Television - A time-travelling DI revisits shameless 1970s chauvinism. By Andrew Billen Life on Mars (BBC1)

Now here's a twist on the maverick cop formula: a young detective who, to the bemusement of his brutish colleagues, plays by the rules. DI Sam Tyler issues cautions, seeks warrants, neither duffs nor sets up his suspects, refuses to take confessions at their face value and respects women as, you know, people. It sounds like a French and Saunders sketch - maybe it's been one - and certainly Life on Mars (Mondays, 9pm) contains laughs, all of them fully licensed by its silly, high-concept premise: that a clever young police detective called Sam Tyler has uprooted from present-day Manchester and replanted in the same city's police force in the year 1973 - 1,000 years BPC (before political correctness).

When an RTA sends Sam into either a deep hallucinogenic coma or the past, the track playing in his car is Bowie's 1973 single "Life on Mars" - a fine title for the show, because it suggests what a strangely different planet it was back then. Wandering around dazed, Sam demands his mobile. "Your mobile what?" a PC Plod asks. In his caramel-coloured car, there is an eight-track cartridge machine, not an iPod. But if the gadgets are dated, more archaic still are the police's attitudes to "birds", "Pakis", "spastics" and, most strikingly, to what constitutes "good" coppering. Having inspected a vomit-carpeted cell, Sam complains it's worse than Guantanamo Bay here. His superior denies it's anything like Spain.

There's fun to be had from the anachronisms, but also from the period itself. Life on Mars's inventors, some of whom hail from the unremarkable police series City Central, clearly have affection for the racier dramatic world of Regan and Carter. You can smell the burning rubber from the Cortina tyres. Indeed, the show unintentionally spotlights, compared to the anarchic energy of The Sweeney, how boring the new cliches of the detective drama are: all forensics, psychological profiling and arch female brainiacs.

Playing Sam is John Simm, a good actor whose popularity, from The Lakes on, has never relied on his lovability. One of the developments to watch is whether the era will bring out Sam's inner thug. His co-star is Philip Glenister, who, with beery plausibility, plays DCI Gene Hunt, head of a team of dim chauvinists who think female officers are there to serve tea and crumpets. (When the sympathetic WPC Annie Cartwright reveals she has a degree in psychology, one of them suggests that after her mind-reading act, psychologically dissecting a killer's MO, she get on with the striptease.) The writers need to be careful, however, to give the oldster a fair crack of the whip when it comes to solving cases. In the three episodes I have seen of this eight-part series, Sam, with his newfangled ways, is right a little too often and is in danger of becoming a smart-arse Sherlock Holmes to Gene's garbage-mouthed Dr Watson. The show works best when they crack cases together - symbolised when, together, they punch open a case of Watneys Party Seven.

Without wishing to come on like Melanie Phillips, I suspect the old policing had its strengths, such as knowledge of the local turf. The cops may have been a gang, but they were our gang. Yet sadly, for one who gained his majority in the 1970s, the writers Matthew Graham, Tony Jordan and Ashley Pharoah seem (their love of Sweeney reruns apart) to regard the 1970s as a synonym for death. The bland test card that used to be shown when the TV shut down is a recurring motif. The third episode centres on the death of a scab working in the dying North Country textile industry. Sam at one stage pleads to be relocated to 1988 (a year after Thatcher's third victory).

They also have to be wary how they handle the show's sci-fi elements, which are as dodgy as Sam's summary of them that, Million Dollar Man-style, opens each episode. The series is in part a Narnian hunt for the magic wardrobe that will take Sam back to 2006. In a particularly tiresome trope, the girl from Test Card F periodically materialises to tempt him to stay. A figure called Neil manifests himself in a variety of beards, including that of an Open University professor, to beckon him back to the present; he seems to be his brain surgeon. The delusional coma angle is a lift from The Singing Detective. There are other steals. The lights in a hospital that turn off, corridor by corridor, hail from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, although they are also a joke about 1970s power cuts.

Fortunately, apart from one over-the-top performance by Lee Ross as the swanky head of the regional crime squad, the prevailing atmosphere is of realism rather than parody. As in last year's Rotters' Club, the attention to period detail is impressive. People whistle (earplugged up, they don't these days). There is white dog-shit on the streets (whatever happened to that?). Buildings have fire buckets filled with sand. "Why would I bother to put that kind of detail in?" asks Sam, and the answer is: because this is another lovingly made programme from TV drama's current best hope, BBC Wales. I called the premise silly. So are those that kick-start Hamlet and Macbeth. It is what you do with a premise that counts, and Life on Mars looks as if it's about to do rather a lot.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

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