STAR COPS: MOTHER EARTH PART ONE
The Sound Of The Police
released OUT NOW! 240 minutes | Cd/download
Publisher Big Finish
Chris Boucher’s police-in-space drama didn’t get a fair crack of the whip on transmission in 1987, being axed after just one series. Now, 31 years on, it’s back.
It’s not quite the same show it was, though. Two cast members have passed away in the meantime, while another, Linda Newton as abrasive Aussie Pal Kenzy, has been relegated to occasional guest star status. Boucher is also AWOL, leaving former Doctor Who writer (and ex-policeman) Andrew Smith in charge. And the series has a more fitting theme tune, having jettisoned Justin Hayward’s much loathed “It Won’t Be Easy”.
On the continuity side, David Calder (his voice mercifully unchanged) is still in place as straight-arrow Commander Nathan Spring, and Trevor Cooper is back as the boorish Colin Devis, a man so spectacularly bad at his job (Spring castigates him in one story for sleeping on duty, and in another for getting pissed) that you wonder what information he’s got hidden away about his employers.
“Set in space, but down to Earth” appears to be the credo, with the series wearing its science fiction trappings pretty lightly; there’s probably more Z-Cars in its DNA than there is Star Trek. An arc plot involving a terrorist group named Mother Earth adds some present-day relevance, and the new characters help it avoid feeling like a dusty museum piece. The standout episode, Guy Adams’s “The Thousand Ton Bomb”, puts one of them, former Met officer Paul Bailey, front and centre as he goes undercover in the organisation. But it’s Ian Potter’s twisty “Tranquillity And Other Illusions” that throws up the box set’s most memory-searing moment, when Devis manages to get his leg over. It’s an arresting image, to say the least... Steve O’Brien
Nine Star Cops episodes were aired; a tenth, “Death On The Moon”, was abandoned due to a BBC strike.