Police Cops With Nathan Parkinson

There’s just something about action movies and TV shows made between the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s that just stands out. Haters of the genre might say these are just cheesy, silly and dated, but to many they great fun and nostalgic to a time where the term “PC” didn’t even mean Personal Computer and raw violence and an over-abundance of manliness was the norm. The boys of Generation Y grew up on these films and have a great affection for them. This love for them, despite the silliness, comes Police Cops, a parody of the genre created by a trio of very funny actors from England. Milk Bar Mag spoke with Nathan Parkinson on the show and his thoughts on the genre.

Where did the idea for Police Cops come from?
Originally, us three guys in the company all met while we did drama school together in London. We did as part of our course a comedy module where we go create comedy sketches. We got paired up with each other by random luck. We just went into a room and decided to play around with cop action films, play around with them a bit and take the mick out of them. Everyone seemed to like it. We did a show after graduation.

There’s a cheesy cop show in The Simpsons called Police Cops. Did you get the name of the show from The Simpsons? It was a great parody of cheesy cop shows.
[Laughs] We only realised this quite recently actually. As we got more known, we got people asking about it. So that actually didn’t come from that, it was just “a homage” to The Simpsons. It’s just a random coincidence. Great minds think alike!

What are your favourite cop movies and shows from that era?
The thing is, between us, we’re not particular fans of the police action genre. We’ve just grown up with action movies in general. With our age group, what we saw growing up, was stuff from the ’70s and ’80s. It’s a general parodying of action films we were doing. By going down this storyline with a veteran cop, that was the way we went with it, because we had seen so much of that. We didn’t particularly have favourite movies of that genre. We weren’t in love with those movies, they were part of our childhood. They’re not necessarily like the Lethal Weapon or Die Hard movies and that kind of thing. They’re probably what our favourites are.

What other countries has Police Cops been shown in?
It’s purely been in the UK and Scotland for the Edinburgh Fringe.

Will there be any cheesy synthesizer music in the background? The ‘70s and ‘80s were renowned for it.
Yeah, we got a lot of those classic nostalgic ’70s-’80s cheesy sounds. The way it turned out, we still got the whole catalog and I’m proud of the soundtrack, it hit the nail on the head.

What can the audience expect from Police Cops?
It’s a bit of a clichéd to say to expect the unexpected. Although it follows a classic structure of a parody of the story and where it goes and where you expect it to go, it does that, but it plays with the form as well. It doesn’t necessarily go where you think it will go, you never quite know what will happen. It’s just a bit of an adventure really.

Police Cops
The Kelvin Club, Melbourne Place, Melbourne
Wednesday March 23 – Sunday April 17, 7:30pm
comedyfestival.com.au/2016/season/shows/police-cops-police-cops