CHRIS BOUCHER
INTERVIEW EXTRACT

Autumn 1994
Who's 7 Convention

Interview edited by Diane Gies.
From Horizon Club Newsletter 34 June 1996

After B7, the next SF series you did was Star Cops.

I was working as script editor on Bergerac when Star Cops came up. I never should have taken it on. I should have stayed with Bergerac. And when I found out who the producer was going to be, I definitely should have turned it down! But I believed that it would be good for my CV to have created my own series. It wasn't...

What went wrong ?

Everything!

Star Cops had plenty of fans, though perhaps not as many as some of the other SF series.

It really needed more time. It should have run another series or two in order to have a chance to work. But the producer and I were in a marriage made in hell. To be fair, he had problems of his own, but we just didn't get on. When he joined the BBC as a script editor, he shared an office with me and I showed him around, where the canteen was, and all that. But we didn't get on then, and when he became producer on Star Cops we still didn't get on! I can remember him asking for changes in the script, and me saying that it was as good as it was going to get. I just felt that he knew nothing about writing, nothing about science fiction and nothing about me - and we fell out fairly heavily. So it was all rather a disaster, and I wish I hadn't done it.

Many thanks to Horizon for kindly giving permission for the use of this extract.
This is merely part of an interview which is mainly about Blakes 7 and remains the property of the copyright holder, whose website can be found at
www.horizon.org.uk