1. Having caught up with Ashes to Ashes on the iPlayer (it's so much easier than watching television, plus you can stop it and go and do something else for a bit and then come back), and having never watched life on Mars, I have to say, I am hooked. This resulted in me buying the two series of Life on Mars so that I can understand the comparisons I am reading. I find DI Alex Kane ever so slightly irritating, but as the irritatingness resides essentially in the over the top superciliousness towards the 'imaginary constructs' and that superciliousness is also reflected in her 'mother's' mannerisms, I can only conclude that that's part of the plot - on a reviewing last night, she was displaying the same supercilious arrogance at the beginning, before she got shot. Wibble.

I do have to say that they have got the period clothing absofuckinlutely wrong, wrong, wrong. That off the shoulder stuff came much later (or maybe it just took a long time to go away) - and the new romanticism percolated into high street clothing around the mid eighties which is when you tended to get the bright blue things. The early eighties were very much a seventies hang over in office dress and the street clothes were post punk proto grunge apart from the small crowd of art school (St Martin's I think) students and ex-students hanging around squats and going to one or two night clubs. Not that I was there, I hasten to add, it's just that this sort of stuff is a hobby.

2. Don't you diss Tank Girl. I've based my life on Tank Girl.

edit: Oh, right, the film. That's OK, then.