REMEMBER 1973? It was the year Slade had the Christmas No 1 with Merry Christmas Everybody, Sunderland beat Leeds in the FA Cup Final and the Wombles first appeared on television. Things were very different then. It was the era of the three-day week and measures to curb the national speed limit to 50mph and ending television programming at 10.30pm were introduced in an effort to reduce energy consumption after the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East.

Policing methods were also very different. The Sweeney captured the essence of the Seventies police officer with its macho swagger and scant regard for rules and procedure. These were pre-Police and Criminal Evidence Act days, times when police interviews were seldom taped and improper intimidation and violence were considered by some to be tools of the trade.

This is the world that Detective Inspector Sam Tyler is dropped into, in the compelling BBC One series, Life on Mars. After a near-fatal car accident, Tyler wakes up in 1973. It is a culture shock from his previous life as a cutting-edge 21st-century detective policing the streets of Manchester. Suddenly he finds himself without all the modern tools of police detection, no computers, rudimentary forensic science and knowledge of DNA (it takes two weeks to process a fingerprint on a shoe), and no mobile phones. “Where’s my mobile?” Tyler asks a PC as he staggers out of his car. “Mobile what?” is the reply. Tyler has to adjust and adapt to old-fashioned technologies and etiquettes. “Are you going to beat me up?” one suspect asks. Tyler replies in appropriate 2006 fashion: “Of course not, I am a police officer”, to which the suspect responds: “Well start . . . acting like one then.”

This series hammers home how much things have changed in 30 years in the way the police go about their work. In his book Not for the Faint-Hearted, John Stevens, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, recalls his time in the CID in the early Seventies: “We worked ridiculous hours, and then went drinking: hard drinking was still part of the culture . . . some senior officers deliberately encouraged the drinking to see whether their subordinates could control themselves. Rules were then very loose.”

Life on Mars is conscious of this bigoted, Neanderthal approach to life and the treatment of a WPC by the CID team emphasises the historical feeling of the show.

The “cringe factor” is high and that is reassuring. It seems inconceivable that only 30 years ago sexism in the workplace was an acknowledged feature, the WPC makes no complaint at her humiliation and accepts her treatment as the norm.

Today we are familiar with the police giving press conferences, professionally manipulating public opinion and cultivating positive PR. Thirty years ago media relations probably meant buying the local reporter a pint after work.

Claire Parker, who produced Life on Mars, observes that Tyler “is repulsed by their attitudes to crime-solving; they are racist, sexist, conduct searches without warrants and think fitting someone up is OK as long as they deserve it”.

Parker makes an important point. The ethos of the day — “Well, if they didn’t commit this crime, they’ve committed another, so it is acceptable to stitch them up” — became the bedrock of many miscarriages of justice in the 1970s and the 1980s. Juries then were less inclined to accept that a confession was false, an attitude hinted at by Mr Justice Donaldson (as he then was) in his sentencing of the Guildford Four: “I would not have made a confession but maybe (the defendant) is different to me.”

Significant changes have been brought about as a result of the iniquities of the Seventies. Ludovic Kennedy, in his book Thirty-Six Murders & Two Immoral Earnings, wrote that we should “be grateful for the procedural improvements that have come about since the introduction of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act in 1984, as a result of which there is now a statutory obligation for interrogations of suspects in police stations to be tape-recorded and/or for a duty solicitor to be present . . . one consequence . . . has been that ‘confession’ evidence has all but disappeared”.

Life on Mars (echoing the David Bowie song of the era) is an exciting and original concept from BBC Wales, the same network that brings us Doctor Who and it is perhaps striking that the setting, with today’s sensitivities, seems far more alien than a couple of Daleks in Costa Coffee.

Life on Mars, Monday, 9pm, BBC One

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