From 1980 to 1992, seminal US police drama Kid Cop gripped the country. Running for 13 seasons, the show to this day holds the record number of Emmy wins and took place entirely in my imagination, starring, well, me, Victoria Principal, Burgess Meredith and in later years, the fat Danny Devito look-alike lieutenant from Cagney and Lacey.
There were two factors behind the launch of this hugely successful show, of which the complete DVD Box set, if it existed, would make a wonderful Christmas present.
The first was my crush on Victoria Principal, aka Dallas’ Pamela Ewing. The second was the fact that when sleeping in the same room as three other people, if you didn’t nod off quickly, the chances were, with all the snoring and turning and as was the case frequently, nocturnal bust ups between mum and dad, the easiest thing to do would be to retreat into a fantasy world, which is what I did.
You’re sharing a communal toilet with 13 other people; you don’t want to be leaving the flat to go to the loo in the middle of the night. It was about keeping your mind occupied. And thus one of the world’s greatest ever cop shows was born.
Admittedly, some of the earlier episodes don’t stand up 30 years on, full of plot holes and the highly implausible lead character, an 8-year-old gun carrying New York child cop, is hard to get your head round.
But when people ask me how did I cope living in one room, I give them two words: Kid Cop. And no gimmicks. Cop spelt with a ‘C’. This was a serious show. By constructing a show that originally played out at 9pm on a Monday night, I was able to escape this daily nightmare of sleeping in a room more overcrowded than a Bangkok prison.
My character’s name was also ‘Danny’. I was a gifted child. This gifted bit I only thought about much later in the eighties as I started to test how watertight and plausible the story was. So I had this gifted thing going on, and a shadowy Mr Fix It type guy murdered my parents, played by Rutger Hauer, whose character sold kids to childless families, not too dissimilar to what was happening in Argentina at the time. I was a well-read child.
Now I think the reason I had my parents murdered, and basically they were killed off in every fantasy I had, was simply because their strong Spanish accents did not lend themselves well to English language dreams. They had those annoying Ossie Ardiles type heavy accents and would just have brought the show down. I didn’t mess around. They were killed off before the halfway point of the pilot episode.
Anyway, somehow, I escaped Rutger Hauer’s clutches, and I should add this wasn’t taking place in Stockwell, it was set in New York, and to survive, I was shoplifting from some huge department store, which was how I came into contact with Victoria Principal’s policewoman, whose character retained her Dallas forename.
Again, and I’ll confess, the plot holes for this leap of faith were never properly dealt with, I ended up, at the age of 8, working for the NYPD. I was, readers, an eight year old with a gun. Which given what’s happening in our city streets these days, doesn’t sound so far fetched.
By the mid-eighties, the show, which borrowed the Hill Street Blues theme tune, had become more of an ensemble piece, owing to the loss of its lead. Fans will recall this was largely triggered by one of its more remarkable storylines, which actually threatened the future of the show. And that was when Victoria Principal’s character was killed off in the Space Shuttle disaster of January ’86, almost halfway through the show’s run, which heralded a switch to a much darker show and a more troubled future for my character who really struggled to move on past her death. And around this time, there started to be more frequent cameos, at least one a year, from Rutger Hauer, as he sought to kill of my character before I blabbed about his kidnapping programme.
Viewers were shocked that Victoria Principal had been allowed to leave the show. Principal was replaced by Sharon Gless, aka Cagney from Cagney and Lacey, who would stay with the show for its remaining six seasons, and she joined Don Johnson who had joined the show the previous summer. Kid Cop was now becoming a who’s who of the best eighties American TV cops.
My character’s relationship with Sharon Gless lacked the highly charged sexual chemistry that was there between Victoria Principal and me, but Cagney was able to get into my character’s head and quickly became a confidant.
Other ongoing storylines involved an even younger Kid cop than me, Richie Barreno, who was actually an old family friend – the youngest child of my parents’ original landlords on arriving in London at the start of the seventies. Richie was six years younger than me and also had to overcome the heavy blow of watching his parents being killed – I showed no mercy to the Spanish accent. He lived with me in New York. As far as I can recall, we lived alone, two under tens, making do, quite comfortably in the big apple, with Victoria Principal looking in on us from time to time. I don’t know what we did with utility bills. I’m assuming as the elder of the two, I was in charge of paying them, and we probably split them equally with me tossing him the water bills so as to give him some responsibility.
In real life though, in Sept ’85, Richie’s family had moved back to Spain, and to deal with the pain of losing him in real life because he was like a little brother to me, I wrote him out of the story. Every now and then, usually Christmas, when he came back to London with his family, I would bring him back for a few episodes, but the on-show relationship between the characters became estranged, mirroring that of Batman’s and the original Robin, Dick Grayson, also known as Nightwing to Teen Titan fans.
By the late eighties, this imagined show was playing a bigger role in my real life. And I think it’s because I was starting to think as a writer, so I would really try and work the stories out properly. As my peers studied for the inaugural GCSE’s back in ’88, I was busy working out storylines.
Christmas ’88 saw the show stripped across 5 consecutive weeknights as Rutger Hauer’s character closed in on mine and Don Johnson’s character was forced to send me into hiding. The rumours in the media were that I wouldn’t be coming back, that I was taking my first tentative steps in the film world. During my sabbatical, the show coped really well without me, although my shadow always loomed over it. But by the summer of ’89 I was back. And really different. As well as returning to the show on the back of my first shave in May ’89, my character now knew that he would have to face his master Rutger Hauer and put an end to him once and for all. But not before taking part in an underground Martial Arts tournament in Hong Kong, largely influenced by the fact that in the autumn of ’89, myself and a bunch of friends had watched Van Damme’s Blood Sport on at least a dozen occasions.
It was in late ’89 that I first spoke publicly on Kid Cop. I was 17, and had just joined this comic strip writing class in West London as I embarked upon my dream of becoming a comic strip writer. Kid Cop was the project I intended to write for it. And I’d met a guy that month who went on to this day to become one of my closest mates and possibly the most influential peer I’ve ever had. And I ran the idea past him and he absolutely destroyed it. I was not ready to tell him that I’d devised the show whilst sharing a room with the rest of my family. So it would be some time before I was ready to talk about it again. My confidence in the show and the world I had created had been absolutely dented.
In the summer of ’91, on the same day that I had puked during an interview at the Marble Arch branch of Littlewoods, I attempted to commit the idea to a novel. Running all of 2 pages in longhand, the show had been renamed ‘Crumbling Rock’. In this, the characters had been transferred setting wise to Gibraltar, an area I knew intimately as my family originated from the last Spanish town before Gibraltar, and I’d had a number of summer breaks there. Despite the relocation, the idea was still for my character to somehow find their way to New York. Rutger Hauer’s character was in it and the whole gifted child
Origin was still in play. My character and his older sister were living with their grandparents – again following the death of their Spanish parents – and my character would receive regular visitations from his dead mum, which was a kind of subplot. If I remember rightly, she would appear in the middle of the night, as ghosts are prone to doing, and had a penchant for playing the piano.
By now the show was coming to an end, and in the final episode, in the summer of ’92, my character confessed to Sharon Gless, on a beach, that he’d killed someone and she had to arrest him there and then. And from then on, there was this massive courtroom drama in which the world became aware that my character was in fact the same boy who had disappeared 12 years earlier. It was the epic ending that the show, now showing signs of tiredness, had deserved.
Kid Cop. The complete 13-season box set is out now and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Well, it’s not, not really, but I wish itwas, don’t you?