Ashes to Ashes
BBC1, 9pm

TO the joy of lechers - and the distress of feminists - 38 minutes of screen time had elapsed before Keeley Hawes stopped prancing around the much-hyped follow-up to Life On Mars wearing a way-too-short red leather miniskirt, suspenders, lacey-topped black stockings, red stilettos and a loose, cleavage-baring blouse.

Initially, this risque garb identified Ms Hawes's Ashes to Ashes character, Alex Drake, as a prostitute, prompting much raucous sexism from the macho policemen she encountered (having time-travelled from 2008 to a more primitive age, 1981 - do keep up). The chauvinist cops had rescued Alex from a floating Thames brothel, patronised by shiny-suited yuppie males listening to Spandau Ballet on their Walkmans and wearing outsized spectacles. Alex's principal saviour had been Life On Mars's de facto star, the seventies northern throwback DCI Gene Hunt (who could be mistaken for Bernard Manning's non-PC nephew).

Gene's Ashes to Ashes entrance, accompanied by fellow detectives, was a similar triumph of retro kitsch. He skidded his Audi Quattro to a halt, stepped out in snakeskin cowboy boots and trained a giant revolver on the bad-guy posho detaining Alex. "Today, my friend," growled Gene, silhouetted between Alex's splayed legs, "your diary entry will read, Took a prozzie 'ostage and was shot dead by three armed b******s'." Deliberate bad taste: yummy!

In the same studied spirit of camp offensiveness, the makers of Ashes to Ashes were banking on us not to wonder why Alex wore her saucy harlot outfit to work for two full days, with only a man's jacket thrown over it, despite her being the leering policemen's boss, DI Alex Drake, police psychologist.

It was obvious Alex was a police psychologist. She couldn't stop talking to herself out loud about it. Yack, yack, yack. Alex's psychological expertise told her she was suffering a subconscious construct induced by cranial trauma, a full sensory hallucination with lots of recessional forms and fantasy assimilations, wherein the mind fashions a conduit to the real world. Blah, blah, blah. While Alex was spouting irksome gobbets of psychobabble, Gene Hunt was bellowing more urgent and jolly stuff: "Now then, Bollinger-knickers - you gonna punch me or kiss me?"

Gene was pursuing his regular job of taking down a drugs overlord, you see, while Alex had a longer-term conundrum to unravel: how could she stop being the central figure in her own neural nightmare, hovering somewhere between life and death?

Dash it if Ashes to Ashes isn't kinda like two shows in one. It's an old-school cops'n'robbers yarn with a weekly denouement that's been subsumed into an over-arching series-long mystery. Plus, there's a woman in naughty perv-clobber and every so often dream sequences featuring the white-faced pierrot from David Bowie's Ashes to Ashes video. It's Lost meets The Prisoner meets The Avengers meets Carry On Matron! The opening episode also had a comic A-Team-style shoot-out for a climax, with much hot lead being harmlessly exchanged.

As such, Ashes to Ashes doesn't make as much narrative sense as its creators would like us to think. In fact, after another somewhat nonsensical dream sequence that involved the puppets Zippy and Bungle from eighties kids' show Rainbow, I wouldn't bet against another old TV fave cropping up.

I can see it now. Gun-toting Gene bursts in on a middle-aged woman in outsize spectacles, barking an inquiry at her. Softening, she divines a sexual import to his words. Or as Dick Emery's Mandy would have put it: "Ooh, you are awful, Gene - but I like you."