"Do you remember a guy that's been
In such an early song?
I've heard a rumour from ground control
Oh no, don't say it's true."

I know, silent for an age and then just tv spam. Ignore the second half - someone is just poor at editing:


See also:
less interesting trailer
original Bowie Ashes to Ashes video
original Vienna video
Play 80s reference bingo with this video (demonstrating my lack of petrol-head knowledge, when Gene Hunt says "fire up the Quattro", I thought of the drink).

At a more serious level, I'm rather curious about this. Life on Mars, whilst following many of the tropes of 70s stereotyping and design, managed to suggest that period which was on a cusp between post-war austerity and Thatcherite plenty. 1981 bling doesn't inspire the same sort of nostalgic recognition in me: it's not a lost world, it was a place where I was joining CND, playing 2-tone records and riding my mate's cross-trail bike. It's not hazy memories of childhood summers and winters of discontent, it's a mere year before I first bought some red hair-dye. It's hard to be nostalgic about a period when you were starting to shape your identity against the rising culture of conspicuous consumption. So I have no idea if Ashes to Ashes can work. I'm sure Gene Hunt will - the Sweeney were still going strong in 1981, after all - but the neat hook of Sam Tyler is gone, and the ending of Life on Mars seems to remove the possibility of repeating that trick. Unless they are suggesting Hunt and his pals are Jungian archetypes lurking in the shared mind of all coppers...

Labels: tv