Did any of the s1 episodes feature the 1981 Ashes series?

Ashes to Ashes to Ashes etc LOL

I think cricket might be for poofters.

I'm nearing the end of Ashes To Ashes series 1 now, and it's been getting slightly better. From a low base. (Or maybe I'm just getting used to it.)

Meaning that if I was stuck at home and it came on telly and I had no preconceptions, I'd probably sit and watch it (but no way would I have forked out £25 for the DVD if it wasn't connected to Life On Mars).

Amelia Bullmore has a really alarming face, doesn't she?

Did you start to notice the gnawing Richard Littlejohn agenda? It really sucks.

I think I said before, the politics of "Ashes To Ashes" is identical to the politics of "The Professionals" or "Who Dares Wins" - all Lefties are either smug middle-class elitists with a sinister side, dangerous subversive Soviet shills or abject, posing losers with no life, while everyone on the Right is tough, sexy and has your best interests at heart. The only exception to this rule are fascists, who are just mean. I'd like to think this was ironic period detail, but I don't. They went for balance at one point by getting Gene Hunt to sneer the word "Thatcher" - as if a real Gene Hunt in 1981 would have hated Thatcher, or as if anything we know about the character suggests he would have been anything other than a raving Thatcherite at this point in time - but it didn't count for much.

Did I remember correctly - is the one that closes with "Ghosts" over the credits the best one?

That's the one I've just watched, yeah.

I wouldn't use the word "ironic", but I am inclined to extend the benefit of the doubt to the producers, in that I feel they were kind of trying to recreate what a cusp-of-the-80s cop show was actually like, agenda an' all.

Gene Hunt spitting about lefties is basically reenacting Lewis Collins or John Thaw doing the same.

All the stuff about "having it both ways" that seems to exercise so many people on this board doesn't bother me so much.

By the way, I reckon Hunt would have cussed Thatcher in '81. Not because she was a Tory so much, but because she was a woman.

I don't wanna take on the role of Ashes To Ashes' defender, by the way. I still reckon they made a pretty poor fist of it. I just don't reckon it's quite as abject as everyone else does (or even I did, at the start).

I've just watched the penultimate episode of A2A - the one with the charity fundraiser, the ska boys and Shaz nearly getting killed - and I have to stick my neck out and venture that it was actually really good.

QUOTE:
I wouldn't use the word "ironic", but I am inclined to extend the benefit of the doubt to the producers, in that I feel they were kind of trying to recreate what a cusp-of-the-80s cop show was actually like, agenda an' all.

Well, yes. How is that a defence?

Oh man. Let's only make 2008-style programmes which conform to 2008's assumptions and aesthetics, shall we? Cos that'll be fun.

Right-wing dramas aren't "fun".

"Right-wing drama" my arse. You're just being hysterical now.

Well, you know. What Taylor said. How is what you said a defence? We know they're co-opting 80s values - bad ones. It's not fun, it's nauseating.

It's only a couple of characters who are actually right-wing*, and even they're shown up to be wrong on all their major bigotries. They're outnumbered by progressive, campaigning lawyers and enlightened young female cops.

*By the way, I don't see a problem with Gene Hunt espousing unpleasant views and being a broadly sympathetic character anyway. It's a bit childish to expect simplistic white hats vs black hats characters.

As I remember it the non-bigoted characters are quite strikingly limp and tentative, compared to Gene Hunt who's very much the main man. There's nothing childish about being worried when the main character of a hit drama espouses unpleasant views and is a hero anyway, if the drama isn't sophisticated enough to challenge those views, or just doesn't want to. The only enlightened female cops I can remember are Alex and Shaz who are both, to a greater or lesser extent, ineffectual whiners. And as Taylor said, there was more to it than the cops themselves.

Aaanyway, I watched the final episode last night and I'd say, for once, that there was an unequivocal right-wing agenda behind it (the bizarre confrontation between Gene Hunt and Lord Scarman). That's worthy of calling an 'agenda', not a few cheap-and-naughty laughs about rug-munchers or pillow-biters or whatever. Dunno what the writers were trying to do there. It didn't seem anything less than sincere.

Other than that, I thought it was a reasonably well-executed finale. Even if it's thematically very similar to the LOM one (comatose cop finds out that her dad is a wrong-un), and they've even more blatantly set up a second series.