Set in 2027 #2: Star Cops: TV series, books and Big Finish audio

Posted on 5 September 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Working slowly through the rather small canon of sf stories and shows set in 2027, I reach the 1987 BBC TV series Star Cops. I have absolutely no memory of watching this show, which went out during the July and August summer holidays at 8.30 pm on a weekday, between my first and second years at university. As far as I remember I spent the summer in Ireland, but there was and is perfectly good BBC reception there.

It’s set among police officers in earth orbit and on the moon, in an era where getting into space seems little more difficult than catching a bus. Indeed, one of the problems of the first few episodes is that the space interiors don’t look all that different from an office environment on Earth, so you’re not quite clear what is happening where.

The 2027 of Star Cops is not very different from the 1987 of when the show was originally made. There seem to be more women in professional leadership positions. The central character, Nathan Spring, has an AI called ‘Box’ which speaks with his voice and is capable of carrying out fairly complex data searches, but nobody else has anything like that. The Soviet Union still exists. “International” generally means from the white, English-speaking world. And as noted above, spaceflight is casually easy.

The show clearly had difficulty finding its feet. The two worst episodes are the first two, written by series creator Chris Boucher and directed by Christopher Baker. Baker had had a long career, though he did very little after Star Cops, and doesn’t seem to have done much science fiction previously. The five episodes (of nine) that he directed are noticeably lacking in energy compared to the other four. (We’ll get onto those in a moment.)

Chris Boucher, who wrote three classic Doctor Who stories and was script editor for Blake’s Seven, should have been able to deliver quality writing, and somehow didn’t here, for a show that was his own baby. Insider accounts tell of the friction between him and producer Evgeny Gridneff. For whatever reason, the first two episodes look flat and have confusing plots, and that was probably enough to kill the prospect of the show continuing.

And that’s a bit of a shame, because although Baker directed five episodes rather unexcitingly, the other four are rather good, and they are all directed by none other than Graeme Harper, who is also the only person to have directed both Old Who and New Who, including one of the stories generally rated as the best of all Old Who, The Caves of Androzani. The screen becomes much more edgy and the show more watchable with him in charge.

In addition, though Chris Boucher wrote the first four episodes and the last, he brought in two other writers for the rest. One episode was written by Philip Martin, who also wrote two Sixth Doctor stories; the other three are by John Collee, then a medical doctor at the start of his writing career, but who hit the big time in the Noughties with his scripts for Happy Feet and Master and Commander. Collee’s scripts are head and shoulders above the other six.

The sixth episode, In Cold Blood, has Graeme Harper directing John Collee’s script, and I think it is the one I would show to someone who was wondering if Star Cops was for them, as a fair representation of its merits and its flaws. As of this writing, you can watch all nine episodes on Archive.org.

Other points that must be made: the scripts are pretty racist and sexist, even by the lower standards of 1987, and the theme tune is just dire.

To go through the episodes one by one:

Episode One: An Instinct for Murder (script Chris Boucher, director Christopher Baker, first shown 6 July 1987): introduces the main cast, Nathan Spring (David Calder) who gets made the head of Star Cops during the story, David Theroux (Erick Ray Evans), an African-American star cop, Pal Kenzy (Linda Newton), an Australian star cop, and Lee Jones (Gennie Nevinson), Spring’s girlfriend. The plot involves a drowning on Earth and spacesuit sabotage in orbit, and the denouement is frankly confusing, though it turns out the Russians are not to blame after all.

Episode Two: Conversations with the Dead (script Chris Boucher, director Christopher Baker, first shown 13 July 1987): Spring’s girlfriend Lee is gratuitously fridged at the start, and the Earth cop put in charge of the investigation , the rather old-fashioned Colin Devis (Trevor Cooper), is incomprehensibly hired by Spring to join the Star Cops at the end of the episode. Meanwhile there is a parallel plot with a space freighter which has gone off course and where almost everything dramatic happens off screen.

Episode Three: Intelligent Listening for Beginners (script Chris Boucher, director Christopher Baker, first shown 20 July 1987): Spring fires Kenzy and another cop for blatant corruption; meanwhile a terrorist group called the Black Hand Gang (Chicago rather than Serbian) is attacking critical infrastructure with ransomware (quite an advanced topic) led by a tremendously creepy hacker played by David John Pope (the Kandyman in Doctor Who). Kenzy thwarts the hijacking of a space shuttle and is rehired basking in glory, the blatant evidence of corruption swept aside (this seemed very improbable to me).

Episode Four: Trivial Games and Paranoid Pursuits (script by Chris Boucher, directed by Graeme Harper, first shown 27 July 1987): the Moonbase has a new commander, Alexander Krivenko (Jonathan Adams, also Dr Scott in the Rocky Horror Picture Show). Spring wants to extend his jurisdiction to the American Ronald Reagan space station (Reagan was still president when this was made), where also a scientist has mysteriously vanished without any trace that he was ever there. The American commander (played by Daniel Benzali) is egregiously sexist, but the denouement is the first impressive episode ending of the series, thanks presumably to Graeme Harper.

Episode Five: This Case to be Opened in a Million Years (script by Philip Martin, directed by Graeme Harper, first shown 3 August 1987, for some reason much later than the other episodes): Spring goes on holiday to Italy and leaves Theroux to deal with a nuclear waste rocket crashing into the moonrise. While he is away he gets framed for drug trafficking. Some great shots which look like Rome (and may even have been filmed there).

Episode Six: In Warm Blood (script by John Collee, directed by Graeme Harper, first shown 10 August 1987): Introduces a new Japanese star cop, Anna Shoun (Sayo Inaba), a Japanese doctor who is recruited from a pharma company that is up to no good. Sadly she rarely rises above stereotype (not the actor’s fault). Very tightly done plot exploring why a renowned scientist was moved to suicide, and incidentally what killed the crew of the Pluto 5 spaceship?

Episode Seven: A Double Life (script by John Collee, directed by Christopher Baker, first shown 17 August 1987): Brilliant concept involving the secret clone of a famous pianist, hiding out on the moon and threatening the embryos of a rich young widow (played by Nitza Saul, who was the Israeli agent in Kessler).

Episode Eight: Other People’s Secrets (script by John Collee, directed by Christopher Baker, first shown 24 August 1987): German official Ernest Wolffhart (played by Geoffrey “Catweazle” Bayldon) comes to check the moonbase safety, and Devis’ psychiatrist ex-wife comes to make a mental health assessment of the crew. Played slightly for laughs but at this point I was relaxing into it.

Episode Nine: Little Green Men and Other Martians (script by Chris Boucher, directed by Graeme Harper, first shown 31 August 1987): Massive media interest is generated by rumors of a Martian artefact, particularly from an American reporter played by Lachele Carl (who went on to be an American newscaster in New Who). Potential shock ending as it looks like one of the main characters has been killed off at the end – or have they?

So, basically I don’t think that Star Cops has the necessary coherence of vision or the resources (or the catchy theme tune) to become a success. It’s clearly still got its fans out there, and I can talk about it now from a position of knowledge.

Chris Boucher wrote two books based on his five episodes. The first, An Instinct for Murder, is a massive expansion of the first TV episode to over 60,000 words, and explains what is going on a lot better than he was able to on screen. It feels like a lot of good writing ideas simply got crowded out by the time limits. The key plot line is still not much good, but it is better supported by the narrative. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:

Nathan glanced out through the booth’s perspex dome towards the distant reservoir. He told himself that tollbooths were more secure, but the truth was that the new generation mobilinks made him uncomfortable, and he avoided carrying one. There were times, though, when his aversion to being constantly available for the ‘unbreakably close person-to-person contact’ promised by the manufacturers was definitely inconvenient. He said, “We had a meeting.”

The second book, Little Green Men and other stories, adapts the other four Boucher scripts for the page. A notable difference is that rather than Jonathan Adams’ Russian Moonbase commander, Boucher has a Chinese boss, Jiang Li Ho, and Japanese Anna Shoun is replaced by an Irish star cop, who is not treated any differently because of her nationality. The second paragraph of the third chapter (“Trivial Games and Paranoid Pursuits”) is:

Marty still looked unconvinced and unenthusiastic. His round, pale face remained irritatingly expressionless. “I think she was lucky they didn’t deport her,” he said. “I would have done.”

Again, this is a sweatier, sexier reimagining of the TV show, written years later and giving a sense of what Boucher maybe wishes the original had been.

Both books were originally published by the one and only Judith Proctor in fanzine format. Now you can get them here in a single volume, Star Cops.

In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought, and I got hold of the first Big Finish box set of plays based on Star Cops, a sequence titled Mother Earth. The promotional video doesn’t say much about the plot but does have a far better theme tune than the TV show did:

Now, as they say, we are cooking on gas. The script editor for the series is Andrew Smith, who is best known in Doctor Who fandom for having written a TV story when he was only 19, but the important point about his career for present purposes is that he grew up to become a senior police officer working on anti-terrorism, which is actually the perfect background to be show-runner for a series about futuristic law enforcement.

There are four stories, the first by Smith, the others by Ian Potter, Christopher Hatherall and Guy Adams (Potter and Adams are well-established Who writers), all about an anti-space-travel activist group causing mayhem and destruction to the Moonbase and other space infrastructure. The third episode, set in Paris but not really sounding much like it, is perhaps the weakest, but they are all good.

Of the original main cast, David Calder and Trevor Cooper reprise Nathan Spring and Colin Devis; Linda Newton appears again as Pal Kenzy only later in the sequence as they had not tracked her down quickly enough in Australia, and Erick Ray Evans sadly died in 1999 so is no longer available to do David Theroux. To them we add two new star cops, played by Philip Olivier (the Sixth Doctor audio companion Hex) and Rakhee Thakrar (who was the English teacher, Emily Sands, in Sex Education), and a Moonbase commander played by Nimmy March (who I think was new to me).

I think that you could enjoy this a lot even if you had no knowledge of the 1987 TV series, and you can get it here. When I do my write-up of SF set in 2027, of course, only the original TV series (and novels) will count, as I keep a twenty-year threshold.

Vengeance on Varos, by Jonathan Dennis (and Philip Martin); also, Sil and the Devil Seeds of Arodor

Posted on 30 May 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

I watched Vengeance on Varos on first broadcast in 1985, and was frankly bored and appalled by it. (Actually I have only a clear memory of the first episode; I may have missed the second.) The start, with a prisoner being tortured and the Doctor / Peri relationship in a deep trough, was not promising.

When I rewatched it in 2008, my views had not changed much.

I remember catching the first scenes of Vengeance on Varos first time round, where Jason Connery’s Jondar is unpleasantly tortured as an audience looks on, and then the Tardis breaks down and the Doctor decides it can’t be fixed. At that point I gave up and went away to do something else. Well, I misjudged it slightly. The torture scenes are unnecessarily unpleasant, and Colin Baker’s portrayal as annoying as before, but the rest of the story is not bad, Martin Jarvis and Nabil Shaban being especially good. Having said which, the scene with Peri turning into a bird is a bit crap.

Coming back to it in 2011, I was a bit more forgiving:

There’s a decent story in Vengeance on Varos, and particularly some good guest performances by Martin Jarvis, Nabil Shaban, and Sheila Read who plays Etta, and decent special effects at a period when these were sometimes a bit embarrassing. But it is rather spoiled for me by the violence, which I am now realising is a consistent problem with this season; by the silly subplot of Peri being turned into a bird and then magically cured in about five seconds; and by a number of under-rehearsed scenes where actors stand around with their hands limply at their sides, always a bit of a red flag for me.

Rewatching this time, my eye was particularly caught by Stephen Yardley, who is also the mutant Sevrin in Genesis of the Daleks, appears in the last series of Blake’s 7 in the Tanith Lee episode Sand, and is also a regular in the second series of Secret Army.

However, it’s still a rather stupid story. To add to my complaints above, it’s weird and a bit dehumanising that The Governor and The Chief Officer don’t have names. More trivially, when the Doctor is supposedly dead to all appearances during the cliff-hanger at the end of the first episode and the start of the second, Colin Baker is visibly still breathing.

The novelisation is also by Philip Martin, and the second paragraph of its third chapter is:

‘Next time he will die,’ he said soothingly.

When I read the novelisation in 2008, I mocked a malapropism:

“I just won’t look!” Peri said, clenching her eyes shut but feeling the stiff vulpine feathers that had now emerged almost fully all over her arms.

(Philip Martin, Doctor Who – Vengeance on Varos)

Vulpine feathers, eh?

With extra irony, the chief villain is given to malapropisms due to a faulty translation unit. The omniscient narrator has no such excuse!

I was interested to note that the cliff-hanger comes relatively early in the book, a good ten pages before the half-way point. Otherwise the book is a safe transformation from screen to print. You can get it here.

Before I get into Jonathan Dennis’s Black Archive, I just want to look at the later career of Sil. I’m actually rather a fan of Mindwarp, the second part of Trial of a Time Lord, with its shock ending for poor Peri (foolishly revoked six episodes later). Mission to Magnus, the unbroadcast story from the cancelled 1986 season, failed to impress me either in print or on audio. I was much more impressed by an original Big Finish audio by Martin, Antidote to Oblivion.

And for this post, I sought out and read Martin’s novel Sil and the Devil Seeds of Arodor, based on a direct-to-video film which I have not seen (though apparently Jeremy Corbyn got a copy from Nabil Shaban). The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

The profit chamber on Thoros Beta monitored the progress of its multiple investments throughout the universe. Thoros Betans were hunched over display panels giving the latest profit and loss values, and muttered voices echoed in the corridors as fortunes were made . . . and sometimes lost.

It’s not very good. Sil and Lord Kiv get caught up in a plot to sell dangerously addictive drugs to the people of earth (specifically the “Eurozone”, whose boundaries are not defined). Lots of characterful screeching, but as so often, the plot is just nasty for the sake of being nasty. You can get it here.

Jonathan Dennis, who previously wrote the Black Archive on Ghost Light (incidentally, the first Black Archive that I didn’t really care for), has mounted a detailed but ultimately unconvincing defence of Vengeance on Varos.

The first chapter, “Introduction – In Poor taste”, defends the aesthetic and tonal changes made to Doctor Who for the 1985 season, and asserts that they work. I think a more nuanced view is possible.

The second chapter, “Winston Smith Takes it on the Jaw”, looks at dystopias, especially 1984, and at the uncharacteristic (for Doctor Who) pessimism of the story.

The third chapter, “Capital (It Fails Us Now)”, looks at the critique of capitalism and to a lesser extent colonialism in the story, and in other Who stories (including Kerblam!). The second paragraph is:

Keeping this history in mind, it stands out when looking into the production of Vengeance on Varos that ‘producer John Nathan-Turner was wary, fearing that Philip Martin might inject political comment into the storyline.’⁴ Martin said, ‘He suspected I had some sort of political aim in mind, and so he insisted I prove myself first by doing a scene breakdown.’⁵
⁴ Pixley, ‘The DWM Archive: Vengeance on Varos’, p17.
⁵ Bentham, Jeremy, ‘Keep Watching!’ In-Vision #80 p4.

The fourth chapter, “‘They Also Affect Dogs’ – Sadism and Video Nasties”, looks at the moral panic around video nasties in the mid-80s, in the context of the horror genre in general and Videodrome in particular. Dennis finds a smidgeon of regret that the music cue in the acid bath scene is handled badly, and that Peri is exploited worse than usual here.

The fifth and final chapter, “Who Speaks for the Audience? – Conclusion” makes the fairly obvious point that Arak and Etta to some extent stand for us the audience.

An appendix, “6 Times 2 Equals 12”, makes some very interesting paralells between the Sixth and Twelfth Doctors:

The obvious similarity is in the Doctor’s character arc. Both eras feature a gruff, arrogant Doctor who gradually smooths out and becomes more (conventionally) likeable. In the sixth Doctor’s case that arc is unfortunately truncated due to real-world circumstances outside the narrative. It was a good concept in the Colin Baker era and Moffatt is able to bring it to its proper conclusion with Peter Capaldi.

Aside from this general similarity of the character arc, many of the details are echoed as well. Baker and Capaldi both appeared on the show prior to being cast as the Doctor…

The Doctor and Clara bicker. It doesn’t come off quite as harshly as comparable scenes between the sixth Doctor and Peri, but that’s down to the dialogue being funnier…

The first full years of both Baker and Capaldi’s tenure end with stories heavy on body horror, set in funeral homes where the Doctor’s old enemies are recreated with human corpses as the raw material. There’s even similar imagery, of the glass Dalek and the transparent Cybermen in tanks. They both have companions who die – Capaldi gets two – and all those companions get those deaths negated in some way…

Capaldi gets the all-black outfit that Colin Baker wanted, and it does serve as a visual reminder of the severity of the character. However, Moffatt starts progressing the character arc immediately.

Dennis is ready to admit that this was much more successful in the 2010s than in the 1980s. He seems curiously shy of drawing the obvious conclusion that it’s simply that Steven Moffatt (plus team) is a much better show-runner than John Nathan-Turner (plus Eric Saward). His argument is that the decision to darken the Sixth Doctor era in terms of aesthetics and tone was not a bad decision, just inadequately executed. I’m sorry, but that makes it a bad decision as far as I am concerned.

You can get this Black Archive here.