LIFE ON MARS
Get yer trousers on! Matthew Graham grasses up the potential TV revival, the slaag.
’ve got this idea for the poster,” says Matthew Graham, co-creator of Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes. “It’d just be this massive wall of cardboard boxes, with the Cortina and the Quattro side by side, both smashing through the boxes at the same time!”
Are we mad, in a coma or back in time? None of the above. Graham really is plotting the return of Gene Hunt, mashing the worlds of Mars and Ashes together in a brand new, Brut-splashed bastard of a series. ’Oops are most definitely back on the menu.
“We decided to tell people on Twitter when we were doing these Life On Mars tweet-alongs,” he tells SFX, perfectly willing to grass himself up. “We haven’t even gone to the BBC yet. I think we’ve caught them out slightly – I think some journalists phoned them up and said, ‘When are you making the new Life On Mars?’ and they went, ‘What? Did we miss a meeting?’” he laughs. “Hopefully they’ll like what we bring them. I really hope we get the chance to do it. I think we’ve got one more last hurrah left in the old boy.” One more punch in the old pair of driving gloves…? “And the mother of all cardboard box walls!”
This news came as a real surprise. Are you equally surprised to be doing it?
It came as a surprise to me when I suddenly found myself getting in touch with [cocreators] Ashley Pharoah and Tony Jordan and saying, “I’ve got an idea for a Mars.” We’d been kind of banging it around for years. After Ashes To Ashes the BBC asked us, “Can we do another iteration?” And we didn’t feel we could. None of us felt particularly excited about the ’90s, which was the obvious one
to do. It didn’t feel glamorous to us. It didn’t feel exciting. It didn’t feel like the far-flung country of the past. It just felt like… the ’90s. And then, bizarrely, there was a genuine interest from someone who wanted to do a musical. A jukebox Life On Mars musical in the West End! I was quite excited about it initially and then I realised it wouldn’t be Phil and John dancing on the stage. I knew in my heart that if it worked it would probably make me a millionaire, but I just thought, “I don’t see it. I don’t see this being us.”
And then there was a movie idea. We had an idea for a movie that incorporated New York, and had Gene Hunt in it but also, basically, Popeye Doyle [from The French Connection] as well. And that was cool. We were quite excited about that. We talked to a film company about it and they were kind of interested. But it was almost going to be too big.
The more we started playing around with it, the more I couldn’t stop thinking about when they made feature films of The Sweeney, and how they were never as good, because those characters belonged on television. We could get excited about the idea of writing a movie but we couldn’t get excited about it being a Life
On Mars story.
So we abandoned that. All three of us agreed that we wouldn’t touch this thing again unless one of us sat up one morning and went, “Eureka,
I’ve got it, I’ve got an idea!”
And that was you…
That was me! It was just a few months ago. I was writing something and it wasn’t working and I was really cross and grumpy about it and I went for a walk. And I remember thinking, “Gah, I wish I could do something like Life On Mars again…” And I thought, “Hang on, I can!” So this idea pinged into my head.
I felt it had to be braver. It had to at least attempt to be as brave as the original Life On Mars. It wasn’t enough to go, “Oh yeah, we’re the nostalgia jukebox show that shows you Spangles and roller discos and plays you Pink Floyd and has some car chases and some funny lines.”
I wanted to be scared again as to whether the idea would work. Obviously we’d have all the fun and all the iconography that you want from the show but there had to be a core idea there, a point to it. And I suddenly thought, “I think there’s a point to this story. It has something to say about our world.” And at the same time I started to become aware that people were contacting me on social media, saying, “The world’s shit, we hate Trump, we hate Boris Johnson, justice seems to be in such short supply – where’s Gene Hunt when you need him? Gene would sort this out!”
And whereas I used to laugh at that stuff and think, “Oh, for god’s sake…” now I started thinking, “You know what, I feel like that. I feel like I want him to come in and be not so much the thin blue line as the large beige line between us and the forces of evil. I don’t want someone who’s touchy-feely. I want someone who identifies as an armed bastard!”
So I phoned Ash and I said, “Can I just bend your ear for an hour – I’ve got this idea for what we can do with it, and how we can maybe bring them all in.” I said, “We may not realise it but we actually made a mini-Marvel Universe. Characters from different eras and different periods. We’ve got Keeley, we’ve got John, we’ve got Phil, we’ve got the Devil, we’ve got all these characters. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we found some way to unite them?”
Not that they’re all in a big gang running around together…
It wasn’t enough to go, ‘Oh yeah, we’re the nostalgia jukebox show with Spangles’
So you’re brainstorming it right now?
We’ve got the story kind of worked out. We desperately wanted to find a way of doing three time frames. Not necessarily to run parallel in three time frames, but for the show to cover three time frames. We wanted the ’70s and we wanted the ’80s and we wanted a version of now – it’s not quite our now, but it’s a version of our now that’s hopefully an interesting prism. It’s this world but with a few key elements skewed.
And then we started scaring ourselves. I don’t know whether this will even make it into
the show but one scene we have planned is going to take place in 2021 in the Jimmy Savile Wing of a hospital. So that gives you an indication of how we’re skewing the alternate reality. We were like, “Can we even do that? Would they even let us?” It’s dark.
The moment we got scared about whether we would be allowed to do something, we felt we were on the right track. And it’s also about getting old. There’s a little bit of Unforgiven, a little bit of the Western – can you put the gun belt back on?
The passage of time is crucial, then?
It’s about memory. It’s about what you remember the past to be, what you regret about the past, what you miss about the past and then seeing it again. We’ve already opened the door on the metaphysical in the show. We’ve already said that it’s an afterlife, so we have that to play with in our toolbox. It’s not as though we’re stuck with the laws of physics! Ashley and I were saying we’ve learned a lot during these tweet-a-longs. We’ve been watching them in detail and it’s made us recognise the things that are really important about Life On Mars, and reminding us that occasionally we veered too far away from the things that worked.
What are the elements of Mars that you think are essential?
One of the big things is seeing it through the eyes of Sam. What made it compelling for an audience was you were basically just with one man, going through this journey. It made it feel like one of those stories that you almost make up for yourself. You go, “What if this happened to me…?” So that’s something we learned – take your main character and make this a subjective experience, not an objective one. And sometimes less is more with Gene. Don’t overload him because you think it’s The Gene Hunt Show. He works best when seen through Sam’s eyes. He’s a foil and he’s a challenge for us – he’s the guy who says things we don’t always approve of but we find ourselves laughing at.
Is it going to be tricky to write Gene in the present climate, though? After all, he’s a walking macroaggression…
He is. And you’re right. But I think we’ve found a way to hamstring him. What’s really funny is people who know that they can’t say certain things any more, but we know what they’re thinking.
There are certain things we did in the old shows that we would struggle to do today. So we will have to be clever about how we use him. But I think the context of the show will use him in a different way anyway. We won’t just be playing the same linear line of, “Oh look, we’re back in the ’70s! Look, you can eat a pie for breakfast!” It won’t just be that. It’ll be other things too.
Are all the cast onboard?
None of the cast will be confirmed until we’ve got scripts. But I’d love to get everyone back. I’ve reached out to a couple of people – and a couple of people have actually reached out to me. I know the ones that are already really up for it, so that’s good. I just hope others will be too. Obviously there are a couple of characters that I really do need to be in all of it!
Most importantly, will the title be another David Bowie reference?
I’d like to keep the title secret for now. We’re pretty sure we know what we want to call it. We started working out the story and went, “Oh my god, there actually is a David Bowie reference that fits this perfectly.”
So what’s the next step?
Ash and I are just working up a big pitch document. We’re going to sit down with the BBC and show them the pages and talk to them about it and see whether they’re excited enough to want to do it. We’d love them to do it. They know nothing about it yet other than we’re working it up.
They’ve said, “Great, love to read it when you’re ready.” I just hope they like it! We’re going to have egg on our face otherwise, aren’t we? We’re going to have to go back on Twitter and say, “Just kidding! Changed our minds. Let’s do a musical instead!”