Life as we know it

TONY Crane: "Do we know each other?" Sam Tyler: "We will one day".

Life on Mars, or 1973 Manchester to be precise, is confusing - as such exchanges verify.

On the evidence of the opening episode of the second series, this ingenious time travel drama is going to be every bit as good the second time around.

The only regret is the makers have decided this will also be the final series. A case of getting out while the going is good - a brave decision but probably the right one. There's only so long you can keep viewers guessing before revealing why policeman Sam Tyler had a car accident in 2006 and woke up in 1973, where the cops behave like they're in a Seventies police series.

It sounded ridiculous but the first series made this hard-to-swallow premise work and, for those of us old enough to remember that period, had the added bonus of high nostalgia value.

While Tyler not only has to deal with the old-fashioned policing methods - beating up suspects, planting evidence, taking back-handers - but with regular flashbacks (or should that be flash forwards?) to lying in a coma in a hospital bed being threatened by a shadowy figure.

His Seventies colleagues remain suspicious of his new-fangled police methods, such as fingertip searches of crime scenes. This led to a line of coppers wearing Marigolds being serenaded by their crime-busting colleagues with a chorus of "Hands that do dishes feel as soft as your face".

John Simm's Tyler looks understandably perplexed while Philip Glenister's regular scene-stealing as DCI Gene Hunt is downright criminal.

Some idiot - sorry scheduler - is pitting Never Did Me Any Harm against Life On Mars, which is mad as both are heavily into nostalgia.

The new C4 series is a variation on those where children are sent back to be educated by old-fashioned methods. This time Jon Gregory, whose eight-bedroom house in the Home Counties suggests he's not short of a bob or two, turned back the clock to make his children relive his days growing up in a terraced house on a Leeds council estate in the 1970s.

Hannah, 12, and Josh, ten, didn't take kindly to going back to basics. The shock of being deprived of all the things they take for granted - TV, pocket money, clothes, hair mousse and even food - was met with anguished squeals of "I don't like it" and "I hate this".

Even his wife rebelled. Having just £36 for the week's shopping - a tenth of her normal budget - was bad enough. Jon insisting on buying a tin of Ideal evaporated milk, fondly remembered from his childhood, was the final straw.

Surprisingly, there was a happy ending.

The children knuckled down, despite being taken to school in a yellow 1970s camper van instead of a people carrier, and cooked their parents dinner.

It would be nice to know if they've carried on with this new regime since the cameras left or whether they've returned to being spoilt brats.