Life On Mars: knowledge comes with death's release

So, Sam Tyler makes a different choice to Dorothy, deciding there are places better than home. Last night's Life On Mars saw the lead character gloriously choosing to leap to his death, for a fleeting moment of reconciliation with his preferred fantasy of 70s pastiche, rather than carry on in a bleached-out, enervated 2007.

There is some grist here for the mill of those blockheads who've praised this series for being wonderfully 'politically-incorrect' (Sian Williams on Breakfast this morning being merely the latest). Being generous, I imagine they mean that Gene Hunt doesn't seem like the product of endless focus groups or demographic profiling. And yes, in a sense, that is refreshing. Hunt is preposterous, and in this context good fun. But I really wish these people would think before opening their mouths, as the implication is that life would somehow be better if we could go round calling people pakis, wogs, poofs, bitches et al - you know, like everyone thinks.

Anyway, I think it's less overtly political than Sam having woken to the profound rightness of the reactionary, despite the diametrically dull police procedural meeting he attends directly before his jump; Sam's return to his fantasy is an abnegation of adult responsibility (which, really, is also the motor driving the 'string-em-up' brigade). He chooses to return because it's fun dressing up in funny clothes and skidding along in funny cars. As the car screeches into the distance, the children dancing in its wake are an emblem for the nostalgia of that decision - not of specific tokens, like space hoppers and Space Dust, but an idealized 'land of lost content'. Dennis Potter's Blue Remembered Hills was a riposte to that kind of infantile hankering after a mythical golden age, but I can't find it in my heart to begrudge Life On Mars for this ending. If nothing else, a modern lead character choosing suicide as a positive resolution is also well off the page of focus group reports, and it contains a kind of vitality purely for that. We've had fun over two series and we haven't mistaken Life On Mars for real life - that of now or thirty years previous. Neither has Sam, but if you're going to hanker after a fantasy world, have the courage to really embrace it.

ADDENDUM: See also here and here for some excellent other views.