Oh no, don't say it's true

Given that time-travelling sitcom Ashes To Ashes begins this week, here are five endings, or "solutions", that will certainly be more entertaining, if no less implausible, than the one that actually makes it to screen.

1) All the action turns out to have taken place inside a tiny glass snowstorm held by a small child waiting in a bus queue with her parents who are the spitting image of Gene Hunt and whatshername.

2) Mrs Time Traveller wakes up in a scheduling meeting at BBC Television Centre in 1981 and discovers she has been dreaming about being a police office in the year 2008 sent back to 1981, and the whole thing has taken place in the equivalent time it took Bill Cotton to run through the corporation's plans for televising the Royal Fireworks Party.

3) The entire show has been imagined by John Simm who woke up and decided to pitch an idea to the BBC about a spin-off based wholly on the first David Bowie song that came into his head.

4) In the dying minutes of the final episode, Esther Rantzen turns up with a bunch of pensioners and numerous samples of chocolate soup/onion toothpaste/talking daffodils in tow, and proceeds to unmask Gene Hunt and co as Doc Cox et al, who have been perpetrating a massive and therefore amusing hoax on an entire borough of London.

5) Mrs Time Traveller dictates an account of her travels into a tape recorder and posts the cassette to a doctor friend of hers, who instantly finds himself transported back to 1986 for a show entitled Absolute Beginners.