Pete suggests

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Reptilian reverie

James Delingpole

Wednesday, 6th February 2008

Lif in Cold Blood (BBC1); Ashes to Ashes (BBC1)

This all came back to me when I saw David Attenborough on Life in Cold Blood (BBC1, Monday) visiting the same place and being nibbled. Apparently 20 years ago, one of the lizards developed a taste for the orange fruit of the foul-smelling dead horse arum lily (which previously they’d only considered useful for attracting flies) and now, unlike any other lizards anywhere in the Mediterranean, they all eat it.

Earlier Attenborough visited a colony of African lizards where the sturdiest male with territorial rights to the hottest rock pulls the most females. But which is more important: looks or property? By way of experiment, Attenborough rearranged the rocks so that one of the scrawnier male specimens ended up with the best pile. Within moments he was besieged. I was reminded of Mrs Merton’s question to Debbie McGee: ‘So what first attracted you to millionaire Paul Daniels?’

Ashes to Ashes (BBC1, Thursday) is the sequel to Life on Mars and I can’t quite decide how much of a let-down it is. Because it is set in the Eighties, a decade one is currently required by statute to find risible and shallow, they have decided to play it mostly for laughs which I think may be a mistake. Comedy action is the feeblest of genres because the former always ends up undermining the latter, removing much of the threat and tension that is necessary if action is to be exciting.

Of course Life on Mars had its comic moments too, but these were much more sly and unforced — largely, I suspect, because the makers didn’t realise quite how funny Philip Glenister’s DCI Gene Hunt was until the series had got going. The series’ driving force was supposed to be the bafflement of a politically correct Noughties police officer who finds himself mysteriously travelled back in time to 1973 Manchester, not the antics of a foul-mouthed, beery chauvinist pig who could even — eek! — be a bit racist.

With Ashes to Ashes the tone is more tongue-in-cheek. The original Gene Hunt you could more or less imagine running a real police station; the new one, you can’t. He’s a gun-toting fantasy figure in a bright red Audi Quattro, so Miami Vice he makes The Professionals look like Dixon of Dock Green. I particularly hated the shoot-out at the end which did that annoying A-Team thing where everything is riddled with machine-gun bullets and no one gets hurt.

I suppose the makers’ excuse for this is that Gene Hunt is now the projection of a female fantasy. This time, Hunt and co. are a figment of the imagination of a sexy police therapist/doting mother/whizzo hostage negotiator played by Keeley Hawes who in the real world has been shot in the head.