Have I failed to notice something critical with "Life on Mars"?
Yes. What planet are you on?
8(17.0%)
Yes. Buy the DVD immediately!
7(14.9%)
Not really, it's overrated and the SF elements are crap
7(14.9%)
Not as good as Veronica Mars
0(0.0%)
Isn't that a song by David Bowie?
16(34.0%)
What would I miss most if I woke up in 1973?
Mobile phone
3(5.8%)
iPod
0(0.0%)
Internet
37(71.2%)
Remote controls
3(5.8%)
Nintendo
0(0.0%)
Sudoku
1(1.9%)
Photoshop
5(9.6%)
LiveJournal
3(5.8%)
Tony Blair
0(0.0%)
Clicky thing?
Clackers
20(43.5%)
Conkers
11(23.9%)
Clickwheel
15(32.6%)
I figure the one thing you could find no reasonable subtitute for in 1973 and that would drive you bananas is Photoshop! You can do stuff in photoshop now, that a really gifted graphic designer / artist would be hard pushed to manage in ten times the time in 1973.
My problem is that it is a bad 70s cop show (I like 70s cop shows) and that neither the 70s nor the 2000s cops are believeable as cops.
Also it was done far, far better in the (SFnal) one off play The Black and Blue Lamp on BBC2, which saw the van carrying the crook who shot George Dixon in The Blue Lamp to Dock Green crash, and be catapulted into an imaginary 1990s TV series called The Filth (and it was worth the licence fee for the credit sequence of The Filth alone.) Interestingly, this had the exact opposite premise of Life on Mars which is that all modern cops are politically correct and non-corrupt, and all the 70s cops are the opposite. Only in TB&BL this was meant to be how cops were viewed through the eye of the camera, while in Life on Mars this is, apparently, meant to be how real cops are/were. Ah, me.
My iPod-a-like-but-better would push the Internet pretty close. I'd have to hear other people on the train - shudder!