Star Cops (1987)

By the year 2027, Mankind has clawed its way off the planet and a string of six orbital platforms complement a Martian colony and an international base on the moon. Sadly, crime hasn’t been left behind and in an effort to staunch the swell of illegal activity, the authorities create the International Space Police Force, an inept and ineffectual authority that has signally failed to stem the swelling undercurrent of orbital crime.

Created by Chris Boucher, Star Cops is not so much Hill Street Blues (1981-1987) in orbit (as Gerry Anderson’s subsequent and inferior Space Precinct (1994-1995) set itself up as), as a rather traditional police procedural in free fall. Typically British, it often fails to recreate the dynamism of American cop shows that seemed obviously necessary for such a venture and opted instead for stiff upper lip heroics. There’s still much to admire, however, particularly the notion that the ISPF is not taken at all seriously, even by the people who set it up. Staffed by volunteers and crippled by inefficiency, the group is constantly derided by the media, who dub them ‘Star Cops’. As the series opens, the rot is about to be stopped by the appointment of a new Commander, Nathan Spring (David Calder) and the upgrading of the unit to full time status.

As one might expect from a writer whose previous credits had included not only stints on Doctor Who (1963-1989) and Blake’s 7 (1978-1981) but such popular crime shoes as Bergerac () and Juliet Bravo (), the man chosen to save the ISPF from ignominy is a plain old fashioned copper who looks and acts just like he stepped off the set of Softly, Softly, a stereotypically British technophobe intent on setting the Star Cops back even further by rejecting modern techniques in favour of the kind of detection work that Dixon of Dock Green would have been proud of.

Boucher spent some three years researching Star Cops, mapping out his near future scenario in some detail, resulting in that rarest of rarities, a TV SF show that actually adheres to the laws of physics and where the technology actually seems plausible. Boucher and his co-writers were canny enough, however, to use the technology and science only to aid the ambience of the piece, much as the trappings of a contemporary crime show are used simply to aid the plot and development of the main characters. There was little technobabble in Star Cops, just good, strong drama, well written and well acted.

What really separates Star Cops from the rest of the pack is Boucher’s close attention to detail and his insistence on using established science as the springboard for his ideas – thus we have Spring suffering nausea while in space and has trouble keeping things from floating away from him in low gravity. And, amazingly, it even plays true to the laws of physics and there are no sounds in space. Sadly, the paucity of the budget (the BBC may have trumpeted Star Cops as serious science fiction yet it stills refused to give it any serious cash) rather betrayed Boucher’s efforts, resulting in plastic sets and all too obviously fake model shots.

But special effects weren’t the point of Star Cops. Instead it traded on human drama and did it surprisingly well. Sadly, this formula failed to click with either the critics or, more crucially, with the viewing public who weren’t overly struck by the show. It ran for just nine episodes, its planned tenth installment scuppered by strikes at the BBC. A second season, set to have taken place in and around the Mars colonies, was planned but the poor viewing figures soon put paid to that.