Masonic handshakes

They were at it in Ashes to Ashes the other week. And now in Inspector George Gently, George's trusty young assistant John Bacchus has signed up for the Freemasons. I work pretty close to Mason HQ in Great Queen Street in Holborn, ugly great thing it is, always full of short fat old men in blazers going in and out. Shiny brass buttons, you get the idea. It's like a Rotary Club version of Angels and Demons. In Ashes, Gene Hunt faces Alex Drake's withering scorn when she assumes (along with the audience) that he's gone over to the junior Illuminati, only to reveal how he'd played the system to get a result.

In Gently, Bacchus is more conflicted, going all the way with the trouser-rolling, while still trying to do his job as a copper, which leads his long-suffering wife to suspect he's getting his leg over on the side. It's a beautifully made series, very low key period detail unlike the Rock and Roll Years soundtracks of Ashes to Ashes or Heartbeat. But it has one very central flaw: Martin Shaw, doing the sort of stupid forced gravelly voice rivalled only by whinging primadonna Christian Bale as Batman.

I can't get beyond Martin Shaw being the unsexy one from The Professionals, an uppity genre telly ac-TOR in the mould of Leonard Nimoy, and a new age religious nut to rival Sting. And his absurd performance as George Gently isn't helping, frankly. A perfectly good detective series spoiled by this over-strained old ham. The seeming popularity of Shaw and his telly peer Robert Lindsay are mysteries to me. Surely people can't seriously enjoy watching them parade their questionable egos all over the BBC? You only have to watch Philip Glenister, effortlessly splendid even in the terrible Demons, to know that some actors deserve to feel confident about their skill. But Martin Shaw? I don't get it. And I even watched Rhodes. You can't say I haven't given him a chance.

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.