Chris Boucher

A look at the late-80s BBC series Star Cops, which followed the adventures of the International Space Police Force in the year 2027.

The Intergalactic War is over. The Combined forces of Earth's galaxy have triumphed over the invasion force from Andromeda, but the price of victory has been high.

A spaceship crashes approaching the planet Cephlon and when the crew of the Liberator answer the distress call they find their own lives endangered. Blake is caught in a desperate race against time to save the lives of the crew and also find the mysterious ORAC. Once in Blake's possession, ORAC predicts the future of Blake and his crew by showing them an image of the Liberator blown to atoms in space. Blake is powerless to alter their inevitable destruction, and when the Liberator is seized by a hostile force, a series of terrifying events sets the prophecy in motion.

Supreme Commander Servalan assigns the task to the deadly Travis-his orders simply to seek, locate and destroy Blake's 7! Travis and his Mutoid crew clash with Blake in a crucial struggle over the Federation's secret cypher machine and again in desperate hand-to-hand combat on a mysterious dead planet. Finally, they confront each other on a barren ice world as Blake attempts to rescue the resistance leader, Avalon. This time, however, Travis is expecting him, and a terrible trap awaits. . .

The Doctor arrives on a planet where two tribes, the savage Sevateem and the technically brilliant Tesh, are at war. He meets Leela, an exile from the Sevateem, and discovers that the tribes' god of evil is apparently himself...

The Doctor and Leela must catch a killer on a vast mining ship run by robots and humans.

The present day: just as the Fourth Doctor and Leela arrive in Fetchborough, England, Professor Fendelman prepares to experiment on a fossilized skull which science says should not exist. The skull is actually an artefact of the Fendahl, a god-like being who feeds on the life force of others. It has begun to awaken and kill. Worse yet, others seek to exploit the Fendahl's dreadful power.

The adventures of The Doctor, a time-traveling humanoid alien known as a Time Lord. He explores the universe in his TARDIS, a sentient time-traveling spaceship. Its exterior appears as a blue British police box, which was a common sight in Britain in 1963 when the series first aired. Along with a succession of companions, The Doctor faces a variety of foes while working to save civilizations, help ordinary people, and right many wrongs.

The daily lives of the men and women at Sun Hill Police Station as they fight crime on the streets of London. From bomb threats to armed robbery and drug raids to the routine demands of policing this ground-breaking series focuses as much on crime as it does on the personal lives of its characters.

Jim Bergerac is a detective sergeant in The Foreigners Office who likes to do things his own way. While dealing with his own personal demons Bergerac has a knack of finding trouble, and sometimes causing it.

A group of convicts and outcasts fight a guerrilla war against the totalitarian Terran Federation from a highly advanced alien spaceship.

Juliet Bravo was a drama that focused on two female police inspectors, neither of whom were called Juliet Bravo! These two inspectors worked in the small fictional town of Hartley, Lancashire. Jean Darblay was on the scene first and had trouble with her sexist colleagues. However she soon managed to gain their trust and prove a woman could be a successful police officer and housewife. Jean's call sign was Juliet Bravo. When she was promoted and moved on she was replaced by Kate Longton who not only took over the patch but also the headaches that went with it.

Shoestring is a BBC detective drana set in Bristol and starring Trevor Eve as private detective Eddie Shoestring, who operatee his own show on Radio West, the local radio station. The programme ran between 30 September 1979 and 21 December 1980, in two series with 21 hour-long episodes. Eve opted not to return after two series, as he wanted to diversify into theatre, so the production team changed the setting to Jersey and created Bergerac, also following a detective returning to work after a bad period in his life.

Romany Jones is a British sitcom created and written by Ronald Chesney and Ronald Wolfe for LWT. Broadcast between 1973 and 1975, the programme follows the comic misadventures of two layabout families living on a caravan site. Originally designed as a starring vehicle for James Beck (Dad's Army), the 1972 pilot and 1973 first series centred on Bert and Betty Jones (Jo Rowbottom), newlywed after seven years, who spend their wedding night in their rickety caravan, natural to Bert but distinctly alien to Betty, born and bred in Streatham. Most of the humour focused on life in theirs and a neighbouring caravan housing Lily and Wally Briggs (Queenie Watts and Arthur Mullard, although Arthur English was cast in the pilot). Following Beck's death after completion on the second series, Bert and Betty were written out, and replaced with a city gentleman and his debutante wife, both of whom remain blissfully oblivious to the Briggs' antics.

Star Cops is a British science fiction TV series created by Chris Boucher, set in 2027 where the International Space Police Force (ISPF) maintains law and order in a newly colonized solar system, overseen by Commander Nathan Spring. Known for its hard science fiction approach and realistic portrayal of space travel, the series was canceled after one season due to poor ratings and production issues. Retrospectively, it has been critically reappraised.

David Tynan O'Mahony, better known as Dave Allen, was an Irish comedian. Initially becoming known in Australia during 1963–64, Allen made regular television appearances in the United Kingdom in the later 1960s and 1970s.