Ashley Pharoah and Matthew Graham

Matthew Graham and Ashley Pharoah met while working as writers on EastEnders. They developed Life On Mars with Tony Jordan, and went on to set up their own production company, Monastic Productions. They are the creators of Ashes to Ashes and new BBC drama Bonekickers.

You can read scripts for the first episodes of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes in our TV Drama Script Archive.

When did you make the decision to take Gene Hunt into another era?

Ashley: It was towards the end of Life on Mars. We knew Life on Mars had to end for various reasons, the most important one being that John Simm wasn't going to do any more. So it was time to move on. And it was the BBC who phoned and asked for more - we loved Life On Mars so much that we didn't want to spoil the memory of it. But being writers, we sat in a pub and thought: "Why can't we do that? It would be a challenge." And that was it really.

We basically went away for two days with Jane Featherstone at Kudos, and a development person called Beth Willis who ended up producing the show. And we said: Look, if after two days we're still struggling to find something that excites us then we're not going to do it. But after about two hours...

Matthew: It was about two minutes...

Ashley: We just started to get excited about it again. And so we said we must do something at the end of Life on Mars before we come to the end of filming, so that it doesn't feel totally arbitrary. So we seeded a scene into the last episode where John Simm records everything that had happened to him onto a DAT tape that's given to a police psychologist. We didn't know whether that psychologist was going to be a man or a woman at that point, so rather than be a hostage to fortune we just made it a generic police psychologist, and then we thought at least we've put something in there that could hopefully segue a little bit into Ashes to Ashes.

So that was the start of it, which then spiralled into a bigger conversation about where we could take the universe. So we started talking about what we call our three-year plan, which is if all things being equal and we run Ashes to Ashes into series three, we'll actually unveil a bigger mystery and a bigger plan, and ultimately reveal a lot more about the characters.

Matthew: The main thing about Ashes to Ashes in series one is that we made it about what the clown represented, what the clown was, because we wanted to play with the idea that the audience knew exactly what was going on, so we thought let's have a character who, like the audience, knows what's happening.

And then the next stage of the three-year plan is to undermine that, so that you realise you don't know what's going on and nor does Alex. So it was a bit of a gamble but we thought we'd get away with that a little bit in the first series and we wanted to establish a different tone.

What changes did you make to the characters when you put them in another era?

Ashley: The strange thing about that gang is that we don't know much about them, because they're not conventional characters, they're in someone's imagination. We decided very early on we weren't going to age them, but at the same time this series was about re-establishing. It was enough I think to have moved it to 81.

There's not a lot different in it, and that was intentional. But that doesn't mean that there won't be, or that we don't have plans to do that. We do have plans for them, we just didn't want to do it all in one go. Because the other thing about it was that we tried to make Ashes to Ashes a little bit as though no-one had seen Life on Mars. It was for a new audience, and there has been a new audience who didn't watch Life on Mars who came to this show. So we wanted to kind of re-establish it in everybody's mind before we started to do the wonderful, horrible things we've planned.

How do you write for an icon like Gene Hunt?

Matthew: One of the things other writers found very hard when they came on initially was they became very self-conscious about writing for Gene. And so in early versions the script would often be Gene endlessly just saying shut up all the time. Someone would say "Morning Guv", "Shut up". "Can I get you a cup of tea?" "You can take that cup of tea and shove it up your arse."

But the man's not insane, he's witty. And they would take a while to find the balance. We don't always get the balance right - you can't, I think, with a character like that. It's so tempting to make every line a gag, that you can actually end up undermining the character.

What we've always tried to say to people and to ourselves is: don't write an iconic character. He's a borderline Cro-Magnon man, but he has a strong sense of justice, and he's very smart but doesn't know it. There are a lot of people like that, so write him as a person. Find the reality within the show.

That's the thing about drama anyway, whatever you create. The Street is ostensibly real - but it isn't. The stories are real, but it's set in a street where a rapist lives next door to a murderer who lives next door to a guy who's dodging the dole, so in other words it's heightened reality. And that's good. So what you have to do is find the reality.

Jimmy McGovern had to find the reality in that show, and we have to find the reality in Mars. And if you produce Star Trek, you have to find the reality of Star Trek. The principle of setting up rules doesn't change, no matter what show you're creating. You have to establish your characters, establish your world, and give your world rules.

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