When Life on Mars first aired, it felt less like a TV show and more like a collective fever dream for middle-aged Brits. The premise — a copper from the 2000s wakes up in 1973 — shouldn’t have worked. Yet somehow, amid the flares, the casual sexism, and the smoking indoors, it captured something we’d all been quietly missing: clarity.
Gene Hunt wasn’t subtle, but at least you knew where you stood. The world was messy, yes, but it was an honest kind of messy. No buzzwords, no HR departments, no bloody hashtags — just people trying (and often failing) to do the right thing. It was political correctness’s awkward adolescence, back when the boundaries were blurry but the intentions, mostly, weren’t malicious.
That’s partly why I wrote Who Sent Clement? — not as fan fiction, but as a spiritual cousin to Life on Mars. Clement is cut from a similar cloth: a man out of time, foul-mouthed, outdated, but carrying just enough decency to make you root for him. Drop him in modern London, and he’s like a dog trying to operate an iPhone. Watching him blunder through a world that’s left him behind is equal parts comedy and tragedy — a mirror to all of us who occasionally wonder when the rules changed and who forgot to tell us.
Beneath the laughs and the chaos, there’s a serious thread — about guilt, redemption, and what it means to make peace with who you were. Life on Mars nailed that balance, and I like to think Clement wades through similar waters — just with more swearing and worse manners.
So if you’re missing Life on Mars and wish there were another misfit out of time trying to right his wrongs — only this time, helping a woman who’s desperately trying to survive her own car crash of a life — you might just get along with Clement.
