TREVOR COOPER
INTERVIEW EXTRACT

Spring 2003

Interview conducted by Alan Stevens.
This interview was first published in Shockeye's Snack
Bite 14 April/May 2003

I understand it was Graeme Harper who recommended you for the part of Colin Devis in Star Cops.

Yes, that's right. Graeme talked about it when we were doing that stage play in the pub, and he said, 'There is this series and I'm really pushing you for it because this part is perfect for you.' And a few months later I went to see the producer Evgeny Gridneff and Christopher Baker, who was the other director working on the series with Graeme. And so I met with them and talked about it and I got the part, which was great because it was the first regular part in a series that I had been given. I'd done a lot of telly at that point, but it had always been an episode of this and an episode of that. So to play a character that actually went through an entire series was a break for me, no question about it.

I always thought it was a great pity that Star Cops didn't go on to a second series.

Yes, it was a great shame. I think the first episode of Star Cops that went out was not a good one.

Originally the opening story was meant to be in two parts, but Jonathan Powell told Chris Boucher to condense it down into one episode.

Yes, I'd heard they'd chopped it down, but after that it didn't really work, and it also looked wrong. There were two design teams on that series. There was one good design team and one not-so-good design team, and then there were directors on it and one was excellent and one was just okay. And it's very clear in the episodes who did what. Half the episodes are over lit and the sets look crummy, and the other half are beautifully under lit, and the only light you get is from computer screens. It made it look more like the spaceship in Alien rather than a duff set in studio one.

Didn't the show go out at a rather strange time?

It went out on BBC2 at about half past eight and our competition was Terry And June. I always remember that, and of course we would lose heavily to Terry And June in the ratings. I think most of middle England would rather watch that than us. But I remember there being a lot of people writing us off after the first episode, and then a few people crept back. That was the thing, so by the end of it there were people saying 'Actually this is rather good.' And newspapers as well were saying, 'This is a rather good series now, and I hope it carries on,' but it didn't. We were "booked" to do another one, in the sense that we were "optioned" for another one. We didn't get paid or anything, but we were asked to put some time aside to do another series, but it didn't come about.

How did you get on with the rest of the cast?

We had a ball. I mean, people always say that about those programmes, but I mean we did, they were fantastic. I still see David Calder [who appeared as Nathan Spring] quite a lot, and he told me that Erick Ray Evans, who played Theroux, isn't with us anymore. He went back to America and died a couple of years ago. As for the others, Linda Newton [who played Pal Kenzy] has gone back to Australia, though she does pop over occasionally; I've seen her once or twice. Jonathan Adams who played the Russian, Alexander Krivenko still knocks about, and Sayo Inaba [Anna Shoun], the Japanese girl, I've not seen since.
I thought David Calder was a wonderful cast leader. He was one of those guys who always liked everyone to be having a good time. And we spent a lot of time in rehearsal making sure we understood the script and knew what was going on, and we used to do a lot of work on the scripts, cut things and add things. I remember once Philip Martin coming in and being very upset that we had changed so much, but in the end he was fine. I think that he realised that we were continually changing lines. He was perpetually saying 'Well, does this work? And do we understand what this means? And why are we saying this?' So he was always questioning things, trying to make it better, which I think paid off.

Apparently there was originally meant to be ten episodes of Star Cops, but one got scrapped.

That's right. That was one by Philip Martin and it was going to be directed by Graeme Harper, but there was this strike at BBC studios, and so although we rehearsed the episode for about a week, they suddenly said, 'We are pulling this one.' Of course we all got paid to do that episode because we were booked for it, but sadly it was never made. Then when we came to do the last episode Erick Ray Evans got chicken pox. Literally - we'd rehearsed it all and we got into studio and he said 'I'm not feeling very well,' and I think Erick recorded one or two scenes and then we noticed that he was coming out in these big spots. And if you get chicken pox when you are over thirty you get very ill with it. So he was carted off, and there was no way we could rebook the studio, apparently, so we had to make it. Chris Boucher, who had written the episode, wasn't available, so David Calder and I went off into a side room and rejigged the entire episode, so that basically Linda Newton got nearly all of Erick's lines.

Did you like the character you played in Star Cops?

Yes I did. I could relate to Colin Devis suddenly being stuck on the moon and having to deal with all this new technology, because that's how I feel about computers and the internet today. I mean on the one hand he was a cop and did everything like a cop, but on the other hand he was a kind of buffoon in space who had been landed with all this technical equipment to deal with, which always strikes me as quite funny. Sort of muddling though, and thinking he can do things with a pencil and a piece of paper. It was a nice character to play.

Many thanks to Alan Stevens for kindly giving permission for the use of this extract.
This is merely part of an interview which is mainly about Doctor Who and remains the property of the copyright holder, Alan Stevens whose website can be found at
www.kaldorcity.com