KEY POINTS:
You heard it here first: I have - cue drum roll - discovered the ultimate dream of geeks everywhere. Yes, I've stumbled on time travel!
Alright, I haven't actually stumbled on time travel. What I've discovered is how to travel in time. No need to wait for some
pointy head at MIT to invent it, or for Steve Jobs to make it small and put a little apple on it. All you need to do is, erm, well turn your old telly on, because the box in the corner of your living room is just the thing for taking risk-free (and carbon neutral!) trips back and forward in time to whenever and wherever you like.
Want a quick blat back to the Renaissance? Tune into the new series of The Tudors on TV One on Sunday nights. Want to make a great leap forward? Watch Star Trek Voyager on Sunday mornings on Prime. And, if you're keen to relive WWII, battle by tedious battle, turn on the History Channel at any time, on any day, all year around, though you'll have to put up with it being in black and white.
All this (admitted utter nonsense) occurred to me as I sat through two shows - one returning, one new - that make rather a meal of being set some time other that now.
Life On Mars (TV One, 8.30 pm, Mondays), which returns for its not-quite-as-good second season, operates under the conceit that 21st century copper Sam Tyler has been hit by a car and has woken up to find him in 1973 and he's working for a "guv'nor" who says things like "Don't move, you're surrounded by armed bastards". Yes, he appears to have landed in The Sweeney.
Prime's new flagship show Mad Men meanwhile isn't so much about time travel as about transporting us back to another time, in this case to a 1960s New York where Madison Ave advertising creatives quaffed a couple of Tom Collins for dinner, glugged an Alka-Seltzer for breakfast, nibbled on shrimp in meetings and smoked Lucky Strikes pretty much all of the time.
The thrill of these shows has rather less to do with the fact they're (mostly) well-written, nicely shot dramas that deliver snappy, witty one-liners every five minutes or so. My feeling is the greater attraction lies in them being set in times that are far less PC than the damp moist towel we live in now.
Indeed the bits in Life on Mars devoted to the mystery of why Sam is where he is, are far, far less pleasurable than the sheer bloody genius of his guv'nor, DCI Gene Hunt (played with force, affection and great humour by Philip Glenister). Hunt is a hard-drinking, hard-smoking Neanderthal. And he's as funny as a fit nearly every time he opens his mouth.
Gene: "Are you on strike? Get your hands off your ding-a-ling, we've had another shout."
Sam: "Well seeing how you broke my door down, I take it, it's big?"
Gene: "Like Shelley Winters' arse!"
Mad Men, while rather less vulgar, is, at first glance, a morality tale, and one which might develop into a must-see. However during last Sunday's first episode I found myself far more taken by the glossy, pristine recreation of 60s New York and, dare I say it, the ironic sexism. The scene where one secretary at the advertising agency, Joan, was showing a new girl, Peggy, around the office was typical.
"Now try not to be overwhelmed by all this technology," said Joan, as she pulled a cover off a desk to reveal an electric typewriter, a phone and an intercom. "It looks complicated but the men who designed it made it simple enough for a woman to use."
How I laughed. Guiltily.
Maybe that's the best bit about time travel using the box: you get to indulge your inner Neanderthal. And then you turn it off.