Back in the summer of 1987, the BBC put out a single season of a science fiction police procedural TV show called Star Cops. Created by the notable Chris Boucher (a scriptwriter on classic British SF like Doctor Who and Blake’s 7, and cop dramas like Bergerac and Juliet Bravo), Star Cops was a legitimate stab at doing a near-future take on crime fighting on the ‘High Frontier’; this wasn’t ray guns and starships stuff, it was a smart, sharp-edged attempt to do day-after-tomorrow ‘hard SF’ that borrowed from the visions of Earth-orbiting space stations and lunar bases on the drawing boards at NASA and the European Space Agency.
And of course, being the Apollo-age rocket nerd I am, I was hooked! How big a fan am I? I own one of the original International Space Police Force uniforms from the show, and you can find some of my previous writing about the series in Above The Law, an unofficial guide published in 2020.
Star Cops only ran for 9 episodes, cut short by a production strike and poor ratings – but in later years it went through a critical re-evaluation, becoming an obscure bit of British telefantasy that many felt never lived up to the promise of its premise. Fast-forward to 2018, and the folks at Big Finish Productions (whose audio dramas have revived & rejuvenated other cult shows like Doctor Who, Blake’s 7, Survivors, The Avengers, Dark Shadows and more) brought Star Cops back to life with original cast members David Calder, Linda Newton and Trevor Cooper, in a series of new stories that have gone on to double the run of the TV show.
I’ve worked with Big Finish on a bunch of audio drama projects over the years, so naturally, I wasted no time in banging on the airlock to get my name on a list of future Star Cops writers – and I’m excited to officially announce that I’ve written “A Cage of Sky”, an episode of the new six-part ‘season’ of Star Cops audios coming out from January to June 2024, under the umbrella title Star Cops: Blood Moon. Working on this project has been an item on my writer bucket list for a long time, and I’m looking forward to talking about it more in the near future…
Read more about new series of Star Cops audio dramas at the Big Finish website; and you can find the full range of Star Cops audios here, along with pre-order links for all six episodes of Blood Moon.
