A Story of Coincidence and Chance

Ashes to Ashes just did their very special trans episode. Colour me unimpressed.

I watched the new Life on Mars. It's interesting how many scenes are shot-for-shot remakes of the original.

How come nobody told me that they'd started showing Ashes to Ashes?

I picked up a DVD set over the weekend: The Omega Factor. This was a BBC series that was aired on TVOntario when I was much younger, and I have vague recollections of it. In particular, I have a strong memory of the theme music from the series, although I can't really remember any of the characters or the plot.

I probably saw the series around 1980 or thereabouts, and haven't seen anything about it since then, but I popped in the first episode and was astonished about how well I've remembered the theme music over the years.

(There were a lot of old TV series that I first encountered on TVOntario: The Ghosts of Motley Hall, The Prisoner, Dr. Who (complete with Judith Merril's post-episode bits as the Undoctor), and others.)

The series I'm currently completely engrossed in is Life on Mars, a series about a Manchester police officer who gets hit by a car, and awakes in 1973. Much of the show revolves around the differences between policing methods in 1973 and 2006. Sam, the main character, keeps wanting to secure crime scenes and collect forensic evidence, and his boss, Gene, wants to bang people's heads until they confess. The most interesting element of the show is the repeated implication that Sam isn't really in 1973, but that he's in a coma in 2006 and he's imagining all the events of the series (although the pilot episode dwells on him having difficulty believing that his subconscious could come up with the level of detail that he encounters). It's a good show.