'You are where you are, Sam - you've got to make the best of it!': Re-imagining, renegotiating and re-evaluating memories of the early 1970s in BBC's Life on Mars

The BBC's groundbreaking 2006 time-travelling police drama Life on Mars, set in a vivid visual re-imagining of early 1970s Manchester, explores and interrogates memories of collective and individual pasts through the experiences of present-day policeman DCI Sam Tyler. Sam has a car accident in the course of duty and wakes to find himself back in 1973. Unsure as to whether he is mad, in a coma or really back in time, he faces a life and death struggle to battle his way back to his own future. The series offers an audience the immediate visual and cultural pleasures of a re-imagined 1970s. It also offers Sam's particular personal narrative of this time, in which he is forced to re-examine and make sense of his own individual past. This article considers the way in which the series allows the audience to re-explore political, social and cultural elements of an early 1970s Britain, at the same time making comparison, through the consciousness of Sam Tyler, with his and their world of early twenty-first-century Britain. It also looks at the ways in which Sam makes his personal journey of rediscovery and re-evaluates fundamental beliefs about himself and his identity. It concludes with an examination of Sam's decision, in the last episode, to return to the 1970s - a leap of faith or a surrender to the self-imagined world of his own consciousness?