Grace Jones is a lesbian?

There's always been somewhat of a whiff of Adam and Joe's The 1980s House about Ashes to Ashes. The new series opened with a triptych of Thatcherite imagery: a Rio-fuelled car chase, the Taskforce setting sail for the South Atlantic and a Stephen Milligan-inspired auto-erotic asphyxiation. Even Maggie's mantra of 'one of us' (stolen from ABBA, but she was like that) was very much in evidence, as our trusty team of figments of Alex Drake's fading imagination act exacty as you would imagine to solve the mystery death of a fellow copper. You have to hand it to Alex, her memory of the 80s is pretty fantastic, considering this entire world has been dreamt up by her while in a coma. If it was me, it would just consist of white MFI furniture, Max Headroom and crunchy perms.

There were some lazy touches (the photocopier hadn't been the same since that bird from accounts photocopied her arse at the Christmas party, apparently, and important clues can be discovered by rubbing a pencil over a notepad - presumably an in-joke, but even so), the sort of thing that could easily undermine the entire series if it was left unchecked. But the plot was enjoyably twisty, with some very bleak little glimpses into Alex's nightmare world, where she's being actively pursued by the present in a way that Sam Tyler never had to deal with. The big problem for Ashes to Ashes has been that the idea was so perfectly encapsulated in Life on Mars that just rehashing the same ground with a woman in the 80s isn't really enough. They look like they're trying to address that by cranking up the differences, with her world being invaded by this ghost from the future. Might not be all that easy to pull off.

Particularly lovely to hear Philip Glenister again sans Amerian accent. Gene Hunt. Like the rest of the programme, it shouldn't work. Yet he's such a sexy character, mainly because of Glenister's maudlin performance, a darkness he didn't need to give him. In Life on Mars it served as a counterweight to Sam's bleak and confused visions. In Ashes to Ashes up against cocky postmodern Alex he's the more sad, and we just don't know why. And I'm not sure I want to.