Ashes to Ashes II Episode One on BBC One

The eighties are back, and they've brought their soundtrack with them. It's been so long since Life of Mars and the first Ashes to Ashes season that I'd forgotten how thumpingly good the soundtrack to these shows has always been. Episode one of the second Ashes to Ashes treats us to an early car dash through eighties London with some cracking eighties pop to ease – or punch – us back into the decade after the show's absence. The more incidental music is pretty creepy this week, unlike the upbeat eighties stuff, and part of me hopes that carries on because it just proves that Ashes to Ashes is a teeny bit darker than Life on Mars.

What the team behind both Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes haven't forgotten is that their shows thrive on keeping us guessing and trying piece together the links they dangle in front of us. Half of the charm of Life on Mars was trying to work out if Sam Tyler (John Simm) was mad, in a coma or back in time. That's why it was so solid as a two-season show; any longer and the conceit would have worn thin.

The first episode of the second season jumps right back in with a few things to keep us guessing early on. Having wrapped up the whole issue with Alex Drake's parents in season one, Ashes to Ashes needs a new set of intrigues, and finds them in a medical man with a habit of sending Drake (Keeley Hawes) flowers. Roses, as it happens. He takes quite a shine to her, it seems, and knows she's not a real eighties girl.

So keen does he seem that he goes so far as to kidnap the poor woman and take her to his improvised operating theatre. The rescue effort distracts from the episode's main story, which is all about bent coppers in Soho. That's 'bent' as in corrupt, not as in gay. It seems one of the men paid to clean up the streets has died while indulging in a 'perk of the job'...all very seedy. As we've seen lately in C4's Red Riding, the grassroots of the Police force in the eighties rarely come out looking good, and – again – it seems the rot spreads even beyond the roots of the force.

What Ashes to Ashes has over Life on Mars, is its ability to tackle feminism and gender. It lacks the charm of the coma question, but gains immensely in having sent a woman to the past, instead of another man. In a year when Thatcher was leading the country in arguably our last imperial war and Princess Diana was still on TV screens, Ashes to Ashes has great potential to focus on a fair few modern female role models. This episode has Thatcher, Diana and Princess Margaret, as well as a male stripper to combat the 'objectification of women' it gives us with the Soho clubs. Actually, that stripper scene is pretty funny. Ashes to Ashes can handle its politics with a definite sense of humour, tongue very much in cheek.

There are three things about Ashes to Ashes that make me smile. One: the soundtrack is stupidly good; upbeat and apt, while being catchy and always enhancing what's on screen. Two: each episode's story is littered with moments of Drake thinking about or being reminded of the modern day and the series' final flowering is no doubt being seeded early on. Three (and this is the big one): Gene Hunt. The man is the best justification for eking a little more life out of the Life on Mars concept, and once again he dominates his time on screen. It's an unbelievably good thing to see Philip Glenister back in a good show, after the Cbeebies-does-Torchwood fiasco that was ITV's Demons. The gruff Manc DCI is back, and thank goodness for that.