With his camel coat, jaw-skimming sideburns and irascible one-liners Philip Glenister has brought the swagger of The Sweeney to the BBC’s retro cop show Life on Mars. Glenister, 43, plays straight-talking detective Gene Hunt, a tough, northern version of Jack Regan, opposite John Simm’s politically correct, modern-day copper. The year is 1973; the police were a force, not a service, and baddies weren’t read their rights, they were told: “You’re nicked.”

::mpu::Perhaps it is a yearning for days before the police went all soft and sociological that accounts for the show’s unexpected popularity. It has been pulling in 7m viewers each Monday and has even made the drab Seventies seem strangely stylish — especially the cars. Ford Capris and Granadas, Austin Allegros and Hillman Hunters all rekindle nostalgia for a bygone world of Gatso-free motoring when we all wanted to drive like they did in The Sweeney, The Professionals and Starsky & Hutch.

As Detective Chief Inspector “I’m all over it” Hunt, Glenister careers through the streets of Manchester in a Ford Cortina Mk III GXL. He insisted on doing some of the stunts himself, throwing the car through corners without the aid of power steering, ABS or airbags.

All very well on set, but his newfound skills didn’t go down too well back home in London’s leafy suburbs. “I’d hate to get back into my car on the weekends because I’d be driving with my missus and she’d say, ‘You’re driving awfully fast dear, can you slow down — you can do it at work but this is Richmond’.”

Glenister is not so different in real life from the gung-ho, street-savvy Hunt. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly and he has a cunning tactic for tackling drivers who get on his nerves.

“If I’m next to an aggressive driver who’s been showing off, I’ve developed my own way of getting back at them. If I point to their wheel — as if to say ‘Jesus, have you seen the problem you’ve got?’ — it puts the seed of doubt in the back of their minds. In 10 minutes’ time you can bet they’ll be pulling over to take a look.”

His love of cars, particularly old ones, is fuelled by a childhood that revolved around television. His father John is a recently retired television director and his brother Robert, also an actor, starred in the BBC drama Hustle. As a child he was obsessed with the stylish cars he saw on TV — Tony Curtis and his red Ferrari Dino 246 alongside Roger Moore’s yellow Aston Martin DBS in The Persuaders. He remembers buying a Dinky toy Jaguar and painting it the same colour as the one driven by Steed in The New Avengers.

He took his test as soon as he could and is still bitter about failing first time. “I had a dickhead of an examiner,” he explains. “He told me to take the next left, so I did and we ended up in a car park. He turned to me and said, ‘This is a car park,’ and I said, ‘I didn’t know if you meant the car park or the next road.’ The bastard failed me for that.” But this was not his only misdemeanour. “I also didn’t handle a roundabout properly,” he admits. “I went over it instead of round it.”

His first car, while at the Central School of Speech and Drama, was a decrepit Mini Clubman with a steering wheel that had to be gripped tightly to stop it veering to the left. A write-off that had been bolted back together, he suspects, and sold to an impoverished student.

After graduation, parts in shows including Bergerac and Heartbeat and a “horrible flop called Frontiers which was supposed to be a new high-tech police show”, allowed him to upgrade to a Peugeot 205 and marked the beginning of a long career playing cops. In 1998 he played the lovelorn Dobbin in the BBC adaptation of Vanity Fair which led to him being cast as the factory boss in the Bafta award-winning series Clocking Off, followed by a role in Calendar Girls, the film starring Helen Mirren and Julie Walters. Life on Mars has sealed his success, with a second series set to begin filming in the spring.

All of which has led Glenister to the much more sensible BMW 330 in middle-management silver parked outside the four-bedroom house he shares with his wife, the actress Beth Goddard, and their daughters Milly, 4, and Charlotte, 1. His friends call it the “pimp-mobile” (although he has yet to add go-faster stripes) and he claims it is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

“It’s a sports car disguised as a saloon,” he says. “I bought it four years ago and it’s the first decent car I’ve ever had. The one drawback is that there’s not enough room in the boot for even a set of golf clubs. But it’s great for long journeys — you don’t notice driver’s fatigue nearly as much in a smooth car like that as when you’re in some old pit.”

Reluctantly, he’s now considering something more family and luggage friendly. “I’m looking at Audis because I think they’re practical but still look good,” he says without much enthusiasm. “One thing’s for sure, I’m never going to drive a 4x4 in London. We won’t be having another child either — I couldn’t stand to drive an MPV.”

Still, it could have all been so much worse. Having decided as a young boy that he rather fancied becoming a milkman (“because you’d have the rest of the day off to play with your toys”), Glenister could have ended up with a milk float.

ON HIS CD CHANGER

I listen to the radio quite a bit, Radios 2 and 4. I’ve just bought the best of Ian Dury and the Blockheads and the best of David Bowie which is good driving music, and filming Life on Mars has taken me back into my old hippie stage, so I’ve found myself buying Paul McCartney’s new album, Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard, and the Rolling Stones, A Bigger Bang

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