Damien Love meets Life on Mars star Philip Glenister

SOMEWHERE out in the suburbs of cyberspace there is a woman who, when she goes online to do certain things, calls herself "Titsinajumper". Like a few million others, Titsinajumper is a fan of the BBC's ground-breaking hit of 2006, Life On Mars, the genre-bending series about the modern-day Manchester policeman Sam Tyler, played by John Simm, who, after being hit by a car, wakes to find himself somehow back in 1973 and working with Salford CID, whose detectives surround him like Neanderthals in Old Spice.

Most of all, Titsinajumper is a fan of Sam's fearsome old-school boss, the chain-smoking, booze-swilling, nonce-beating DCI Gene Hunt. And one of the things she likes to do is write stories about him, then post them on the internet; compositions that climax in blue-purple passages where the name "Gene" alternates with words like "licking", "naked", "grunted", "juices" and "face-up against the mirrored wardrobe door".

She's an extreme example. But Titsinajumper's passion is symptomatic of a wider trend. There's a lot to love about Life On Mars. At its best, the show plays like a pop collision between The Sweeney, Back to the Future, Slaughterhouse Five and a decent I Love the Seventies compilation album. Sam is the protagonist and the question of whether he is truly back in time, in a coma, or simply mad is the central mystery - but it's Gene that has made the series a phenomenon. More precisely, it's the way that the actor Philip Glenister plays him. For many, Glenister, who is 44, was a dimly recognisable figure at best before Life On Mars. But for some, he has been one of British TV's most arresting, least appreciated natural resources for 10 years - at least since he played the awkwardly heroic Captain Dobbin in the BBC's enormously underrated adaptation of Vanity Fair in 1998.

Glenister has all the equipment for the screen, big or small: a magnificent face, with features that manage to be thick and sharp at once, a slightly pock-marked complexion that lends poetic resemblance to Richard Burton and, you notice when you meet him, piercing green eyes. He can do blunt and menacing. He can do noble and Byronic. Most difficult of all, as he demonstrated as Mack, the beleaguered textile factory boss in Paul Abbott's brilliant Clocking Off, he can do ordinary, and make ordinary as surprising as it is in real life.

His preferred mode onscreen, however - a trait shared in their different ways by Gene, Mack, his flinty cop in Abbott's State of Play and his aristocratic Nazi in ITV's Island At War - seems to be irritable. (Glenister, who is married to the actress Beth Goddard, has two daughters, Milly, soon to be five, and Charlotte, two. When I ask him what kind of dad he is, he says, "According to Milly, grumpy.") Even long-term Glenister watchers, however, admit to being taken aback at just how ferociously great he is as Gene. On a basic level, Gene is there to embody attitudes, appetites and slap-happy methods we would like to imagine have been bred out of the British police force, and Britain itself across the past three decades -"Tits in a jumper" delivered in leery appraisal of a female witness is one of his typical throwaway lines.) He could have been a one-note gag, or simply objectionable. Yet the opposite has happened. It tells you all you need know about Glenister's performance that Gene's fanbase stretches from young women hunched over computer keyboards, to real policemen, among whose number he has become something of a cult, his picture pinned to station walls.

As Life On Mars' second, and final, series begins, Glenister is still surprised at how popular his character has become, but it's something he's had time to think about. "What it says is not so much what we got away with back in the Seventies, but more about how nannified we've become," he says. "People look back on the Seventies as though it was this dinosaur age, but I don't think it was. It's just magnified by the fact that people are so obsessed with political correctness now. Gene throws that up. He's just a man of his times, really."

The performance itself reflects this idea; that Gene isn't there simply to characterise a dodgy old mindset we're better off without, but also, more subversively, represents something of value that has been lost. Glenister doesn't steal Life On Mars so much as grab it by the scruff of the neck, lift it off its feet and slam it against the wall. While telling it a Tommy Cooper joke. It's a kind of contemptuous brio practically unseen on the British screen for two decades or more.

Glenister arrives for our meeting in Soho in suitably Gene-like condition. It's early on a bitterly sharp morning as he comes looming in from the street, 6ft frame wrapped against the London cold in a long black overcoat and paisley scarf. The night before he attended the Broadcast awards - a TV industry bash where "speeches go on until f**king midnight" and Life On Mars picked up another award - and is feeling slightly rough. Still reporting for duty, though.

If he looks like Gene, however, he doesn't sound like him. With Life On Mars and Clocking Off, Glenister has become known playing northerners, but he grew up in the south, near Harrow, and has the accent to prove it. "That's one difference between me and Gene," he says, falling gratefully upon a plate of toast. "He's from Manchester and I'm not. We're different in loads of ways. I don't have his balls. I'm not violent.

"We do drive quite similarly, though. But then, I do the driving for Gene. Last year, at home, I was driving through Richmond, and Beth turned and said to me, Look, you're not driving a f**king Cortina in Manchester now, you know. This is SW14.' I sometimes sort of forget."

There are other similarities. Like Gene, who leads investigations with his gut ("Gene doesn't do psychology"), Glenister refuses to get analytical about his work. If pushed, he will reveal some of his sources, but mostly he directs you back to the script. "The character just came off the page. I just knew instinctively how he should be. I can't really say why or how. I don't delve too deeply into it. I'm not that sort of actor.

"My point of reference was football managers. I purposely avoided The Sweeney. My research was watching Match Of The Day from the early Seventies, to see what the crowds looked like. How big the sidies were. Brian Clough was being interviewed. The interviewer asked him what happens when somebody disagrees with him. And he said..."Glenister, who, during our conversation also does a mean Michael Caine, a debatable Sean Connery and a very camp Nazi, breaks into an unnerving Clough impression, "...well, lad. He comes into my office, we have a chat about it for half an hour, he realises I was right all along, and we move on.' And I thought, that's Gene. That and Wyatt Earp. He's a mixture of the western genre, and the First Division genre."

But Brian Clough at the OK Corral doesn't fully explain Gene. As the new series of Life On Mars begins, clues begin drop more rapidly about what has happened to Sam, but we still don't know quite who or what Gene is: a "real" character; or an element of Sam's subconscious, a bellicose Harvey to his surly Jimmy Stewart. How can you instinctively know how to play that?

"You know it's not a f**king science, acting," Glenister says as cheerily as the hour will allow. "You just do it. I hate it when actors talk about acting. It's so boring. Am I part of Sam's subconscious' It's really, honestly, something we never sat around and discussed.

"I find the whole process increasingly strange, the older I get. Here I am in my early 40s, still dressing up and pretending to be somebody else. You think, this is not a grown man's job, this. Sometimes on set, John and I will look at each other like, What the f**k are we doing? This is ridiculous. We're grown men pretending to be f**king Starsky and Hutch. It's pathetic.' That's why actors get such bad press. It's a bit weird. But, f**k it. We're just lazy bastards, really. It's better than work."

Glenister first got the idea that acting might be better than work as a child, but given his family background, took a surprisingly long time to consider it as a career. His brother, Robert, who stars in the BBC's Hustle, is only three years older than him, but began acting professionally a full 10 years before Philip got serious. His father is John Glenister, the prolific television director who, from the Sixties to the late-Nineties, worked on everything from Play For Today to Hetty Wainthrop Investigates and helped create one of the classics of the Seventies with Dennis Potter's Casanova.

When he was a boy, Glenister would sometimes visit his dad at work. "My first memory of it is when he was doing Henry VIII. About 1970. Old 'Enry was out doing a spot of wild boar hunting. I always remember them trying to get this boar to act. And having a very nice lunch. I thought, this is alright. This is quite a nice job. Sometimes, my dad would take me to the BBC at White City. We'd go around the sets. Colditz, you know. You'd go to the green room and see The Two Ronnies having a cup of tea next to Anthony Valentine and Robert Wagner dressed as Nazis, and a sequinned Cilla Black. I remember the smell of the studios, a tweak of magic about it."

He did a little acting in school plays, but the bug was driven out of him by his experience at a comprehensive where "this f**king headmaster was obsessed with Gilbert and Sullivan."

In the late Seventies he would sit in the audience and watch brother Robert on stage with the National Youth Theatre in fiery, punk-influenced plays and feel that something exciting was happening, but the idea of getting up there himself never occurred to him. Still, he was drawn to the edges of showbusiness. In his late teens, he worked as a runner for the semi-mythic music entrepreneur Robert Stigwood, the man who gave the world the Bee Gees and the movies Saturday Night Fever and Grease. He remembers hanging around the offices staring as the likes of Eric Clapton came in. Mostly, he says, "I was a bit of dreamer, no game plan."

He puts his move into acting down to a drunken pub bet. "A mate of mine's girlfriend was in an amateur dramatic group and they were about to start doing a panto. This would have been the mid-Eighties. We had this jokey bet that a couple of us would be in it. And I was the only one that did it. I was the comedy turn in Jack And The Beanstalk. I knocked the scenery over, nearly took out a row of Cubs. But I started becoming a kind of prostitute for local am-dram groups, I kept getting asked if I would do parts, and I enjoyed it. Finally I applied to various drama schools, got into the Central School of Speech and Drama, and then it just went on from there."

Glenister has been working steadily in television for 16 years now. While he refuses to get precious about his work, that shouldn't be mistaken for his not being serious about it. He credits his father's influence for making him always acutely aware of television as a unique medium, rather than something that was just there, in the room.

"I've always thought television has had a rough time," he explains. "But then, it has much more responsibility than film, than theatre, precisely because it is in everybody's front room. Looking at what's been going on with this f**king Big Brother shit, I do think it's being horribly exploited at the moment. It's going for the lowest common denominator, simply because it's just f**king cheap. There's no characters in Big Brother, there's no story to be told by them. A story gets imposed upon them. I'm just not interested in playing that game. It's a sadistic format, and I find it worrying we're happy to make that into entertainment. It's like, let's dunk the witch. It's damaging, because we're creating a nation of f**king morons."

He fears he sees the influence of reality TV feeding back into scripts. "You get sent things now, and the way it's written, everything's given away, there's no ambiguity. The character looks to the other character. There's a twinkle in his eye. Is he thinking that he might have done it...?' They spell out every single little nuance. That drives me f**king mad. Don't tell me my job."

This, of course, contradicts his assertion that he just gets a script and does it. Glenister is protective of Life On Mars precisely because the writing and the concept is bold and different, but he admits to being possessive of Gene to the point he will argue the case with the writers. "For example," he says, "there was some talk this series about, should we meet Mrs Hunt, bring the wife in? And I said, Absolutely no way.'"

Glenister's love for the programme extends to killing it in its prime, as he reveals the decision to finish the show at the end of this series originated in discussions between him and John Simm. "We felt we'd all created something really special, and we just didn't want to get to the stage where people were going, Do you remember Life On Mars when it used to be great?' But I love playing Gene. I've resigned myself to the fact that I'm never going to find another role as good as this."

Not that we've necessarily seen the last of Manchester's finest. There has been tentative, tantalising talk of a Life On Mars spin-off, following the character into the Eighties - Gene with his jacket sleeves rolled up - which, to continue the David Bowie theme, has been given the working title Ashes To Ashes.

Glenister confirms the idea is being discussed, but would rather not say much more. As he considers my own Bowie-inspired alternative for a title ("Boys Keep Swinging? That sounds like a reality show for transvestites"), however, his own suggested preference lets slip a clue about the programme's proposed direction: "London Calling".

For the time being, though, as the final series begins, he would prefer people concentrate on Life On Mars and its "mind-blowing" conclusion. I ask if, since becoming Gene, he finds himself getting recognised more often.

"Well, it's not something I actively seek out," he says. "Beth notices it more than I do. She'll be like, Uh-oh, you're being clocked.' When the show's on, yeah, if you're on an eight-week run, you're going to be clocked a bit."

And how do you handle it?

"Well people are mostly very nice. Touch wood. They come up and say, Love the show,' and that's absolutely fine. Or, you'll be in the shops and someone'll say, I know you. Where do I know you from?' I just say, Well, I shop here a lot.'"

"But I'll tell you what was strange," he adds, looking at the table. "There's this website, which, very sweetly, somebody set up. And they sent me this Christmas card. All these messages from all these women. Dear Gene,' or Dear Philip, Have a lovely Christmas' They'd all signed it. And, I mean, it was all very nice and pleasant, you know, because they know I've got family and stuff.

"But then," he says, looking up perplexed, "there was this one had signed herself Titsinajumper."

Life On Mars begins on Tuesday at 9pm on BBC1