jurisdiction over classification and censorship in specific geographic regions was much more difficult to impose. Had Kubrick lived to see the proliferation of the internet, video-streaming and broadband it is likely the movie's notoriety would have dissipated as it became easier to access.

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​Though the origin of Life on Mars may lie in the end-of-the-century sentimentalism of the 1990s, its resonance with 21st Century audiences was very much a product of a set of circumstances that transformed the culture of media consumption in the mid-Noughties. On the one hand, the series reflects a kaleidoscope of cultural references that occupied the collective conscience of television audiences who grew up in the Seventies and Eighties: The Sweeney, David Bowie, Get Carter etc. On the other hand, it was very much at the cutting edge of the way in which 21st Century audiences were learning to live with (and process) access to that history. To argue that Life on Mars is postmodern, therefore, just because it recycles culture is not sufficient. Analysis requires an understanding of where the show falls on a continuum of postmodern products that go back to Spaghetti Westerns and Sixties police procedurals.

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Taking as the jumping-off point Jean Baudrillard's notion that postmodern culture is defined by the proliferation of information technology and the collapse of the distinction between the real and the simulated, it is easy to see how Life on Mars embodies the concept of simulacrum. The world that protagonist Sam Tyler occupies is depthless: the space between the 21st Century world of forensic policing and the hyper-real world of the 1970s police procedurals; a pastiche of the generic conventions defined by shows like The Sweeney and The Persuaders. The Western genre is also invoked by the score, which gestures towards the musical style of Ennio Morricone. The inclusion of a poster for the film High Noon (1952) in Gene Hunt's office is another nice touch. However, to suggest that these intertextual references make the show any more post-modern than the texts it gestures to is misleading. Within the cultural context of their own production, these Seventies products also incorporated a panache of different styles, including Thames Televisions Special Branch (1969), Peter Walker's film Man of Violence (1969) and Mike Hodge's Get Carter (1971).

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The allusion of the show's title to the David Bowie song 'Life on Mars', with the line "take a look at the lawman, beating up the wrong guy" positions the show as a heritage product: appealing to the tastes and preferences of a lucrative baby-boom demographic revisiting the cultural landscape of their formative years. However, by framing Bowie as a period detail (an artefact synonymous with the era) it conceals the complexity of the way in which the self-conscious manipulation of his own identity shocked audiences in the 1970s. In this direction, the construction of masculinity becomes a key feature in the way in which we are invited to look at the differences between the 1970s and the notional present. This is embodied in the tension between the unreconstructed codes of masculinity embodied by Jean Hunt and the more metrosexual sensibility of Sam. What is missing from this, however, is an appreciation of the more nuanced interactions between Regan and 'partner' Carter in the original Sweeney: there is genuine friendship and affection between these two that contrasts greatly the dynamic between Sam and Gene.

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​Another danger when it comes to viewing a text like Life on Mars in the digital age is that the way in which we encounter it is very different to the way in which audiences consumed real-time media in the 20th Century. Now fourteen years old, but a staple part of the BBC's online portfolio of shows to watch on demand, the retro aesthetic creates the illusion that the lens through which we are looking at the 1970s is much more contemporary than it actually is. As Alan Bennett said in The History Boys (2006) ‘There is no period so remote as the recent past’, and while Life on Mars shone a light on the 1970s at a time when the dust was only just beginning to settle, how we decode a show from 2006 is not yet fixed. Now from a 2020 perspective elements of Sam Tyler's performance of self are no less archaic than Gene Hunt's. On the one hand, his humourlessly 'woke' inner dialogue doesn't go far enough. On the other hand, his unadorned, ‘weedy’ performance of self does not reflect the concerns of a generation of men accustomed to the toxic masculinity and the spornosexual culture of gym gains, piercings and tattoos.

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​The gender binary between Sam and Gene is not, however, the only thing that seems anachronistic about Life on Mars. The casting of John Simm was originally something of a blank canvas in 2005: his legacy was playing everyman figures in TV dramas that included Clocking Off, Spaced, White Teeth and State of Play, having starred in The Lakes at the end of the 1990s. However, his role as The Master in seven episodes of Doctor Who immediately after completing Life on Mars reframed the way in which many people decoded the series: in particular foregrounding the science fiction element of time travel as a narrative device. This retrospective element of 'borrowed interest' is of course facilitated by the way in which television drama is consumed on demand by audiences in the digital age: with both series uploaded concurrently onto the BBC viewing platform iPlayer. Arguably this is one of the most genuinely post-modern features of Life on Mars and it often gets overlooked.

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​The notion that postmodernism is a relative concept is, however, problematic: that something can be more or less postmodern flies in the face of the logic that everything is a ‘construct’. In this sense, contingent notions of authenticity are invoked as an antidote to the implosion of meaning. Allusions to collective cultural memories provide reassurance that there is a fixed point on the horizon, even if we are travelling in the opposite direction. The Test Card Girl serves as a neat motif for this in Life on Mars: a reminder of a world in which television transmission was not continual and media consumption (and life) less complicated. Likewise, the creation of overseas versions of the show in the US and Russia provide the reassuring allusion that the BBC version is the authentic 'original'.

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​Of course, the Life on Mars franchise endured with the sequel Ashes to Ashes (2008), set in 1981. It also continued with the appropriation of David Bowie's catalogue, with the title referencing a hit song from 1980. This time, however, the character of Sam was replaced with a female lead Alex Drake (played by Keeley Hawes) and the series relocated to London. Playing fast and loose with the narrative, the premise of the series posits Drake in a hyper-real purgatory after she awakes in 1981 following a shooting. As with Life on Mars, the car is the star, with Hunt's Mk 3 Cortina replaced with an Audi Quattro (and a model variant not available in the UK until 1983). Shot on Super 16 mm film, the series invokes the retro-futuristic glamour of early music videos as opposed to the grit of British gangster movies. Like the Test Card Girl, this technological conceit creates the illusion of 'authenticity' and the suggestion that the 1980s were somehow less postmodern than the present.

While Ashes to Ashes was a hit, it resonated less with audiences in part because the experience of looking through this kind of lens was becoming much more routine. The acceleration of YouTube between 2005 and 2010 created a culture in which the archives of film, music and television from the previous fifty years had become perpetually present: audiences had also graduated to curating their own media museums via Facebook and then Instagram. Life on Mars, with its sepia tones and naive interpretations of cultural change, however, is a reminder of a more innocent time: a time no less postmodern than the present, but the point at which we realised our understanding of history was little more than a fashion parade of cultural appropriation and fancy dress box posturing. In this sense Life on Mars is postmodern, but no more so every novel, play, film or pop song of the Twentieth Century.

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​Tellingly there was no third series of Life on Mars; the series in which an unsuspecting police detective woke up in the 1990s, to find themselves confronting the contradictions of a culture beset with anxiety about the future, bathed in a comfort blanket of nostalgia. There's breaking the fourth wall and then there is bringing down the whole house with it: such a narrative device would cancel out the premise on which the show was founded. However, it would perhaps make for more genuinely ground-breaking television. In the meantime, Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective (1986) and Stephen Poliakoff's Shooting the Past (1999) remain pinnacle achievements in the genre of postmodern television drama.

​In the words of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, "I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” (1932): the tile of which was borrowed from Shakespeare's The Tempest.

​Popular culture has always eaten itself: it is just the flavours on the menu that change…