Star Cops - Legacy

Legacy

The demise of Star Cops after just nine episodes has been seen as indicative of the decline of British television science fiction in the 1980s and, after Doctor Who followed Star Cops into cancellation in 1989, there would be no British regular science fiction drama series on British television until Bugs began in 1995. However, Star Cops has undergone something of a reappraisal – in science fiction circles at least – since it went off the air in 1987. Reviewing the VHS releases for TV Zone in 1991, Gary Russell stated that "Star Cops represents excellent science fiction" and recanted his original impression of the series upon broadcast that it was "Bergerac in spacesuits, complete with rather cruddy visual effects and boring performances". A retrospective article penned by Keith Topping for Dreamwatch to mark the series' 10th anniversary in 1997 described Star Cops as "a series that could (and should) have been one of the BBC's most popular, influential and entertaining products of the era. On at least one of these points the series failed miserably, but, certainly when it came to entertainment, it succeeded magnificently". In 1999, when science fiction magazine SFX asked an expert panel from the SF field, including Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, to compile a list of the top 50 SF shows of all time, Star Cops came thirteenth on the list, with SFX describing it as "the SF TV show SF writers love. It wasn't perfect but it's as close as TV will ever get to producing proper written SF". Later, in 2005, SFX went on to poll its readers for their list of the top 50 British telefantasy shows and Star Cops was voted into twenty-seventh position on the list. The BBC themselves revisited Star Cops in a thirty-minute retrospective documentary about the show, recorded as part of a series titled The Cult of..., first broadcast on BBC Four on 28 November 2006 as part of that channel's Science Fiction Britannia season. Reflecting on the show in the programme, the author and critic Kim Newman said that "the strength of Star Cops is the writing. I don't think any of the episodes are realised as well on screen as they are on the page. If it had come back for another couple of seasons it might well have been the BBC's best science fiction show". The documentary concluded that Star Cops was an "overlooked gem".