Ashes To Ashes premiered on BBC1 on February 7, 2008. Gene, from Life On Mars, turns his attentions to taking on the "southern nancy" criminal scum and flanked by his faithful sidekicks DS Ray Carling and DC Chris Skelton, he transfers down South to the London Met. But Gene gets a surprise when he is thrown together with a sexy, ambitious and intelligent officer in the shape of single mother DI Alex Drake. Alex has risen rapidly through the ranks of the Met and in the modern world of 2008 is renowned for using her skills as a psychological profiler to capture suspects. But Alex is ripped from her current world of equality and respect when she and her daughter are kidnapped. She is shot while making a bid for freedom and wakes up in a brothel in 1981, surrounded by men who look like something out of Miami Vice and is confused, to say the least. Here Alex comes face to face with some familiar characters, not just from her own life-time, but also from the reports logged by none other than Sam Tyler, which Alex has spent months poring over.
