The second series of the classic TV production ‘Life on Mars’ comes to our screens this week. If it’s up to the first series and sticks to a ‘strangely’ believable plot, it’ll be fantastic.

The fascination of this sort of programme to me is that it’s something which has interested me since a young age and there was a scene in the first series which triggered off an early memory.

I must have been about 5 years old I guess and I was in bed at my Aunts house waiting to go to sleep and the door opened. A man walked in who looked a lot like my Dad, but wasn’t. He glanced over to me, smiled, then left.
I called to my Aunt who came in and passed it off as a dream, but to me it was real.

Seeing the scene where the main character of Life on Mars is walking along outside a football match back in 1972 and sees himself as a child walk past him. The boy glances back and the ‘older version’ of him decides not to do or say anything.

This spookily leads me to think that perhaps I was seeing myself in my Aunts room that night? What’s even more spooky is that I seem to look like the man more and more as I age. Am I to one day return and have a peep at myself?

Oooh – errr!!

But, from that early age and having a life long fascination through reading ‘The Time Machine’ by H.G.Wells and watching programmes such as ‘Dr.Who’, ‘Goodnight Sweetheart’ and the movie ‘The Philadelphia Experiment’, I do tend to let the old mind wander a bit. Even the Startrek movie where they came back in time to save whales from discinction has a wonderful story within it – plus to see Spock dressed as a hippy is quite enthralling as well!

What could it be like just to walk through a door and come out 50, 100 years ago, or ahead. Amazing, just as long as you can get back again.

Now as I leave you thinking this bloke as lost the plot completely, don’t forget to tune in. The casting and story are ‘out of this world’, but beside this, it also portrays life in the early 70’s to a tee.

Life on Mars; BBC1, Starring John Simm, Philip Glenister, Liz White, Marshall Lancaster and Dean Andrews.