The Scotsman - 26th March 2010
If you're not already an aficionado of BBC1′s time-travelling cop show Ashes to Ashes – and if not, why not? – here is a swift catch-up service.
It is 1983. After accidentally shooting his colleague, Alex Drake (played by Keeley Hawes), a very PC PC who has been transported back in time from the present day, the defiantly unreconstructed dinosaur DCI Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister) has been on the run abroad – “the Isle of Wight”.
But tired of being on the lam – “I thought, ‘Why am I running? Gene Hunt doesn’t run!’” – he’s returned to tough it out at an internal inquiry and zap his team with more hilariously politically incorrect one-liners. Soon after coming back to head the CID once more, Gene is horrified by his subordinate’s dress sense: “Ray, if you come in here again dressed like a maths teacher, I’ll paint your balls the colour of hazelnuts and inform a bag of squirrels that winter’s coming.”
Later, he is equally exasperated by a colleague’s inability to locate a suspect: “We’re looking for a bloke who’s done time. That narrows it down to most of planet Earth and the whole of Sunderland.”
Welcome back, Gene. It hasn’t been the same without you.
Gene is pounding the mean streets of London for one last time in the third and final series of Ashes to Ashes. The drama comes to an explosive climax as Gene is investigated by a zealous Discipline and Complaints officer, Jim Keats (Daniel Mays), and we finally discover why Alex has been catapulted back to the 1980s.
Today we are on set at the disused biscuit factory in South London that doubles as the CID squad room, to bid farewell before Ashes to Ashes is thrown on the funeral pyre once and for all. The first thing we see is – appropriately enough – Gene’s trademark snakeskin cowboy boots. These symbols of his unquestioning machismo occupy pride of place, standing unchallenged in the middle of Glenister’s dressing room. Noticing us eyeing up his prized possessions, the actor jokes: “they’ll be on eBay by Christmas!”
By any objective yardstick, Gene should be perceived as a monster, a racist, sexist homophobic brute more likely to introduce himself to a suspect with his fists than with his rights. But against all odds, Gene has become one of the best-loved characters on TV – to underline the point, he was used in M&S’s ad campaign at Christmas. Since he first swaggered on to our screens in the debut series of Life of Mars four years ago and pinned the right-on modern-day detective Sam Tyler (John Simm) against a wall with the immortal line – “I’m Gene Hunt, your DCI. It’s 1973, almost dinnertime, and I’m having hoops!” – the nation has taken him to its heart. You can now join The Gene Hunt Appreciation Society – where fans debate his best-ever one-liners (is it “He’s got fingers in more pies than a leper on a cookery course” or “He’s more nervous than a very small nun on a penguin shoot”) – and buy T-shirts bearing the slogan: “I’m having hoops!” I’m sure if Gene stood in the forthcoming general election, he’d win by a landslide.
Reclining in a chair in his dressing room, Glenister considers just why his alter ego is so widely adored. “Yes, he can be brutal and a shit and can go too far,” concedes the 47-year-old, who is married to fellow actor Beth Goddard and has two young daughters. “But he’s a fully rounded character, a human being. He’s three-dimensional and from the start as Gene I’ve been able to play the full range of emotions: humour, hardness, pathos, loneliness.”
Is Glenister at all like his alter ego in real life, then? “No! There’s only one Gene Hunt in our house, and it ain’t me!,” he smiles. “I get fourth billing. I have a wife and two daughters, so I’m way down the list of priorities. I get much better treated here…my wife will kill me for saying that!”
Gene also gives us a rare frisson; he lives his life in an uninhibited, devil-may-care manner that we, in our Health and Safety-obsessed culture, can only dream of. According to Mays: “Gene represents someone who doesn’t give a shit – he simply tells it like it is. We live in such a regimented world, where you can’t move without getting three points on your licence. Everything’s so by-the-book nowadays.
“We’d all love to go through our lives in the same carefree way of Gene – get wrecked, go to work the next day with a massive hangover and stuff the consequences. Gene says the sort of things we’d love to, but can’t. That’s why we adore him.”
Even more surprisingly, Gene has set female pulses racing to an alarming degree. “So many women have said to me, ‘Gene’s so sexy,’” continues Mays. Appealingly, Glenister – who has also starred in Cranford, Calendar Girls, Clocking Off and State of Play – dismisses his status as a heartthrob with a joke: “I’m so used to being a sex symbol now, I’m throwing women off me all the time on the Upper Richmond Road!
“I don’t think anything of it. It’s something made up by the media. I didn’t go out there and say, ‘Right, I’ve decided to be a heart throb at the age of 47.’”
Despite Gene’s smouldering attraction for the rest of the world, he has yet to charm Alex into bed. But Glenister thinks it right that Gene and Alex never get it on. “They’re like a married couple, but without the sex. Romance is always simmering in the background – obviously, there is chemistry between them – but if you show too much of that, you don’t have a series. If they kiss, then there’s nowhere else to go. It was the same with Moonlighting – as soon as they got together, they didn’t have a series. You have to string the audience along. There is still an element of ‘will they, won’t they?’ and jealousy of other people. We try to keep that sexual frustration going. But if it was just a case of ‘man, woman, third series, they kiss’, that would just be boring. And the idea of kissing Keeley – nightmare!”
Despite the show’s success, the cast of Ashes to Ashes believes it’s right to bring the show to a close now and leave ‘em wanting more. “This is the right time to end the series,” reflects Hawes, 34, who has also had leading roles in Spooks, Tipping the Velvet and The Canterbury Tales. “People want answers now. It’s better to go out while they are still vaguely interested!” Glenister, too, thinks that it is right to go out at the top. “There’ll be a huge hole in my life without Gene – I’ll miss him hugely. But the last thing you want to do is carry on till season ten and run out of steam.”
So is he worried now about being forever typecast as Gene? “No, I’m comfortable with the notion that Gene Hunt might define my career. I’m not one of those actors who says, ‘Oh my God, I’m so much more than that!’ There is nothing I can do about it, anyway. Either you can sulk and say, ‘It’s not fair, everyone thinks I’m Gene Hunt,’ or you can look on the positive side and say, ‘Look what Gene Hunt has done for my career.’”
Glenister goes on to reveal his next move, now that he has hung up Gene’s cowboy boots. “I’m doing a film with Uma Thurman, Robert Pattinson and Kristin Scott Thomas called Bel Ami.” Unable to resist one last gag, the actor deadpans: “That’s right. I’m finally giving my David Bellamy. I’m going to grow a beard and get Keeley Hawes to play Bill Oddie!” The spirit of Gene Hunt clearly lives on.
It is 1983. After accidentally shooting his colleague, Alex Drake (played by Keeley Hawes), a very PC PC who has been transported back in time from the present day, the defiantly unreconstructed dinosaur DCI Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister) has been on the run abroad – “the Isle of Wight”.
But tired of being on the lam – “I thought, ‘Why am I running? Gene Hunt doesn’t run!’” – he’s returned to tough it out at an internal inquiry and zap his team with more hilariously politically incorrect one-liners. Soon after coming back to head the CID once more, Gene is horrified by his subordinate’s dress sense: “Ray, if you come in here again dressed like a maths teacher, I’ll paint your balls the colour of hazelnuts and inform a bag of squirrels that winter’s coming.”
Later, he is equally exasperated by a colleague’s inability to locate a suspect: “We’re looking for a bloke who’s done time. That narrows it down to most of planet Earth and the whole of Sunderland.”
Welcome back, Gene. It hasn’t been the same without you.
Gene is pounding the mean streets of London for one last time in the third and final series of Ashes to Ashes. The drama comes to an explosive climax as Gene is investigated by a zealous Discipline and Complaints officer, Jim Keats (Daniel Mays), and we finally discover why Alex has been catapulted back to the 1980s.
Today we are on set at the disused biscuit factory in South London that doubles as the CID squad room, to bid farewell before Ashes to Ashes is thrown on the funeral pyre once and for all. The first thing we see is – appropriately enough – Gene’s trademark snakeskin cowboy boots. These symbols of his unquestioning machismo occupy pride of place, standing unchallenged in the middle of Glenister’s dressing room. Noticing us eyeing up his prized possessions, the actor jokes: “they’ll be on eBay by Christmas!”
By any objective yardstick, Gene should be perceived as a monster, a racist, sexist homophobic brute more likely to introduce himself to a suspect with his fists than with his rights. But against all odds, Gene has become one of the best-loved characters on TV – to underline the point, he was used in M&S’s ad campaign at Christmas. Since he first swaggered on to our screens in the debut series of Life of Mars four years ago and pinned the right-on modern-day detective Sam Tyler (John Simm) against a wall with the immortal line – “I’m Gene Hunt, your DCI. It’s 1973, almost dinnertime, and I’m having hoops!” – the nation has taken him to its heart. You can now join The Gene Hunt Appreciation Society – where fans debate his best-ever one-liners (is it “He’s got fingers in more pies than a leper on a cookery course” or “He’s more nervous than a very small nun on a penguin shoot”) – and buy T-shirts bearing the slogan: “I’m having hoops!” I’m sure if Gene stood in the forthcoming general election, he’d win by a landslide.
Reclining in a chair in his dressing room, Glenister considers just why his alter ego is so widely adored. “Yes, he can be brutal and a shit and can go too far,” concedes the 47-year-old, who is married to fellow actor Beth Goddard and has two young daughters. “But he’s a fully rounded character, a human being. He’s three-dimensional and from the start as Gene I’ve been able to play the full range of emotions: humour, hardness, pathos, loneliness.”
Is Glenister at all like his alter ego in real life, then? “No! There’s only one Gene Hunt in our house, and it ain’t me!,” he smiles. “I get fourth billing. I have a wife and two daughters, so I’m way down the list of priorities. I get much better treated here…my wife will kill me for saying that!”
Gene also gives us a rare frisson; he lives his life in an uninhibited, devil-may-care manner that we, in our Health and Safety-obsessed culture, can only dream of. According to Mays: “Gene represents someone who doesn’t give a shit – he simply tells it like it is. We live in such a regimented world, where you can’t move without getting three points on your licence. Everything’s so by-the-book nowadays.
“We’d all love to go through our lives in the same carefree way of Gene – get wrecked, go to work the next day with a massive hangover and stuff the consequences. Gene says the sort of things we’d love to, but can’t. That’s why we adore him.”
Even more surprisingly, Gene has set female pulses racing to an alarming degree. “So many women have said to me, ‘Gene’s so sexy,’” continues Mays. Appealingly, Glenister – who has also starred in Cranford, Calendar Girls, Clocking Off and State of Play – dismisses his status as a heartthrob with a joke: “I’m so used to being a sex symbol now, I’m throwing women off me all the time on the Upper Richmond Road!
“I don’t think anything of it. It’s something made up by the media. I didn’t go out there and say, ‘Right, I’ve decided to be a heart throb at the age of 47.’”
Despite Gene’s smouldering attraction for the rest of the world, he has yet to charm Alex into bed. But Glenister thinks it right that Gene and Alex never get it on. “They’re like a married couple, but without the sex. Romance is always simmering in the background – obviously, there is chemistry between them – but if you show too much of that, you don’t have a series. If they kiss, then there’s nowhere else to go. It was the same with Moonlighting – as soon as they got together, they didn’t have a series. You have to string the audience along. There is still an element of ‘will they, won’t they?’ and jealousy of other people. We try to keep that sexual frustration going. But if it was just a case of ‘man, woman, third series, they kiss’, that would just be boring. And the idea of kissing Keeley – nightmare!”
Despite the show’s success, the cast of Ashes to Ashes believes it’s right to bring the show to a close now and leave ‘em wanting more. “This is the right time to end the series,” reflects Hawes, 34, who has also had leading roles in Spooks, Tipping the Velvet and The Canterbury Tales. “People want answers now. It’s better to go out while they are still vaguely interested!” Glenister, too, thinks that it is right to go out at the top. “There’ll be a huge hole in my life without Gene – I’ll miss him hugely. But the last thing you want to do is carry on till season ten and run out of steam.”
So is he worried now about being forever typecast as Gene? “No, I’m comfortable with the notion that Gene Hunt might define my career. I’m not one of those actors who says, ‘Oh my God, I’m so much more than that!’ There is nothing I can do about it, anyway. Either you can sulk and say, ‘It’s not fair, everyone thinks I’m Gene Hunt,’ or you can look on the positive side and say, ‘Look what Gene Hunt has done for my career.’”
Glenister goes on to reveal his next move, now that he has hung up Gene’s cowboy boots. “I’m doing a film with Uma Thurman, Robert Pattinson and Kristin Scott Thomas called Bel Ami.” Unable to resist one last gag, the actor deadpans: “That’s right. I’m finally giving my David Bellamy. I’m going to grow a beard and get Keeley Hawes to play Bill Oddie!” The spirit of Gene Hunt clearly lives on.
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