In Life on Mars, detective Sam Tyler famously found that he did not want to
leave the parallel world into which he had fallen. Its fans felt exactly the
same way, and that was mainly because we wanted more of Tyler's friend,
colleague and foe, the unreconstructable Seventies DCI Gene Hunt. In just 16
hours of television, Hunt had become an icon of political incorrectness, a
truth teller for his time and ours, an object of transgressive female lust
and a legend.
We were granted our wish to see him again, but only in slightly unsatisfactory
ways. The BBC's follow-up, Ashes to Ashes, brought Hunt back but to the
Eighties not the Seventies. In another parallel universe, Life on Mars got
made again, but by the Americans, with Gene the Mean being played by Harvey
Keitel (no less). And now the real Hunt, the iconic Philip Glenister, is
playing an American vampire hunter, for goodness sake, in ITV1's Demons,
starting tomorrow.
Demons may be your sort of thing or it may be your children's. Glenister was
attracted to the series by its working title, The Last Van Helsing, no one
realising that Universal owned the rights to it. He was pleased that ITV was
taking a risk doing something different, not having really clocked Buffy the
Vampire Slayer. But never mind. He is an awfully good Rupert the Vampire
Slayer and has pepped up some of his dialogue with embellishments of his
own, including the odd extra-textual “S**t!” and “You freak!” as in “Do it
now, or I will most surely smite thee, you freak!”
For all that, the repartee isn't in the Life on Mars league, nothing as clever
as: “She's more nervous than a very small nun at a penguin shoot.” And we
miss it. Having interviewed him, I had always blamed Glenister's co-star
John Simm, who played Tyler, for bringing down the curtain on Life on Mars
by refusing to do more. Now I learn Simm would have.
“No, what happened,” says Philip Glenister when we meet at ITV Towers, where
he is publicising Demons, “is that he said to me he did not want to do
another eight-part series. Partly because he was missing his family. We were
commuting from London to Manchester every week and it was hard. You get home
on a Friday night, the kids are in bed, the wife is in bed, you see them on
Saturday morning and then you are off on Sunday. I sort of agreed with him.
And we weren't sure it had the legs for another eight episodes, quite
frankly. Life on Mars had a natural ending: the guy is either going back to
his own time or something else has to happen. But we did offer and John was
up for a big two-part special to finish it off, maybe a Christmas thing, two
90 minutes.”
And they didn't want it! “No, I mean there are two sides to this argument. The
BBC budget for eight one-hours and from their point of view they are not
going to put eight hours' worth of money into two 90 minutes. I imagine that
is how it works.”
It sounds as if the accountants are in charge? “Of course! Of the industry and
the world: accountants and lawyers. Anybody with the purse strings has the
ultimate say. But we were certainly keen and I saw John the other week and
he is up for doing something about Tyler's interim years.”
Was Simm generous about the sequel? “Yes,” he says, and thinks about it. “I
don't think he watched it too closely.” Simm may have simply been
diplomatic. Critics were not convinced that Ashes was a worthy sequel and
Glenister hints that he may partly agree.
“You have got to remember that Life on Mars started off six or seven years ago
so the writers knew where they were going, whereas Ashes came out of left
field and they had six or eight weeks to set it up. So you are going to make
mistakes.”
Like what? “We went quite light-hearted in places with it and I felt we needed
to go back to having a bit more seriousness beneath it, a bit more darkness,
which is kind of what we had on Life on Mars and let the humour come out of
those situations.”
I say I was anxious from the start when Gene Hunt came roaring down the Thames
in a motor launch.
“I was constantly questioning things in the first series. There were things I
was happy about and things that I wasn't. But you are a hired hand at the
end of the day - although I had a say in certain things. I think we looked
at the first series, which seemed to do well, and we talked about what
worked and what didn't and hopefully this series feels more rounded.”
He is contracted to do a third run, but that will be it; he does not want to
get “bogged down” with Gene Hunt. “It will be time to quit.” In America,
meanwhile, for Harvey Keitel being Gene has only just begun. Glenister says
that Keitel rang him for advice. “He said, ‘Philip, you f***ing bastard, how
am I going to play this part? You know you made such a damn f***ing good job
of this, you f***'! And I said, ‘I'm sorry about that'.”
Having been sent a disc of the American pilot, he was gratified to see that it
followed the British version almost shot for shot. It was good, but not as
good as the UK version (“I would say that”) although it pulled one visual
stunt unavailable in Manchester. After the US Sam Tyler is stopped in his
Mustang by the NYPD, Tyler turns his head and exclaims: “Oh, my God!”
“The camera,” Glenister says admiringly, “spins round and there's the twin
towers because they were completed in 1973.”
So the Life on Mars phenomenon goes on - indeed the day before our interview,
the BBC's version wins its second international Emmy - and Glenister remains
indelibly Hunt, even in the minds of producers of other shows. On Demons,
they wanted Rupert to have a drink problem. Glenister resisted: “I had
already played one washed-up alcoholic from Manchester. I didn't want to
play another one from Massachusetts particularly.”
What is obvious is that Glenister off-screen is more unlike Hunt than like
him: shorter, slimmer and younger than he appears on screen, less
pock-marked, although acne got his sex life off to a slow start as a
teenager. Simm even told me that Glenister was “slightly camp”, but that is
going too far. He is 45, married to the actress Beth Goddard (Suze in Gimme,
Gimme, Gimme) and father to Millie, 6, and Charlotte, 4. Dressed today in
jeans and a casual jacket, he looks like a Surrey school-run dad, which is
what he is.
And if you think this is a story of a working-class boy (or boys - his elder
brother Robert is also an actor and plays Ash in Hustle) made good by the
meritocracy of TV you are wrong. While it is true that Philip (unlike
Robert) went to a comp in northwest London, his father, John, directed Z
Cars, Softly Softly and, later, The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Glenister
became an actor after a spell as a production runner and a film publicist.
Amanda Redman, then his brother's wife, encouraged him to go to drama
school. When he left the Central School of Speech and Drama, three agents
offered to represent him, although his career did not take off until he was
spotted by his present agent, Gilly Sanguinetti, in Jonathan Harvey's
Beautiful Thing at the Bush Theatre, London, in 1993. I suggest that his
career's slow burn may have been due to a certain lack in the leading man
looks department. Glenister says that when he left drama school he thinks
that he looked like the hell-raiser Leif Garrett, which seems to please him.
But if Glenister now leaves the hell-raising to Gene Hunt, he has not failed
to capitalise on his alter ego. He had a perfectly good stocking-filler of a
book out this Christmas, Things Ain't What they Used to Be (Sphere £14.99).
It adjudicates in a rather reactionary fashion on the merits of the
Seventies and Eighties. The book's voice is one part Gene Hunt's to two
parts his and, judging by the acknowledgements, is the work of many hands.
But amid such vital questions as whether Curly-Wurlys were once longer,
there are insights too, and these I assume are Glenister's. In a rant
against the internet site Second Life, for instance, he says that it allows
you to be who you want to be only at the expense of discovering who you
actually are. This, he opines, is “a key part of being a grown-up”.
So I ask if he now knows who he is. “I think one is constantly thinking about
it. The older you get the more you start questioning what on earth it is all
about.”
Did he expect to discover that he was the monogamous, family type? “I think
you go through a period of fighting it and thinking, ‘Am I ready for this?'
And I think one of the beauties of that is when you commit to somebody it
relaxes the relationship. That's when you start to move forward together.
It's like anything: it's bloody hard work; it's not plain sailing and if
people think it's going to be, that's maybe why so many marriages bust up.”
He has been surprised recently to find himself more spiritually receptive than
he imagined possible for someone who does not believe in a “bloke called
God”. The vicar at the church where his wife takes the children to Sunday
school asked him to open a new kitchen and lavatory for the disabled and
when he turned up he was captivated by the choral singing.
And politics? “Do I have a faith in politics? I don't have faith in
politicians. I don't know what to make of them these days. There seems to be
no backbone, no substance.” Enthused, like so many, by new Labour's birth,
he now realises that it may prove necessary to pay for his children's
secondary education. He has already told his older daughter that he wants
her to be a lawyer, not an actor. Glenister, I notice, constantly denies his
celebrity. He is a “hired hand”, part of the industry's “plodding backbone”
and has no interest in trying his luck in Hollywood. Yet he is a star.
Recently he was followed for a weekend by a photographer in a van. “There
was something sinister about the whole thing as I had the kids with me, so I
tapped on his window and he put the window down and I said, ‘Why are you
following me?' He said, ‘I'm not.' I said, ‘Come on, you are, and, you
should know if you want to see me falling out of a nightclub you're 20 years
too late, mate'. And he said, ‘How did you know?' And I said, ‘well I play a
f***ing detective'.”
I take it that it has not gone to his head that women I know openly refer to
him as “hot”. “Well, that's the thing though. It's Gene Hunt they fall for,
not me. People keep asking if women throw themselves at me. No, not in Sheen
High Street, they don't.”
But what do they see in the boozy, poxy, violent Hunt? “They like the
political incorrectness,” he says, as if it is obvious.
In the cowardly new world born of the Brand-Ross call to Andrew Sachs, he
wonders if some of his earthier, less PC, improvisations will now ever make
it on air in Demons. He has concluded that the terror of political
correctness is the reason writers like to work on shows set in the recent
past: it allows them to be incorrect. “After all, otherwise we'd all be
gagged. They'd even be gagging Gene Hunt. And that I could never allow.”
Demons begins on ITV1 tomorrow at 7.20pm
