Ashes to Ashes: My journey to 1981 in an Audi Quattro

As the incorrigible Gene Hunt returns to our screens tonight, Neil Tweedie spends a day as the DCI

The Human League is doing battle with the five cylinders under the bonnet of our Audi Quattro. Erin, my fellow time-traveller, is applying a pencil-load of eyeliner, having scrunched up her hair and painted on a pair of circulation-stopping jeans.

It's a fit-up, Guv: time-travellers Neil Tweedie and Erin Baker (left) as Gene Hunt and DCI Drake (right)

"Get around town, get around town..." blasts the Blaupunkt cassette radio. Clank go the buttons on the austere dashboard. Clunk goes the heavy gearbox. All is straight lines and minimalist Teutonic grey. The turbo kicks in and we're off, back to 1981, the year when Britain learned the meaning of "Vorsprung durch Technik". Or, rather, didn't.

Eeeeeeeh, it were great in 1981. There were still coal miners (though not for much longer) and a few other people had jobs as well - in a strange thing called British Industry. Mrs Thatcher, halfway through her first term, was not terribly popular but a group of islands far away in the South Atlantic would be the scene of her salvation the following year. There was Bucks Fizz and The Birdie Song and street parties marking the wedding that July of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer. So enraptured were the people of Toxteth with the approaching royal union that they burned down a bit of their high street in celebration.

The memories will come thick and fast tonight when BBC1 airs the first episode of Ashes to Ashes, sequel to the Bafta and Emmy-winning Life on Mars.

The original series, fans will recall, mixed sci-fi with police drama by plunging a CID officer called Sam Tyler into a coma and catapulting him back in time from 2006 to 1973. There he worked for the wonderfully unreconstructed DCI Gene Hunt, played by Philip Glenister.

What Life On Mars did for kipper ties, camel coats and fudge-coloured Cortinas, Ashes To Ashes promises to do for the early Eighties. In the new series, Hunt has traded in his old saloon for a sunset-red Quattro and has been given a new sidekick in the shapely shape of DCI Alex Drake, who has experienced similar problems with her space-time continuum. She has managed to get herself shot in the head or something in 2008 and sent back to 1981.

In between Tyler's departure and Drake's arrival, Hunt has transferred from Manchester to London. He's a smaller fish in a bigger pond but just as much of a dinosaur: unapologetically sexist, homophobic and disable-ist. He may have swapped his Brut for Ralph Lauren's Polo, and his Double Diamond for Harp, but one can't imagine him referring to female underlings as anything other than "Flash Knickers"; or not ordering a woman Detective Constable to "go and detect me a packet of Garibaldis".

And presumably he'll meet any expression of male sensitivity with the standard "you great, soft, sissy, girlie, nancy, French bender, Man United-supporting poof".

A reassuring trailer suggests Hunt has no time for either of the two PCs, the merits of Political Correctness and the Personal Computer eluding him both. When Drake switches on Hunt's garden shed-sized desktop, she finds nothing stored on it except his name and a copy of Pong, the two-dimensional tennis game that allowed you to make a cup of tea in between service and return.

Anyway, back to the Quattro. Erin has switched cassettes and we're listening to Antmusic. She paints a line of Tipp-Ex across my face and produces two cans of Colt 45, bought mid-morning in deference to 1981 off-licensing hours. The Human League may have got around town but we're not, what with the speed bumps, the ever-present cameras and the 20mph zones. Gene Hunt and the Audi Quattro weren't built for the dull, risk-averse, passive-aggressive, rule-obsessed Britain of 2008.

Erin's smoking a fag. "Gis us one, Flash Knickers," I ask. Her reply consists of two words. Don't think she'd get me a Garibaldi.

The world outside is an alien place: there is not a Ford Escort XR3 or a New Romantic in sight. Where are all those preening, narcissistic dandies in their pixie boots with droopy fringes? And the wine bars; and girls in leggings; with shoulder pads; and the pencil-thin ties; and people playing with a Rubik's Cube? And Sloanes: where are they? Sorry - they have not been invented yet (The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook wasn't published until 1982).

And what are these strange letter Cs painted on the road? And why are groups of men and women standing around outside pubs smoking in the open air when they should be inside playing Space Invaders? And why is that man sitting in his car next to us at the traffic lights talking to himself while a light blinks on and off in his ear?

Ultravox is playing now - Vienna, kept off the Number One slot by Joe Dolce's Shaddap You Face. Wish he had.

Finally, we hit the open road. The Quattro is a monster when it gets going. People thought it boxy, and even a little porky, when it arrived from Germany, but then it started winning rallies and the scales fell from its admirers' eyes. It has a tendency to under-steer and the turbo takes what seems like an age to spin, but then the 220 horsepower arrives and in less than six seconds you're up to 60mph. Top speed: just over 140mph. The four-wheel drive, such a rarity then, provides lots of grip.

Quattros in good condition are going to cost a lot more because of Ashes To Ashes. The last of the 11,500 built rolled off the production line at the end of the Eighties. Models built 25 years or more ago are now regarded as classics, and one in mint condition commands an asking price of around £10,000. That figure is expected to rise substantially because of the Gene Hunt effect.

Erin's getting bored in the passenger seat and wants to have a drive. A woman? At the wheel of a Quattro? She'll be expecting me to make the tea next. Where's my Garibaldi?

ACCEPTABLE IN THE EIGHTIES

The world according to DCI Gene Hunt

"I don't usually let prozzies into my office - unless I'm having a party"

On women coppers: "They should be a cross between Betty Turpin and the HMS Ark Royal"

To his female sidekick, DI Alex Drake: "If that skirt was any higher, I'd see what you had for breakfast"

"Fire up the Quattro! Take the seatbelt off! You're a police officer, not a bloody vicar."

In a room full of grey plastic: "It's like Tomorrow's World, innit?"

To a crook fixed in his gun-sight: "Today, my friend, your diary entry will read: took a prozzie hostage and was shot by three armed b*******s."

To a drug baron with a phone card: "Flash git."

His first words to Alex when she calls out his name… and then faints: "My reputation precedes me."

To his team: "If anyone laughs I will attach jump leads to their genitalia. The Special Branch are as nervous as a virgin in a brothel."