Panel 1:
“Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time?” Generic and narrative
complexity in Life on Mars
Nicola Dobson
This paper examines the British television series Life on Mars and discusses the generic
characteristics as well as the narrative complexity of the show. By engaging with the
possibility of the supernatural or time travel, Life on Mars differed from conventional
crime fiction with a hybrid of science fiction. However while there have been other
series which combine sci-fi with crime fiction, it was also the situation of a contemporary
policeman in 1973 which set it apart. There is a long tradition and history of police
drama in British television, and this genre was particularly popular in the 1970s. Life on
Mars uses this to reference styles and character traits but from the point of view of 00s
man Sam. The postmodern audience could enjoy the sexist and politically incorrect
Gene Hunt as a nostalgic reminder of a very different world, knowing that Sam would
provide our voice of modernity.
The series long mystery of Sam’s fate provided audiences with an intriguing mystery with
Sam as the unreliable narrator. From the first episode clues appeared to suggest that Sam
was in a coma in 2006 but each time he seemed to get close to solving the puzzle of how
to get home something got in his way. Sam and the audience constantly found
themselves second guessing our judgement of the true narrative meaning, and the
character traits of the supporting characters.
The writers had suggested from the start that the series would end with a clear resolution,
though when the story of Sam Tyler did indeed conclude it was slightly ambiguous.
However due to the success of these two seasons the show is going to return in a spin
off set in the 1980s albeit with a different protagonist. This use of another historical era
suggests a generic divergence from the analytical forensic based shows of the early 00s.
These variations ultimately lead to developments within the genre but this paper will
examine whether the nostalgic approach of Life on Mars is a true generic development or
simply a trip down memory lane for the creators and audience.
Voices Bleeding Through: the Strange Journey of Sam Tyler in Life
on Mars
Karen Devlin (University of Hull)
‘The mind of man can imagine nothing which has not really existed’, said Edgar Allan Poe,
and Sam Tyler’s strange journey into the past in Life on Mars appears to be a
phenomenon which is eventually explained by the basic laws of reason. Sam lies in a
hospital bed in 2006 in a deep coma; it is his damaged brain which has created an
alternative world set in 197 3 in which he can function, feel and react. The apparently
logical explication of Sam’s incredible experience situates it in the realm of the uncanny,
where bizarre or disturbing events can be rationalised. Sam occupies a dual temporal
position; he is trapped in time, but additionally, he also transcends time. Likewise, the
utilisation of modern media and communications technology (television, radio,
telephone, police radio), through which the voices of Sam’s family and friends from 2006
bleed, also invokes the uncanny and the discomfiting. At these junctures there is a
collision between Sam’s two worlds and time is disturbed and thrown out of balance.
In this paper I will examine the referential and theoretical spaces in which Life on Mars
functions, as well as the distortions and subversions of temporality which take place.
Using Tzvetan Todorov’s theories of the uncanny and the fantastic, I will question
whether the term ‘uncanny’ is adequate to describe Sam Tyler’s experience. Do the final
moments of Life on Mars really offer a resolution, or do they leave us [and Sam]
suspended in that moment of hesitation which defines the fantastic: a never-ending
moment of ambiguity, which exists in the space between the uncanny and the
supernatural?
Biography:
Karen Devlin is a researcher and tutor in English Literature at the University of Hull. She
specialises in Victorian Literature and is completing a thesis on the life and work of the
poet, novelist and essayist, Mary Elizabeth Coleridge. Other interests include the
interdisciplinary application of theory; adaptations of literary works for television and
morals and ethics in crime fiction. Karen Devlin has recently written an article, "What
was that shadow on the wall?" Art, Murder & Homoerotic Desire in the Fin de Siecle
Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Coleridge and is currently writing a critique on the work of
Nigel Kneale.
Make Another World: Expressing the Nostalgia Affect in the Diegesis
and Narrative of Life on Mars
Ross Garner (Cardiff University)
Frederic Jameson is arguably the most prominent writer to discuss nostalgia in relation to
contemporary (popular) culture. However, Jameson’s many discussions of this subject
have occurred solely in relation to cinema (see Jameson 1981, 1982, 1991, 1998, 2000 in
Hardt and Weeks), meaning that although his arguments have been insightful, their
application remains limited to one form of media. This paper begins to redress this
imbalance by applying Jameson’s thoughts on nostalgia as an aesthetic mode to Life on
Mars, hence considering the series as an example of ‘nostalgia television’ or the ‘nostalgic
series’. However, whilst recognising that Life on Mars creates a “glossy kind of past
…conveyed via re-motivated symbols and objects of a particular period” (Buchanan
2006: 95) such as old police slogans and commercials, spaghetti hoops, and Tufty the
traffic squirrel, I argue that analysis needs to go deeper than this when considering Life on
Mars from this perspective. This is because the series constructs a discourse of nostalgia
which it is both celebratory and highly critical, in the end resulting in nostalgia being
expressed in largely affective terms. Hence, I argue that what Life on Mars demonstrates is
‘affective nostalgia’ or a ‘nostalgia affect’.
To do this, my argument covers two areas of the programme. Firstly, I analyse the
diegetic world of 1973 that the series creates, considering how nostalgia is drawn upon as
a visual discourse to construct meaning throughout the series. What aspects of 1973 is
nostalgia expressed for, what is it critical of, and what is affectively constructed as ‘better’
than the present? Secondly, how is this ‘nostalgia affect’ constructed by the series’
narrative arc? In this second section I argue that nostalgia is a discourse that plays a key
part in structuring Sam Tyler’s journey back, forwards, and back again, through time,
ultimately leading to the narrative resolution where Tyler ‘chooses’ the past over the cold,
sterile and emotionless present that he returns to. Thus, instead of engaging with the
usual dismissals of nostalgia on ideological grounds due to its reactionary (see Tannock
1995), regressive and falsifying tendencies, this paper contributes to academic
understandings of nostalgia by outlining an alternative way of approaching the concept in
relation to television rather than cinema.
Biography:
Ross Garner is a PhD research student at the department of Journalism, Media and
Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. He is currently researching his thesis on the
construction of nostalgic discourses within contemporary television series and their
audiences, and is writing a chapter concerning nostalgia and the character of Sarah Jane
Smith for the forthcoming IB Tauris book, Reading Doctor Who (2009). Ross’s research
interests include postmodernist theory, as well as cult, ‘quality’ and science-fiction
television series and their audiences.
Choosing Not to Choose Life: Life on Mars and the Dialectic of
Suicide
Dr. Angelina KarpovichAngelina Karpovich (Brunel University)
As befits a series which continuously played with structure, style, and perception, the
conclusion of Life on Mars prompted, rather than resolved, ambiguities in the narrative.
In the closing moments of the series, Sam Tyler apparently rejected his 21st century
existence and made the irreversible choice to return to his life in 1973. If the programme
is viewed under the assumption that the events of 1973 are the dreams/hallucinations of
Sam Tyler who is in a coma in 2006, then his final leap off a building and back into 1973
has to be viewed as a suicide (indeed the programme’s writer/co-creator Matthew
Graham has confirmed that this was his preferred interpretation of Life on Mars). Tyler’s
suicide was a significant and highly unusual television event: not only was he the leading
character in a popular primetime drama, but his actions were presented in a highly
sympathetic, even celebratory, manner.
Even outside the narratively polymorphous context of Life on Mars, suicide itself is a far
from unambiguous act, in which seemingly opposing dialectics, such as for example,
passivity / agency or selfishness / self-sacrifice, can be complexly intertwined rather than
mutually exclusive. Thus, Sam Tyler’s ultimate return to 1973 not only provides a
relatively satisfying conclusion to his individual story, but can be interpreted as an
appropriately consistent resolution to the thematic concerns of the overall series.
This paper will draw on the extensive body of sociological literature which analyses both
the social meanings and the cultural interpretations of suicide (e.g., Douglas: 1967;
Durkheim: 1951) in order to explore the extent to which the themes and aesthetics of
Life on Mars can be said to be existential.
Panel 2:
‘MOONAGE DAYDREAMS’: Industrial and Cultural Memory
contexts of Life on Mars
Dr John Cook (Glasgow Caledonian University)
This paper will reflect on two aspects which seem crucial to understanding the
development of Life on Mars and its successful reception with British audiences: the
industrial / institutional context of contemporary British TV drama, particularly
institutional developments within the BBC which allowed the drama (finally) to be
produced and what the paper will argue is related to this, a generational shift whereby the
1970s has now largely displaced the 1960s as the ‘golden’ decade of cultural memory and
wistful nostalgia in dominant media discourses, discourses which are themselves
reflective of the changing make-up and preferences of the audiences programmers are
trying to reach.
In reflecting on the industrial / institutional contexts of BBC TV drama, the paper will
focus on the emergence of BBC Wales as the powerhouse for a new wave of British
‘high concept’ TV drama, particularly centring around science fiction and fantasy themes,
which followed BBC Wales’ successful capturing of the commission for the revival of
Doctor Who (2005 - ). While Russell T. Davies is the name often popularly associated with
making this kind of drama fashionable again, the paper will argue for the centrality
behind the scenes of a new generation of BBC TV drama executives, especially Jane
Tranter and Julie Gardner, in helping not only to make Doctor Who but Life on Mars
possible. With the help of illustrative extracts, the paper will relate this to the
presentation of the 1970s in Life on Mars as a kind of ‘moonage daydream’ of received
cultural memory, arguing that the drama’s constant oscillation between depiction of the
1970s as a ‘primitive’, ‘backward’ time of restrictive unsophistication and the 1970s as a
‘golden’ period (compared to the present) of untrammelled individual freedom is
fundamental to its whole construction and raison d’etre, being reflective of the various
contemporary audience demographics the series is trying to appeal to and reach.
Biography:
Dr. John Cook is Reader in Media at Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland and has
published on a diverse range of aspects of TV history, TV drama, science fiction TV and
film. In 2005, he co-edited (with Peter Wright, Edge Hill University) the well-received
essay collection, British Science Fiction Television: A Hitchhiker’s Guide (IB Tauris), which
offered a range of pioneering academic critical perspectives on British science fiction
television drama.
“American Remake – Shudder”: Online Debates about Life on Mars
and ‘Britishness’
Brett Mills (University of East Anglia)
The forthcoming, on/off American remake of Life on Mars offers a case study that is
useful for examining debates about why the British original was so successful. In
adapting a series for a different industry and different audience, questions can be
asked about what is at the ‘core’ of the programme which appears to define it. This
paper will explore these issues as they are discussed by Life on Mars aficionados on
the online fan forum, ‘The Railway Arms’ (www.domeofstars.com/forum). Concerns
about what America will do to the series are debates in the thread, ‘American remake
– shudder’, in which many fans – British, American, and from elsewhere – speculate
on how the programme might change. Core to these concerns are notions of
‘Britishness’, which many see as a primary pleasure Life on Mars offers, and which
will be difficult to translate into ‘Americanness’. This ‘Britishness’ is couched in
debates about audiences, location, performance, and casting, and demonstrate
significant assumptions about what defines British television. The concerns about
these changes not only suggest a worry about a favoured programme being ‘ruined’,
but also demonstrate perceptions about the relationship between British and America,
and the value of ‘Britishness’ as a televisual representational strategy. Drawing
extensively on this fan forum material, this paper will explore these representational
debates, focussing particularly on assumptions about the social and cultural role of
television, and its relationship to national identity.
Biography:
Brett Mills is a Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia.
He is the author of Television Sitcom (BFI: 2005) and How to Read Media Theory (with David
Barlow, Pearson: forthcoming).
‘‘Knowing’ Quality: Exploiting Popular Cultural Capital, and
Producerly and Audience Expectations’
Justine Mortimer (University of Winchester)
The relationship of ‘knowing-ness’ to understandings of quality in Life on Mars contrasts
to frequent dismissals of other programming which we, as the audience, can view equally
knowingly – But can we ONLY watch Life on Mars knowingly? Does this become a
defining feature of contemporary quality television drama? Does this expectation of
knowingness contribute to the success of other series that trade (albeit in different ways)
on notions of nostalgia, such as Doctor Who? This might lead scholars to question the
extent to which a great deal of media and cultural studies research on the audience
construction of meaning has passed-by professional media critics in the press etc.
This paper then proceeds to consider (re)assessments of actual 70s programming in
terms of quality – or defined by what is already iconic, asking the question, “Who defines
this?” “Is the power to define quality still largely constituted in traditional spheres of
power and cultural capital?”
The paper concludes by proposing the notion that this, then is the key feminist issue
raised by the programme; not the representation of women in the workplace/media
whether contemporary, historic or ironic; but, the power to define and create quality,
historic, contemporary or ironic iconography.
Panel 3
The Medium is the Monster… or the Message? Uncanny Test Cards
and Interactive OU Lecturers in Life on Mars
Dr Matt Hills (Cardiff University)
Life on Mars offers up many representations of the 1970s, and many invitations to
nostalgia. But despite its apparent emphasis on using the music of the time, in its
representations of the uncanny (Freud 1919) it repeatedly links Sam Tyler’s ‘visions’ to
various other media of the period, characteristically using radio and TV broadcasts as
messages from the future, and as sources of narrative unease. Presenting a monstrous
mediated gaze, in which the television looks back at its audience of one, and the radio
likewise speaks back, I will argue that part of the textual appeal of Life on Mars lies in its
articulation of a fantasy of total immersion and media interactivity.
Through its repeated invocation of (uncannily) ‘interactive’ media, the text resonates
strongly with contemporary media discourses. Far from simply looking back to older
media icons, Life on Mars positions Sam Tyler as the recipient of media targeted singularly
at him, and as speaking uniquely to him, making this textual experience of the uncanny
simultaneously a fantasy of audience empowerment and interactivity.
In Haunted Media, Jeff Sconce points out that fantasies of media “presence” have had a
long history, implying that “television ghosts” and “monsters in the static” are likely to
be “less than frightening or even fantastic” in the contemporary cultural imagination
(2000:126). Following Sconce’s work, I will suggest that Life On Mars uses 1970s TV not
simply to ascribe “occult powers” to television, but also to reconfigure these anxieties for
the multi-platform, digital media environment. Though Sam Tyler’s visions do retain
ambivalent elements of “the fantastic” (Johnson 2005) and the fearful, they are ultimately
validated as positive textual elements – as messages rather than monstrosities, and as
signs of Tyler’s ontological condition. As such, these supposed media “monsters in the
static”, or indeed in the TV test-card signal, can be read as embodying cultural desires as
much as fears. They represent one textual space where ‘old media’ are made to collide
with ‘new media’ discourses of immersion, vibrancy and interactivity. Far from being
nostalgic or backward-looking, I will argue that these aspects of Life on Mars speak
directly to industry and audience concerns over media transitions that are very much of
the here-and-now.
Biography:
Dr. Matt Hills is Reader in Media & Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. He is the
author of books such as Fan Cultures (2002) and The Pleasures of Horror (2005), and has
written widely on television, most recently in articles concerning documentaries about
fandom (Social Semiotics, forthcoming) and the ‘text function’ of the DVD box set (in New
Review of Film and TV Studies, 2007). Matt is currently hard at work on a book for IB
Tauris dealing with the BBC Wales series of Doctor Who, and entitled Triumph of a Time
Lord (forthcoming 2008).
Longing to Return-Seeing the 1970s: Life on Mars, Britain, Nostalgia
and Art.
Elisa Oliver (Central St Martins-University of the Arts)
The popularity of Life of Mars reflects the contemporary condition of return that goes
beyond normal generational nostalgia and highlights a preoccupation delineating a
specific sensibility in British culture. This is characterised by, a concern with adolescence,
both behaviourally and culturally, but perhaps most specifically through temporal
displacements unique to the period that make seeing the 1970s something very particular.
The 1970s generation is the first to be totally subsumed in the televisual, and to
experience the pause and rewind of the VCR and the tape recorder. The construction of
memory and subjectivity resulting from this engagement is unique to this period, creating
a form of return or oscillation. Sam Tyler is literally living inside the temporal
displacements of these technologies. Lost in the 1970s, a time he originally experienced
when four, he is in a constant state of oscillation as he encounters his past and tries to
get back to his 2006 present. The impossibility of return robs him of the rehabilitation
that the return of the VCR allows, pinpointing for us the substance of a subjectivity for
which the 1970s is pivotal. Culturally and politically the 1970s were a period of rupture
and fragmentation characterised by the breakdown of political certainties and the failure
of pervious cultural markers such as Modernism. This paper will consider this
movement of return as indicative of a desire to restore and rehabilitate and will address
the dominance of the 1970s as a type of mourning through an examination of
contemporary artists, Paul Rooney, Susan Philipz and George Shaw. These artists, who
experienced their adolescence in the 1970s, create work that is both obsessed with this
moment, and in that obsession, confront its legacy.
‘Through the TV Screen’ – The Test Card Girl, the Uncanny and a
’70s Childhood
Dr. Peter Jachimiak (Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural
Industries, University of Glamorgan)
One of the reasons why I and others like me (‘40-somethings’, whose childhoods
spanned the 1970s) immediately connected with Life on Mars (BBC 1, 2006 - 2007) was
due to its appropriation of the Test Card F: More specifically, the inclusion of the Test
Card Girl as a ghostly, dead-of-the-night apparition who acted as a form of spiritual
guide to the ‘in a coma’/‘gone back in time’ DCI/DC Sam Tyler (played by John Simm).
This eerie, chalk-wielding Girl (in real life, Carole Hersee, the daughter of the BBC
engineer, and inventor of the Test Card, George Hersee), and her co-star Bubbles the
Clown, provided me and my generation with a visual and sonic – not forgetting the
original’s weird mix of pop, jazz and classical mood music (see Currie, 1996) – backdrop
to our childhood play. Indeed, for many, the pair’s very stillness, in particular their frozen
expressions, proved phobia-inducing (BBC News, 19th April 2001).
Yet, in Life on Mars, the Test Card Girl embodies far more than memories of childhood
paranoia: Not only a residual ’70s day/nightmare, as an embodiment of the uncanny –
typically “a peculiar commingling of the familiar with the unfamiliar” (Royle, 2003, p.1) –
she represents the loss of our childhood selves. For, in the final scene – as children are
seen running, bursting out into the back lanes found behind regimented terraced housing
– the Test Card Girl, now as some ’70s Alice-banded Pied Piper, leads the urchins’
charge. In the context of Tyler’s death (and his resultant release from his present-day
workplace/emotional claustrophobia into his unshackled ’70s past) the Girl, at this very
moment, suggests a nostalgic yearning for the childhood exuberance of ‘feeling alive’. As
such, this paper critically examines nostalgia – what Boym (2001) terms “hypochondria
of the heart” – and contemporary adulthood as it re-encounters 1970s childhood.
Panel 4
Location, Location, Location: What does the 1970s look like?
Teresa Forde (University of Derby)
The setting of Life on Mars was finally chosen to be the Greater Manchester area, further
boosting the North West as a choice of location and important area for television
production. The terraced houses and back streets dominate the image of 1970s city life.
This paper will explore the extent to which this sense and recognition of place is
significant to the programme's reconstruction of a 1970s world. In doing so, it will
consider the extent to which the location contributes to both an authenticity of place and
a regional 'repositioning' of 1970s programme, The Sweeney into a North of terraces and
Victorian pubs, encapsulating the label of 'regional' drama. Equally, the paper will
address the extent to which this representation largely avoids the key issues of the
emerging new housing estates in many cities and towns evolving in the 1960s and 1970s
for new factory workers and immigrants. Therefore, the question, 'what does the 1970s
look like' addresses both the importance of the location of Greater Manchester in terms
of textual significance and television industry profile, and its relative arbitrariness as an
image of the 1970s. It provides a setting of nostalgia for a coherent past of the city, the
conurbation as undisturbed from the nineteenth century. The images we see of Sam's
twenty first century city business world, atomised and cold, can truly be contrasted with
the close living of back to back houses and local corner pubs of the 1970s setting. As the
drama moves to the end of its second series, the local community centre of the edge of
the new council estate emerges as a site of trauma for Sam, but the location returns in
the final denouement to a brick tunnel and train track, re-invoking the industrial
landscape of the north.
Sam Tyler and the New North
John Curzon (University of Warwick)
As part of a wider consideration of post-industrial (or de-industrialised) northern
England in contemporary film and television, this paper reflects upon the significance of
the years 1973 and 2006 in the BBC One series Life on Mars. In particular, the paper
considers the effects of an intervening period of economic restructuring, including the
breakdown of the Fordist-Keynesian consensus, the decline of a manufacturing North
and the emergence of a ‘post-industrial’ economy exemplified by white-collar service
industries. By taking as a starting point, a line of dialogue spoken by Sam Tyler in
episode three of series one, the paper expands upon the idea of 1973 and 2006 as
representing ‘B.C.’ and ‘A.D.’ respectively. Through a discussion of Crester’s factory
space and its modern reincarnation as a loft apartment in episode three of the first series,
the paper touches upon the emergence of a post-industrial phase of Capitalism, the
movement of Northern cities from places of production to places of consumption, the
growth of the post-industrial middle-class and the memory of violent confrontations
between capital and labour in the 1980s. The paper also considers Sam Tyler’s role as a
‘comer-in’ with particular significance for contemporary representations of northern
masculinity. A typical character type within northern English film and television, the
comer-in is an urbane, cosmopolitan incomer possessing large amounts of cultural and
social capital and who is representative of the new post-industrial middle class driving
the economic renaissance of contemporary Manchester.
The paper seeks to demonstrate the appropriateness of Life on Mars as a way of
explaining social and cultural changes initiated by developments in the world economy
since 1973 and the significance of these changes for the ongoing representation of the
North of England.
Memory Banks Failing! : Life on Mars and the politics of reimagining the 1970s
Andy Willis (University of Salford)
When Life on Mars first appeared it garnered almost universal critical acclaim and the
arrival of the second series became one of the most eagerly anticipated television events
of 2007. This high profile has contributed to the series becoming one of the cultural
touchstones of the mid-2000s, telling us much about the interests and concerns of
contemporary television drama.
However, in this paper I want to focus not on today but on how Life on Mars
constructs yesterday, and in particular the ways in which the programme engages with
ideas of representing the past. In particular, I want to consider its central re-imagining of
the, specifically Mancunian, police force of the 1970s. Alongside this the paper will
discuss Life on Mars’ marginalisation of the politics of the period, arguing that through a
reading of both these factors we can best come to an understanding of the somewhat
conservative nature of the programme and its selective recall of a decade when Britain
was rife with social upheaval and industrial unrest.
Whilst on the surface the series may seem to offer a critical and distanced view of
the 1970s through the contemporary and liberal eyes of Sam Tyler, the fact that all the
central characters are serving police officers works to undermine and challenge this. By
re-calling the actual role of the police in Britain during the 1970s and some of the crises
the force took part in, this paper will engage with the idea that contemporary popular
television drama can represent the past in a political way, arguing that the programmes
seeming erasure of politics from its version of the past once again reveals that it is often
what is missing from contemporary television drama that is the most interesting.
Biography:
Senior Lecturer in Media and Performance at the University of Salford. Andy Willis
is the co-author, with Peter Buse and Nuria Triana Toribio, of The Cinema of Alex de
la Iglesia (MUP, 2007), and, with Lisa Taylor, of Media Studies: texts, institutions
and audiences (Blackwell, 1999). He is also the editor of Film Stars: Hollywood and
beyond (MUP, 2004) and the co-editor, with Antonio Lazaro Reboll, of Spanish
Popular Cinema (MUP, 2004) and, with Mark Jancovich, Julian Stringer and Antonio
Lazaro Reboll, of Defining Cult Movies: the cultural politics of oppositional taste
(MUP 2003)