‘Don't let him take Britain back to the 1980s’: Ashes to Ashes as postfeminist recession television

Abstract

This article interrogates postfeminism and recessionary discourse in the time-travel police series Ashes to Ashes (BBC, 2008–2010). Viewing the series as an early example of ‘recession television’, it explores how the resident gender discourse of postfeminism established in the pre-recession first series, and attendant cultural priorities, shifted over time in tandem with the onset of recession, following the 2008 global financial crisis, and in line with tendencies of emergent recessionary media culture. In early episodes it over-determines the characterization of female detective protagonist Alex Drake as a postfeminist subject, drawing her to well-worn cultural scripts of femininity. Later this gives way to the discursive centralization of her boss, Gene Hunt, already an iconic figurehead of recidivist masculinity from the earlier Life on Mars (BBC, 2006–2007), one of several gendered responses to the drastically changed economic environment in which the series was produced and received.

Notes

^1. Broadcasters' Audience Research Board, http://www.barb.co.uk/viewing/weekly-top-10?_s=4

^2. Richardson (2010) situates Mars in relation to the discourse of ‘quality’ so pervasive in television studies, as do contributors to Life on Mars: From Manchester to New York (Lacey and McElroy 2012), who discuss the series as ‘quality TV’.

^3. Scholars have differently theorized and conceptualized the relationship between masculinity and postfeminism in popular film and television (Modleski 1991, 5–10, 76–89; Projansky 2001, 84–86; Dow 2006). Notwithstanding the particularities of these various formulations of ‘postfeminist masculinity’, they tend to cohere around the notion that attributes formerly perceived as feminine or that disingenuously or superficially present as feminist inhere within and efficaciously inflect masculinities that nonetheless retain their position in the power structure, and thus pose little or no challenge to the gender status quo.

^4. Protagonist Maggie is a working single mother struggling to balance the competing demands of her professional and domestic spheres. Textual nods to this significant precursor to Ashes are in the title sequence, the layout of CID's office and Alex's styling, particularly her first series bubble-curl perm. Similarly, one of the most discussed aspects of Mars is its intertextual relationship to police series from the 1970s, especially The Sweeney (ITV, 1975–1978) and less so The Professionals (ITV, 1977–1983) (Chapman 2009; Nelson 2010; Tincknell 2010; Lacey and McElroy 2012). Mars' 1973 setting predates their broadcast by years but Ashes is set the year after both The Gentle Touch and the BBC's competing series Juliet Bravo (1980–1985) began. This enabled direct references as Alex is patronizingly referred to as ‘our very own Juliet Bravo. Or is it Jill Gascoine. The Gentle Touch’.

^5.Cagney & Lacey's (CBS, 1982–1988) Mary Beth Lacey (Tyne Daly) was the canonical US equivalent.

^6. It transpires that she is undercover as a prostitute, a well-worn scenario in female-led detective television of the period like Charlie's Angels (ABC, 1976–1981).

^7. Alex is constantly drunk throughout the first series. After a short-lived sexual liaison with an East End property developer, she gleefully pulls off a one-night stand with a Thatcherite patron of her local wine bar.

^8. Beth Willis (Producer), DVD commentary, Ashes to Ashes: The Complete Series One.

^9. Jonny Campbell (Director), DVD commentary, Ashes to Ashes: The Complete Series One.

^10. Ashley Pharoah and Matthew Graham (Co-creators), DVD commentary, Ashes to Ashes: The Complete Series Two.

^11. This comprised nostalgia documentaries, archive compilations of 1980s pop performances and new one-off dramas set in the 1980s. Money (BBC, 2010) adapted Martin Amis' 1984 novel satirizing the decade's greedy hedonism; Worried About the Boy (BBC, 2010) was a biopic of pop star Boy George showcasing 1980s excesses of consumption; and Royal Wedding (BBC, 2010) depicted a 1981 street party in a Welsh village about to fall victim to the mass unemployment that Thatcher's policies heralded.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hannah Hamad

Hannah Hamad is Lecturer in Film Studies at King's College London. She is the author of several articles on postfeminism and contemporary media culture, and the monograph Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary US Film: Framing Fatherhood (New York and London: Routledge, 2014).