Star Cops: Difference between revisions

{{quote|''Spacemen are ten-a-penny. What they need out there is a good copper.''}}

''[[Star Cops]]'' was a British science fiction television series first broadcast on [[BBC 2]]BBC2 in 1987. Set in the year 2027, the world of ''Star Cops'' includes five permanently manned space stations orbiting the Earth, as well as bases on the Moon and Mars, and approximately three thousand people live and work in space. The setting was influenced by the potential for greater access to space promised by the then new Space Shuttle programme, and by concerns about the militarisation of space through the US government's Strategic Defense Initiative (known as "Star Wars"), both of which were underway in the early 1980s. Space travel and life in space are portrayed in a [[Mohs Scale of Sci Fi Hardness|hard science-fiction]] style, with fairly realistic depictions of weightlessness and low-gravity environments, lengthy space journeys of months or years, and hazards such as spacesuit failures and radiation exposure.

In total nine episodes of ''Star Cops'' were made. A tenth episode, titled "Death on the Moon", was planned but industrial relations difficulties during production led to it being abandoned shortly before recording was to commence. A combination of factors, including conflicts in the production team and poor scheduling, meant that the series never found a satisfactory audience and was cancelled after one season. In recent years, ''Star Cops'' has undergone something of a critical reappraisal and is generally hailed for being a good attempt at a realistic [httphttps://wwwweb.archive.org/web/20090601121403/http://space-frontier.org/HighFrontier/ "High Frontier"] SF series.