After he wakes up in 1973 he makes his way to the Manchester Police station where he meets DCI Gene Hunt, DC Chris Skelton, DS Ray Carling and WPC Annie Cartwright. He himself is carrying a police warrant with the name 'DI Tyler'.
Sam joins the team, but is constantly working at trying to get back home to his own time.
He falls in love with Annie and forms a bond with Gene Hunt, even if the two clash on many opinions and procedures. Sam begins to become a little more like Gene, while Gene becomes a little more like Sam.
Sam is able to meet with his younger mother and father, Vic Tyler (Played by Lee Ingleby, also plays Bacchus) who vanished when he was a boy.
Characters and Cast[]
DI Sam Tyler - John Simm
DCI Gene Hunt - Philip Glenister
WPC Annie Cartwright - Liz White
DS Ray Carling - Dean Andrews
DC Chris Skelton - Marshall Lancaster
Episodes[]
Series 1[]
Episode
Original Air Date
Viewing Figures
Episode 1
Monday 9 January 2006
5.7 million
After a road accident in 2006, DCI Sam Tyler awakens to find himself in 1973. Apparently a DI and assigned to work under rough-around-the-edges DCI Gene Hunt, Tyler follows a series of murders which have been committed with the same modus operandi in both 2006 and 1973. The clash-of-cultures between Tyler and others relates mainly to the lack of importance placed on forensic science in 1973. WPC Annie Cartwright stops Sam jumping off the top of a building after he convinces himself that suicide will take him back to 2006.
Episode 2
Monday 16 January 2006
An armed robber Kim Trent is brought in with no evidence in a case of a violent robbery from a local bookies, Gene plants false evidence on him. Tyler seeing this as grounds for a false conviction and allows Trent to be released without charge, and the man then goes on to commit a further armed robbery from a jewellers, resulting in June an innocent cleaning woman working in CID being seriously injured. After forensics is messed up by Chris, Sam finds new hope in solving the case with Leonard, a partially deaf street cleaner who saw the robbers without their masks. Sam tries to persuade him to testify by offering him police protection but Gene, Ray and Chris don't take the protection seriously resulting in the lives of Annie and Leonard being at risk.
Episode 3
Monday 23 January 2006
4.8 million
When a man is killed at a textile factory Gene is convinced the culprit is Ted Bannister the union organiser. Gene pushes Ted for a confession which he gives to save the factory from closure. Gene is happy with the confession, but Sam pushes deeper, and discovers he was instead covering up for a fatal accident. Ted's son is found to have been planning a payroll robbery at the same firm and has stolen guns being tracked by DCI Litton. Sam tries to reason with the robbers and lets his guard down only to be saved at the last second by Gene.
Episode 4
Monday 30 January 2006
Sam arrests the henchman of Stephen Warren, a local Mr Big, when he learns the whole of CID are on his payroll. Sam also visits his childhood home to interact with his mother (using name of "Bolan", a reference to the glam rock star Marc Bolan), who was being threatened by the landlord, one of Warren's men. Sam tries to help her by giving her some money and she misunderstands his gesture. When Sam tries to go all out after Warren, he finds himself in a fix when Warren sets him up in a honey trap. The girl involved in the honey trap sees the error of her ways only to be murdered by Warren. Gene disagrees with Ray, who says that if they don't play the game, people get hurt and helps Sam bring down Warren, putting his guilty conscience to rest. Sam also attempts to persuade Gene to swap his Red Rum for Tyler's Proud Percy in the Grand National sweepstakes.
Episode 5
Monday 6 February 2006
A Manchester United fan is murdered and it is widely assumed that the culprit is a Manchester City fan. Sam suggests that he go undercover as a barman at the Trafford Arms pub to try to gain more information, where he is assisted by Gene and Annie. The pub is frequented by a group of Manchester United supporters and it soon becomes apparent that they are planning a confrontation with Manchester City fans at the derby game to be held on the following Saturday.
Episode 6
Monday 13 February 2006
When a handyman in the local newspaper office takes hostages to get his life story published, Sam, Gene and Annie are also captured when Annie attempts to infiltrate the offices disguised as a nurse. The 2pm deadline of the hostage-taker coincides with the time of day in 2006 when Sam's life support machine will be switched off, and Sam is convinced that he must avert one to prevent the other.
Episode 7
Monday 20 February 2006
A young man being held for a minor drugs offence dies in custody at the station while Gene and Sam are out. While Gene tries to protect his team, Sam struggles to conduct a proper investigation into the death. After alienating all his colleagues, he is able to determine that Ray forced him to take cocaine, causing a heart attack, and that the others had been covering it up. Gene furiously demoted Ray to Detective Constable.
Episode 8
Monday 27 February 2006
7 million
Sam encounters his parents Ruth and Vic Tyler in 1973; he believes that if he keeps his father from running away, he will be awoken from his apparent coma. The closer he gets to apprehending his father, the more he hears sounds which indicate he's close to waking up. Gene suspects Vic is deeply involved in crime involving hardcore pornography but Sam thinks otherwise. At the end, Gene reveals Vic is a ruthless gangster. Rather than traumatising his family more by arresting his father, he instead lets him run away. Flashbacks throughout the entire series are revealed to have been from young Sam's memories of this incident that he only now remembers.
Series 2[]
Episode
Original Air Date
Viewing Figures
Episode 1
Tuesday 13 February 2007
Tyler has visions of someone disrupting his life support system in 2006, and encounters who he thinks is the same assailant in 1973, running a gambling syndicate and protection racket. Recognising the man Tony Crane as a killer he failed to stop in the future, Tyler is prepared to go to any lengths to make sure his life is not threatened and the man doesn't kill his original victim. Meanwhile, the department is looking for a new DC, and they can't seem to find the right man for the job. Eventually, Sam chooses who he thinks deserves the promotion for the person's help in solving the case...Annie, who becomes WDC.
Episode 2
Tuesday 13 February 2007 (BBC 4)
On an assignment to return a career safe breaker nicknamed "Dicky Fingers" from prison for further questioning, Tyler, Ray and Chris are attacked by robbers and the man who they were taking in for questioning is broken out. Is a local gangster to blame, or is there more going on than meets the eye...? Meanwhile, Sam tries to break in the first black detective in the department, a man who will later become Sam's mentor when he first joins the police force.
Episode 3
Tuesday 20 February 2007 (BBC 4)
The team receive a bomb warning, claiming the IRA has planted a car bomb in Manchester. Being from 2006, Sam realises the bomb warning reported doesn't fit with his understanding of IRA methods. However, when Sam's modern know-how fails and nearly kills Ray, the rest of the department shun his line of investigation to focus on an Irish socialist group. At the same time, Sam's visions of the future suggest that he may have suffered brain damage, affecting his higher reasoning, from having been in a coma for so long.
Episode 4
Tuesday 13 March 2007
The body of a young woman is found in wasteland. The investigation takes the team to suburbia, where a local car dealer is throwing private parties, employing make-up girls from a local company to “help out” when the wife-swapping begins. Posing as married couple Tony and Cherie Blair, Sam and Annie infiltrate one of the parties, only to discover that it isn't as simple as they think.
Episode 5
Tuesday 20 March 2007
The team investigates the abduction of the wife and daughter of a school teacher, who are being held captive by somebody who wishes the team to release a prisoner arrested for the murder of a schoolgirl a year ago. At the same time, Sam faces a life or death situation in 2007 when he thinks he has accidentally been given an overdose. As the deadline draws closer, Sam collapses into a deeper coma, leaving his colleagues to tackle the mystery on their own (albeit using some of his earlier suggestions).
Episode 6
Tuesday 27 March 2007
As heroin hits the streets of Manchester for the first time, CID and DCI Hunt want culprits for the smuggling, the dealing and ensuing violence, which becomes difficult when Annie is kidnapped by the smugglers. As Sam tries to get to the source of the influx of this deadly drug, he finds himself intractably drawn to a beautiful young woman who was witness to a heroin-related shooting... and who, he later realises, is the mother of his girlfriend in the future. At the same time, Sam's 'visions' reveal that his girlfriend has decided to stop visiting him in hospital, as she can't keep waiting for him to wake up.
Episode 7
Tuesday 3 April 2007
A water-tight court case fails to put away a local gangster. Unable to cope with a guilty man walking free, DCI Hunt turns to alcohol but soon finds himself in a spot of bother. When it appears as though Hunt may have killed someone, it's up to Sam, torn between Gene and his replacement, Frank Morgan a DCI who actually uses Sam's modern police techniques and vocabulary, to help him out.
Episode 8
Tuesday 10 April 2007
Sam learns that an operation is to be conducted on him in 2006 to try to revive him from his coma. However, he believes that to return to the twenty-first century, he has to betray his colleagues in 1973 — can he regard them as real or imagined?
Trivia[]
When Sam leaves hospital you see he was staying in Hyde Ward, room 2612. Hyde is the station that he supposedly transferred from. Hyde 2612 is the number he rings to speak to Frank Morgan.
The surname on the headstones of the graves of Sam's 'parents' is Williams. This was originally to be Sam's surname on the show, but Kudos felt that "Sam Williams" was not striking enough. Co-creator Matthew Graham consulted his daughter and she suggested Tyler after Rose Tyler, from Doctor Who.
In S2EP4 When Sam sits down next to Carol Twilling on the bed, asking "Do things ever get a bit frisky?" the top button of his shirt is undone. The camera cuts away and back, only to find that there are now miraculously two buttons undone, not just one. Sam has not moved in this time.
In S1EP7 DCI Hunt tells Kemble to "Call DI Carling when you're ready to name your source," although at this point Carling was a detective sergeant, not an inspector.
