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Britainology 98: Life On Mars (2006)

UPDATE: something went wrong with the file export when converting from WAV to MP3, and it added some very strange noises. We've fixed it and have re-uploaded. Sorry about that!

For this month's first Britainology, we're discussing the 2000s TV series Life On Mars, or 'what happens when you get hit by a car that makes you travel through time and it becomes the early '70s.' But we wind up liking it more than disliking it, and spend some time exploring what it's like to encounter real, unpolished representations of what things were like in bygone eras.

Britainology 98: Life On Mars (2006)
Britainology 98: Life On Mars (2006) Britainology 98: Life On Mars (2006)

Comments

Loved this show so much I even watched the American remake. It was... not as good, but it included a scene in which the (white) cop protagonist was being held hostage by knockoff Black Panthers and impressed them by pretending to come up with "Ice Ice Baby" off the top of his head.

Luca

Life on Mars is an iseki

The Beak TM

Seconded

h tt

Not mid-90s but i drive a 2001 accord, and am gonna keep driving that shit till it dies

Julia Martin

how about a whole new podcast for people who admire and romanticize cops with the John Wayne Gacy dancers

MI

Obsessed with Jihad Jeeves and Wooster, would love to listen to like a full hour of just that

Hannah Blumenfeld

There's a really interesting British crime show from the 70s, called Gangsters. Shot on location in Birmingham, it has a cool filmic style and goes out of its way to portray the nastiness of the setting.

BarFly

The return of Nate's Uncle's Inscrutable Homophobic Comic

BarFly

How about a Britainology on the cultural elements that gave rise to Andrew Wakefield?

MI

Don't see how you can think of them as separate continuities when Ashes to Ashes explicitly references Life on Mars, but clearly you think heaven is a pub in Manchester.

Andrew Davis

There’s a scene in the later show where the cast of coppers give Thatcher a standing ovation on her reelection, so we can’t say it isn’t true to life

FR

The sidebar about various homophobic epithets took me out because Gene Hunt actually has a monologue at one point describing another character which is burned into my brain and is pretty much just a list of old timey homophobic epithets, including fudge packer and uphill gardener. There’s also an episode where he describes a suspect as ‘faker than a tr*nny’s fanny’. An alarming proportion of the memetic quotes I can remember from this show involve slurs in some way. I have an unpleasant feeling that the thrill of hearing various old timey slurs was a significant part of the show’s appeal, and I almost certainly had at least one of these quotes on my Facebook profile as a teenager.

lousullivan.bf

I too think about Butler Ian Jihad all of the time. Would watch the entirety of Jihad and Wooster

h tt

Hard disagree with Nate on Me and You and Everyone We Know which is, in fact, good

James

Asheville local. I’ll be on the lookout lol

Scott Taylor Fletcher

ah, the classic little landlordism them, if only WE could go back but YOU would be doing all the work. Got it, in my American brain Celtic is more pre-Roman British Isles association. I just chimed in because I'm not sure the whole luxury automated communism thing is going to work out, so I think articulating the difference between farmers and artisans who both do work and own their own land as opposed to "farmers" who are just landlords is worthwhile distinction since someone will still have to produce food in the future, but I'm rambling now.

jamin

I'm not entirely sure to what extent crofting is still a Thing but the crofts absolutely were owned by a landlord, not the tenants; the nostalgia absolutely is in my experience a 'wow if only we could go back to the good old days when men were men and we all farmed 20 hours a day' thing, not a 'I would like to own my own land' thing. Also, to be clear, I meant 'Celtic' as in the broadly understood 'Celtic' parts of the world (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Mann, Cornwall), not actual ethnic Celts.

marilyn

Wasn't crofting a result of the land clearances long after the Celts were gone or I am off base here? I would assume the appeal of modern crofting would be the ability to own some land of one's own.

jamin

I like how the British equivalent of an anime isekai truck is a dirty vauxhall cavalier

Andromeda

I’m surprised that neither Milo or Nate mentioned the US remake with Harvey Keitel as Gene Hunt.

Robert Greensmith

Came here to say this - absolutely right, and the same reason that you hear prestige music on Homes Under The Hammer

Josh L

tough but fair

Shivvy

When his backstory episode confirmed he's supposed to be a Londoner I laughed out loud. But at least he's entertaining! Frenchie otoh, just pure painful.

Stu Palmer

When Nate says "it's not quite like that, it's not like a Hideo Kojima story" does he mean Haruki Murakami? Or what Kojima thing is like "in a cop story you get hit by a car that takes you back through time"?

zona

I don't think there's much to get out of modern Who but like a Pertwee-Baker-Davison threefer could be interesting for their different places in British popular culture and the different kinds of Britishness they embody

who ate all my cum

This kind of realism reminds me a lot of Babylon Berlin, a German police series for which the producers somehow got the millions that were needed to create a perfect reproduction of 1920 Germany, so that the characters can investigate stuff like secret rearmement efforts to avoid the terms of the treaty of Versailles 😆. Honestly, the best TV series ever produced in Germany, maybe even Europe

Anggg

Did Milo/Russian speakers in the chat watch Anora? Thoughts?

Shivvy

I forgot Butler Ian entirely so glad to have him back

Shivvy

as a native EN speaker/FR learner it’s easy to ignore Frenchie by focusing on whatever it is Karl is doing, bc even as a yank it’s wild as a hell

Shivvy

I feel like it's basically too obvious lol but on a long enough timeline they're bound to. Myself I remember watching basically all of 10 and almost all of 11 then dropping off, then recently watching Blink and being *appaled* at the dialogue, it was almost a parody of how twitter comedians do Marvel Patter. I guess it suffers a lot from the Seinfeld Effect where it pioneered a genre that later on became overblown and backlashed

etienne

Also November should realistically be on this one

Erin Taylor

Also - and I like John Simm, I think he's undeniably an excellent character actor - I think Drake has a much more compelling dynamic with Hunt, and Hawes is a much more engaging lead in a lot of ways.

RipleyInSpace

"I have a gun in my purse, just in case anyone's gay" is a fucking all-timer

RipleyInSpace

Being french listening to him make my brain glitch... He sounds like a french speaking english but with french words...

Régis

You cannot talk about Gene Hunt and euphemisms for homosexuality without citing this Life on Mars scene https://youtu.be/Sw2HT6tgSys?si=r05ICeiUeqCjk7aL

Liam Danagher

I can't get this melody out of my head. And I can't stop thinking about Riley. https://youtu.be/eRH7YSwl3xc?t=1087

En Bee

ehh, it's easy to think of them as separate continuities, and A2A has a lot of enjoyable stuff

weronika mamuna

the problem with that idea is that surely they’d have to watch, like Rose (2005) and also some random episode from the 80s and also one that’s actually good from the reboot (not that the entire 2005 s1 doesn’t capture the essence of RTD Dr Who)

Nina

Okay now you've triggered some early-2000s LJ/tumblr fandom brainrot in me, so I gotta ask: have you guys ever done a Dr Who Britainology? If no, are you planning to?

Suggestive Cacti

Great observation about the PSP. Nostalgia gets in the way of the reality. Come back a generation further, and you're using a pencil to rewind audio cassettes. That was (one of) our PSP

Cormac

Superintendent Roman Jakobson issuing orders to PC Unmarked and WPC Marked

Jack Fennell

shame on you guys for not inviting Hussein on to talk about a British Isekai

William

the producers of the Sopranos really understood the deep-seated need for lily white WASPs to do their loudest and most embarrassing central casting italian american impressions in public. 20 years later, and they still think that's a personality, truly amazing

MI

Ugh no... special place in hell for any cop show that borrows its title from a Bowie song for relevance. It's 2025 and rape kits are still crumbling into dust inside of evidence lockers, but at least we're completely cured of that awful 1970s sexism

MI

One difference I think is that English twee has a 'jolly good, stiff upper lip' paternalistic vibe about it, whereas Scottish twee is very much this infuriating 'RETVRN to the glens, we must all become countryside artisans' thing. If you visit touristy places in Scotland, for instance, you will likely see some establishment with the word 'croft' or 'crofter' in the name. I have yet to understand why a peculiar Celtic form of brutal landlordism is so nostalgic to so many people.

marilyn

If you think English or American tweeness is bad, you haven't encountered the truly cursèd canon that is Scottish twee, which consists largely of plush Loch Ness Monster and Highland cow toys in tourist gift shops, insisting on calling New Years 'Hogmanay', wanking over 'Rabbie' Burns, pasting tartan everywhere, replying to people with '*English' when they talk derogatorily about the British, and overusing the word 'wee'. It's very tied up in the politics of Scottish nationalism in the same way that English twee feels tied up with Continuity Remain and Lib Dem-ism, and is absolutely a major reason I now believe Scottish nationalism to be total horseshit lol

marilyn

I would not recommend the sequel series (Ashes to Ashes) if you at all enjoyed Life on Mars, unless you have fandom brain and want to know what actually happened.

Andrew Davis

Omg speaking about bad (foreign) language use... Frenchie from The Boys *cannot* speak French. Like come on man you had ONE JOB. Even his "hon hon hon I am Ferennncchh" accent is appalling.

Stu Palmer

Was listening to this in the car when I was passed by a pristine Mk2 Ford Escort 🤯

Mark Chickenf1sh

Tea-sekai?

Ijon Tichy

I remember him being described once as the kind of atavistic monster who could only have existed in Thatcher’s Britain

Cat Mara

I've been rewatching The Wire and was surprised at how jarring the Russian language was in the few scenes it appeared in season 2. For such an amazing show, they are speaking utter nonsense. A show that I remember getting it very right is the Sopranos. Will have to check out the Americans at some point. Thanks for another amazing episode!

Serkles

My understanding is that because of the bbc's flat agreement with the music industry (at least at the time), they would not have spent a lot of money on the soundtrack. This is why a lot of shows not intended for international sales get licensed music that would otherwise be unattainable. This is why for example hitchhiker's guide originslly just used jmj's oxygene in full as a soundtrack, which was scrubbed when sold international

Nat O'Connor

I appreciate this isn't to the pod's taste, but John Simm is also most well-known for being the first proper incarnation of the Master in the reboot of Doctor Who (technically preceded by Derek Jacobi for all of about 5 minutes).

Leo Curtis

Jihad and Wooster is going to be in my brain for a while now

Joe Zebedee

As for the soundtrack - the BBC have a blanket music agreement with the industry where they're basically allowed to use anything in their programming, with certain conditions. That's why Adam Curtis is able to score his documentaries in the way he does

Juliet

James Anderton was the police chief in Manchester - a friend of Margaret Thatcher who notoriously said gay people and sex workers were "swirling around in a cesspit of their own making" at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Several of the Manchester bands besides the Happy Mondays referenced him - there's a line in 'Hit the North' by The Fall about how 'cops can't catch criminals' but 'they're not too bad, they talk to God', and The Passage talked about him a lot, notably in 'Mr Terror, Chief of Police'. His daughter turned out to be a lesbian so probably God thought he deserved smiting

Juliet

Bring back the noise

A sudden absence of bees

Could this be a British Isekai?

DrawingGardi

In Ireland female police officers were called Bean Garda - woman guard. Nurses were also called bean altra (woman nurse) despite the fact that nurse made up the vast majority of nurses

Seán

At 1:45, I travelled into an alternate reality where I was listening to this podcast while being depressed. I didn't pay extra for this, please send me back.

Dovah

also, v fond of this show, the first scene he has in the seventies was filmed a street over from my grandparents house

Theodora

feel slightly insane, what was the terrifying screech around 1:45

Theodora

1:50 saund warming

Iln Nico

Life on Mars is honestly so good it's my go-to 'I'm I'll and wanna watch something' show

Riley

fwiw my hot take is that ashes to ashes is better because more conceptual and unhinged

Nina

never felt more stalked and also terrified to hear a single bad thing about john simm or this show.

Nina

i am sorry — I started rewatching life on mars for comfort *yesterday*

Nina


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