Yeah, but I don’t think it would be something where we would go back to the seventies. I can tell you that, without giving too much away. I think we need to do something a little even more surprising and more shocking.

The reason we never saw any of that with Sam was, we hadn’t really planned to finish Life on Mars after two seasons. We had the biggest hit, one of the biggest hits on television, and it’s so hard to come up with hit shows that the last thing you want to do is come up with a hit show and then say, ‘right, I’m pulling the plug on it’. We had certainly planned to do at least one more series, at least series three or possibly a series four, but John [Simm] was obviously in every scene, he was very tired, he’d just had a new baby, he was away a lot from home and he just came to us and said ‘look, I want to call it a day, I want to just finish season two and call it a day’, and that came about kind of halfway through filming season two, so it was a bit of a last-minute thing.

So we sort of then had to work out, well, how are we going to bring this whole thing to an end and so the ideas that we wanted, such as what would happen to Sam, and also, where they all were, what was happening to them, who was Ray? Who was Chris? And who was Gene, most importantly of all probably is who is Gene Hunt? Who really is Gene Hunt? That stuff, we had in our heads, but we hoped we’d have a couple more series to bring it out.



We’d always had this idea of bringing in a guy who came in to police Gene, a kind of Jed Mercurio character walking straight off of Line of Duty to come in and police Gene. And this guy would turn out to be a force for evil, and we had to hold that off, so when we came up with Ashes to Ashes, we said to the BBC, ‘look, we’d love to do it, but we’d like to do three series, and we’d like the first series to be the frothiest one and then the second series will get darker and the mysteries will really start to come out, and then the third series is going to be frankly the most weirdy-woo of them all’ and they said ‘in what way?’ and we said ‘we’d like Satan to turn up in the third one’ and they were like [laughs] ‘oh, okay boys, whatever’. And that’s what we did, so in series three we got to bring Danny Mays in as Keats, who obviously turned out to be this very, very nasty Satanic figure.

In the end, we still got to do all the stuff we wanted to do with Gene, but we never got to tie up John because John had gone by then. But I have spoken… I know that John has since talked to people about being open to coming back to do something, to do some kind of final iteration, so I’m hoping he still feels that he would want to do that. I haven’t spoken to him so at some point, when we’ve got the idea to properly pitch to him, I’d like to take him and Phil [Glenister] out to a very nice lunch somewhere and pitch it to them [laughs].