There is life AFTER Mars for stars of hit time-travel series

The drama series which ended last night - has received the critical plaudits and has been nominated for three Bafta TV awards.

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John Simm, Philip Glenister and Liz White: The stars of acclaimed time-travel TV show Life on Mars. Glenister will return in a spin-off show called Ashes to Ashes

Philip Glenister, who played unreconstructed Seventies copper Gene Hunt in the hit time-travel drama, will repeat his role in a spin-off series, Ashes To Ashes, set in London in the Eighties, the BBC confirmed.

Glenister will appear along Life On Mars co-stars Dean Andrews, who played DS Ray Carling, and Marshall Lancaster, who played Dc Chris Skelton.

In the new series, Hunt swaps his Ford Cortina for an Audi Quattro when he is lured from Manchester by the Met to take on the "southern nancy criminal scum".

In another time-travel twist, a female detective chief inspector, Alex Drake, is mysteriously transported from 2008 to 1981.

Meanwhile, Andrews has also been cast as a union worker in the new series of Jimmy McGovern's BBC drama series The Street, while Lancaster will take a lead role in a new production at York's Theatre Royal.

Glenister, 44, also starts filming this month for a role in a BBC1 period drama co-starring Dame Judi Dench.

He will play a "gentleman reformer" in Cranford Chronicles, a five-part adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's novel about the 19th-century Cheshire town on the cusp of social change.

"It's a bit of a change from a misogynistic Seventies copper to a 19th-century gentleman but I'm looking forward to it," said Glenister.

John Simm, who played Life On Mars's Sam Tyler, the modern-day Manchester policeman who found himself in 1973, will be in the finale of the current series of Doctor Who as the sinister Mr Saxon - who will be revealed as the time lord's arch-enemy The Master.

He is also set to star in a new play at London's Bush Theatre this month.

Simm, 36, will play the lead in Elling, a stage version of the 2001 Oscar-nominated Norwegian film about a would-be poet sent to live in an institution when his mother dies.

Liz White, 28, who played policewoman Annie Cartwright, is enjoying critical success playing a young wife in Dying For It at the Almeida Theatre in Islington.

Millions tuned in for the final episode of Life On Mars, to see Sam Tyler wake from his coma in 2006 - but choose to "return" to 1973 by throwing himself off a building.