With Ashes to Ashes currently back on our screens, David Clensy chats to Bath-based Ashley Pharoah, who created the world of DCI Gene Hunt

I t seems a world away from the seedy London streets trod by DCI Gene Hunt, as I drive down mile after mile of single-track road in the countryside around Combe Hay, near Bath.

For the creator of Ashes to Ashes, this rural idyll offers the perfect writer's retreat. His elegant, stone-built house is well off the beaten track, in a tranquil corner of the West Country with views across the valley from his immaculately kept Elizabethan-style knot garden.

His hard-working gardener is just leaving as I arrive and Ashley is busy in his study, already writing the third series of Ashes to Ashes – a fact that preempts the question that's been on my lips all the way here.

So there will definitely be a third series?

"Well, we're certainly hoping so," Ashley explains as he leads the way into the kitchen and starts to fill the kettle.

"Of course, it will require the BBC to commission it, but we're working on the assumption that they will want it. The show certainly seems to be getting good viewing figures for the current run."

For fans of the show, the very fact that there is a third series already taking shape answers many of their questions. So time-travelling DI Alex Drake clearly isn't going to make it home by the end of series two?

"No, we're not finished with her just yet," Ashley admits. "But I think the third series will be the last. You have to know when to draw a successful series to a close, and I think the time will be about right then."

For Ashley, who grew up in Nailsea and attended QEH, the City School, in Bristol, the world of DCI Gene Hunt has become very real over the past decade.

The character, played by Philip Glenister, has become a cult figure following his initial outing in Life on Mars in 2006.

But Ashley and his writing partner Matthew Graham – who lives just down the road in Frome – started writing the series eight years before it was finally commissioned.

"Nobody wanted it for ages," Ashley says. "We were knocked back by the BBC the first time we offered it to them. It came close to being made by Channel 4, but then they chickened out.

"Things changed a lot in those eight years. Back at the end of the 1990s, TV executives weren't ready to make something like Life on Mars. After all, it was a time when Doctor Who was still moth-balled and everything on TV seemed to be fly-on-the-wall documentaries.

"Eventually we went back to the BBC and they finally agreed to make it. But even then we had no idea whether it would be popular.

"I can remember Matthew and I were sitting down to watch the first episode and wondering what we'd created. It seemed like some strange mix of Alice in Wonderland and The Sweeney."

But the show became an almost immediate hit, and characters like the brash, old-style copper DCI Gene Hunt became iconic figures – quickly entering the zeitgeist.

"I can remember the moment when I realised it was becoming part of the national consciousness," Ashley says. "I was listening to the commentary on a cricket match and the broadcaster said 'it's like Life on Mars here today, it's like being back in the Seventies'.

"Then I was watching the news on TV and a policeman from the Met was making a statement saying that the Met wasn't run like Life on Mars anymore.

"All of a sudden this series we'd created had become part of the language." Ashley says his early education at QEH laid a solid foundation for a career in writing.

"I loved being at the school," he says. "It had a brilliant English department and I was lucky enough to have some really inspiring teachers who encouraged my interest in writing.

"It was a great place to be a pupil. I was a day boy, but because there were boarders it felt like a real, old-fashioned school. It was like growing up in the 1950s."

Ashley went on to study English at the University of Sussex in Brighton.

"I started listening to dramas on Radio 4, and I thought I'd have a go at writing one myself.

"To my amazement, a few months later I received a letter from the BBC saying that they wanted to produce my piece, together with a cheque for £300 – which seemed like a massive amount of money for a student in Brighton."

Ashley was hooked, and after his graduation he signed up to a post-graduate script-writing course at the National Film and Television School at Beaconsfield.

His early promise continued to flourish – his graduation film was nominated for a BAFTA. The film, Water's Edge, followed the lives of people living on the Orchard Leigh estate in Frome.

"It was amazing to get the BAFTA nomination," he says. "But it is possible to have too much success too early. At that age I knew that rejection letters existed in theory, but it was only after I graduated and found myself living in London and struggling to get work that I first started to realise just how tough a career I'd chosen."

Ashley eventually got his big break when a fellow graduate of the National Film and Television School, who had become a BBC producer, offered him the chance to write for EastEnders.

"I wrote for EastEnders for three years, and it gave me an excellent grounding. That's where I learnt my craft properly. Writing for any soap opera is very hard work, but you soon realise that if you can write for EastEnders, you can write for anything."

During his 14 years in London he also saw his name appear on the credits of hit shows such as Silent Witness and Casualty.

But it was his friendship with fellow scriptwriter Matthew Graham that gave his career its next big boost.

"I never enjoyed living in London," he explains. "I always wanted to get back to the West Country. In the mid-1990s, I started to realise that with the internet and email, it didn't really matter where I lived. So my partner Morag and I found a place in the middle of Bath.

"It was a few years later, after the birth of my daughter Miranda, that we decided to move out of the centre of Bath to come and find somewhere more peaceful in the countryside. We found this place near Combe Hay, and we love it.

"At about the same time as we were thinking about leaving London, Matthew decided that he wanted a slice of the West Country life for himself, and he found a place near Frome.

"That's when we really started to get to know each other – socially at first, but as our friendship developed, we decided to try our hand at writing together."

Unsurprisingly, the story of Sam Tyler – the policeman who travelled back to the 1970s in Life on Mars – was born over a pint in a pub.

"We were sitting in the bar one day, talking about how great it would have been to have worked as a scriptwriter in the 1970s, when we could have been writing for The Sweeney. "Somehow that developed into wondering what would happen if one of today's police officers was to find himself working in the police force that existed 30 years ago. We realised we were on to something, and we started writing it straight away."

For two series, the country watched with baited breath to see if comatose Sam would "reawaken" back in his own time, only to see their hero die in the last episode.

Despite the perfect cadence of the series close, the BBC wasn't prepared to give up on a series that was a hit with both critics and audiences alike. The Gene Genie wasn't about to be put back in the bottle.

"We had a call asking if we could do another series of Life on Mars, and we said no we couldn't – Sam had clearly been killed at the end of series two.

"Then they came back at us again and implored us to come up with a way to continue the story.

"Matthew and I took the train from Bath to London to meet with BBC executives about it. As the train pulled out of the station we started to wonder what might happen if a police psychiatrist became so heavily involved by Sam's tape-recorded testimony about the world of Gene Hunt, that she might end up being sent there herself. By the time the train had reached Swindon, Ashes to Ashes was born."

Since then, the world of Gene Hunt has developed beyond any of Ashley's expectations.

"It's gone around the world," he says, "which is amazing, because we thought Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes were very British.

"But they've made an American version, set in New York, with Harvey Keitel playing Gene Hunt.

"There's also a Spanish version in production, which is set during Franco's time, and they're talking about making a German version where Sam Tyler wakes up on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall.

"It's strange to see your creation take on a life of its own, and to hand it over to other writers in other countries to see where it will go next."

Last year, Ashley and Matthew unveiled Bonekickers, which followed archaeologists in Bath, and which proved to be an uncharacteristic failure with critics and audiences.

"It's a shame, because I was rather fond of Bonekickers," Ashley says.

"We worked incredibly hard on it and I think it could have worked if things had been a little different.

"It was always meant to be a family show, and we'd imagined it would be aired at teatime. But for some reason the BBC decided to show it at 9pm, which meant we lost children from our audience. It looked out of place that late in the schedule.

"It was also meant to be a comedy, but for some reason, everyone seemed to take it seriously. The idea was to create something epic and ironic, like Indiana Jones, but everyone thought we were being serious, so it came across as ridiculous.

"But, the Americans loved it, and there's an American version in the pipeline, which is set in New England. I think it will go down well over there, and we'll get the chance to fix the things that went wrong on the British version."

The BBC wanted a second UK series, but Ashley and Matthew declined the offer.

"It was just nice to get back to writing Ashes to Ashes," he explains. "When you've been away from Gene Hunt and his people for a while, you start to wonder what they've been up to."

Ashes to Ashes continues on BBC1 on Monday at 9pm.