DEATH ON THE MOON

This was to have been episode 9 and was due to be filmed last. Unfortunately just before Christmas that year there was an electricians strike and a lot of studio time was lost. Other programmes were considered to have a higher priority than Star Cops which meant this episode, due for filming in February, was dropped despite the costumes having been made, the actors cast and the sets designed.

Graeme Harper, the intended directer, stated "There was this great story to be done - a masterpiece, a classic, though I suppose it was slightly outrageous. It was about a big conglomerate who had the contract to actually throw bits of moonsoil into space, project them out into space, to be picked up by travelling workshops 20,000 miles out above the Earth. These cubes of moonsoil were then going to be used to build a huge space station, a big ring. And this is one of the ideas NASA actually have got. They can't take the stuff off Earth so they'll take it from the Moon and use the low gravity and push these things out by catapult."

The ISPF get involved when the body of Han, an employee of the Chinex Company who are partners in the project, is found in one of the launcher tubes. Nathan assigns a Star Cop to each of the five suspects and finds their tendency to treat the whole affair like an Agatha Christie whodunnit frustrating. Pressurised by Krivenko into letting the suspects leave the Moon, Nathan arrests the most likely culprit, only for him to be poisoned in custody. Realising the whole thing is a scam, Nathan exposes the true culprit, Eugene Huldrych, a Swiss financier as he speaks to a worldwide shareholders' meeting via a video link.

Apparently much of the latter part of the script was set in a Swiss chateau.

Lynda Woodfield, the costume designer, stated "We had a Swiss industrialist who was embezzling his company and we dressed him a bit like the Penguin from Batman! We had a very expensive tailored suit and winged collars and a bow tie - Swiss bankers always look immaculate. For that episode we had the Star Cops in their blue, and then the production brought in a Chinese element which I had in yellow. Then we had a Swiss element for which I did a red overall, and Krivenko was in his Russian overalls. The story was based on Cluedo, and so you had all the different colours acting as the game counters - it looked very effective".

The DVD adds little to the above and there the trail becomes cold. Philip Martin apparently doesn't possess a copy of the script and, because it was never made, there's no copy stored at the Written Archives at Caversham.