ABSTRACT
The affect of nostalgia, its emotional and psychological pull, has been a powerful component of the success of the soundtrack movie. The use of an already familiar selection of vintage songs to evoke the past is the hallmark of the nostalgia film, a genre which was itself initiated in the very year Life On Mars re-visits 1973, by the release of Francis Ford Coppola's American Graffiti. Narratively, Life On Mars is dominated by its police procedural structure, including the setting up of a crime to be solved each week as the series progresses. James Chapman points out that while Life On Mars draws on a more cinematic aesthetic than is traditional in British television, including fast-paced action-centred filming, it retains the social issue-driven storylines of popular realism, especially those found in the cop show. The affective power of music may therefore occasionally destabilise narrative structure and meaning, but it also disrupts the progressive intentionality of British televisual social realism.
