Ganymede & Titan: Recent Episodes
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With thanks to Dave for drawing our attention to this in our forum, a very interesting new release has appeared on the website of online retailer Zavvi. Hot on the heels of 2019’s Series I-VIII Bluray comes… the Series I-XIII Bluray! Yes, Series XIII… let the debate about how to number the various productions of the Dave era continue into a third glorious decade.
We’re always wary about fully trusting the details listed by retailers this far in advance of a release, as plans can change, and even those that don’t change may have been misinterpreted at some stage. However, in the absence of any kind of official online presence for Red Dwarf, we’re very intrigued by the list of what’s included. As well as uniting the BBC and Dave eras of the show in a commercial release for the first time ever, we’re promised that Just The Smegs will be there too, which is great news. It felt like the one thing that was really lacking from the previous collection. No word on Beat The Geek, though.
The small print specifies that there’ll be a whopping 32 discs, which indicates we’re getting the full extras package from the previous boxset and the individual releases. Two discs apiece for Series I-VI and BTE-XII makes 20, three each for VII and VIII brings us to 26, then single discs for Just The Smegs and The Promised Land equals 28. That leaves four discs remaining, which suggests The Bodysnatcher Collection may well be included in full this time, with the Re-Mastered episodes and all.
We’d assume that the episodes themselves will be the remasters (with a small r) from the 2019 boxset, and that the old extras will be presented on clones of the original DVDs, as before. I’m also going to guess that there’ll be no new extras to speak off, but I’ll be more than happy to be proven wrong. Release is scheduled for 6th October, so we’re looking forward to learning more – and seeing the new artwork – between now and then. And we’ve got just under four months to learn to speak fluent Emglish.
It’s the best episode of Red Dwarf of all time. Undefeated in all four of our anniversary polls so far, more often than not the winner of other wide-ranging surveys by the Smegazine and Better Than Life, and even given a special BBC2 repeat screening under the title The Best Ever Red Dwarf. It happened to be the first episode I ever saw, probably the one I’ve rewatched the most, and quite possibly the single piece of media in the entire history of human civilisation that I’m most familiar with. I could quote every line of dialogue word for word, perfectly duplicating the intonation. I can picture each and every visual effect in my mind’s eye. It taught me the words “seppuku”, “twonk” and “calamari”. After 33 years, what more could we possibly learn about this episode? Well…
I recently came into possession of a rather special script. Dated 1991. Series V. Show One. Draft One. Back To Reality. The very first draft of the very best episode of our favourite show. Only a small handful of deleted scenes are included on the DVD. A version of the script was released as part of the Primordial Soup book, but that was a much later draft, and doesn’t contain anything that wasn’t either in the episode or on the DVD. We know a lot about this episode, but we don’t know how it started out, before it was honed to perfection. Let’s do this.
We don’t have long to wait until our first piece of “new” material, coming as it does on the very first pages of the script. As a bonus, let’s also include the full scene-setting stage directions, as Primordial Soup only features a much cut-down version.
MODEL SHOT
EERIE MUSIC.
UNDERWATER. AN OCEAN BED
STRANGE, UNFAMILIAR FLORA AND FAUNA. NO FISH.
(WE MIGHT EVEN INTERCUT WITH STOCK)
WE PAN ALONG THE DETAILS OF A CRASHED SPACESHIP, THE SSS ESPERANTO.
THE MUSIC SHOCKS US, AND SUDDENLY, TWO BRILLIANT, GLARING LIGHTS FLARE THROUGH THE WATER INTO THE CAMERA
GRADUALLY, WE MAKE OUT IT IS STARBUG, SETTLING ON THE OCEAN BED, CLOSE TO THE WRECK.
OVER, WE HEAR:CREW
(TECH GOBBLEDEGOOK, ENDING IN:)
The flounder has landed!
There’s more, but we’ll pause here to note that Rob and Doug didn’t even bother to specify the technobabble that the crew would be spouting, nor which of them it is that’s speaking. This leads straight into three whole scenes that were never filmed, and mostly excluded from the script book.
UNDERWATER TANK
WE SEE A FUTURISTIC DIVING BOOT CRUNCH ONTO THE OCEAN BED. IT STEPS OUT OF FRAME, AND THE BOOT OF THE FOLLOWING DIVER CRUNCHES INTO SHOT.
A LOW ANGLE SHOT: LISTER IN DIVING SUIT, CARRYING SALVAGE EQUIPMENT, A VERY POWERFUL TORCH ON TOP OF HIS HELMET. WE CAN SEE HIS FACE THROUGH THE HELMET VISOR, WHICH IS LIT FROM INSIDE THE SUIT.
INT STARBUG COCKPIT UNDERSEA
RIMMER IS HUNCHED OVER A MONITOR, WHICH IS RELAYING SHOTS FROM LISTER’S POV.
LISTER
(DISTORT – RADIO LINK. EACH SPEECH PROCEEDED BY A BURST OF STATIC) We’ve got the airlock. It’s rusted up. We’re torching our way in.RIMMER GLANCES OVER AT A COMPUTER READOUT
RIMMER
Your vital signs are good. Pressure stable. You’ve got forty minutes.LISTER
(FZZT) It’s incredible down here, Rimmer. The plants … the colours … the peace. So tranquil. It’s like … it’s like God’s bedroom, man. I wish you could see it.RIMMER
(UNDER HIS BREATH) Bloody hippy.KRYTEN
(FZZZT) We’re through, sir.OB. INT. CRASHED VESSEL LOW LIGHT
(WE MIGHT EVEN GO BACK TO THE THAMES WATER PUMPING STATION AND SHOOT IN THOSE DARK PASSAGES AND RECESSES)
THE SHIP HAS BEEN HERE FOR SOME TIME. WATER DRIPS FROM VARIOUS PIPES. THERE IS A FILM OF WATER ON THE FLOOR. IT’S SO DARK AND GLOOMY, WE CAN’T MAKE OUT MUCH MORE.
THE CAT, LISTER AND KRYTEN APPEAR FROM AROUND A CORNER IN THEIR DIVING SUITS AND BRIGHT TORCHES, AND BEGIN CAUTIOUSLY WALKING DOWN THE CORRIDOR.
KRYTEN HAS A PSI SCAN.
HE SPOTS SOMETHING (A TERMINAL) ON THE BULKHEAD
Only the very last couple of paragraphs are included in Primordial Soup, sadly omitting the note about a potential filming location. They did indeed film it in the famous Sunbury Pumphouse, as revealed in one of our previous script forays. Lister describing things that were presumably too expensive to film is interesting, as is Rimmer’s response, but I’m glad they stuck to their nerve and went for an entirely joke-free opening for the finished episode, maintaining the dark tone for as long as possible.
This then leads into Kryten informing Rimmer that they’ve located the black box terminal, which is the where the actual final episode opens. There are a handful of minor dialogue differences in the following scenes, none of which are covered in Primordial Soup.
KRYTEN(FZZZT) Mr. Rimmer, sir. It’s only me, sir. Just to say we’ve located the black box terminal. We’re hooking up a remote link. You should be getting something now …
RIMMER
Final entry: routine stuff. They spent the day cataloguing and indexing the new life forms … Then it stops.LISTER
(VO – FZZZZT) Suddenly a salvage operation doesn’t sound quite so sexy.KRYTEN
(FZZZT) No implication intended, sir. It’s purely an observation.LISTER
(FZZZT) You’re saying some huge great damn fish has come along and eaten everything, aren’t you? You’re saying there’s some kind of gigantic prehistoric leviathan out there who’s wolfing its way through this entire ocean.
From wolf to pork, like The Three Little Pigs. I’m amused by Kryten’s almost apologetic tone when first contacting Rimmer, but it’s perhaps a hangover from earlier in Kryten’s development, rather than something the much more confident Series V version would do. We then come to the first big woofer of the episode, and an apt opportunity to see evolution in action.
CAT
(FZZZT) Wait a minute – I’ve got it: Don’t fish swim south for the winter?KRYTEN
(FZZZT) No sir, they don’t.CAT
(FZZZT) There’s no such thing as fish bank holidays? No chance they’ve all gone away for the weekend?KRYTEN
(FZZZT) Unlikely.
It’s a decent gag, but the one in the final episode is much funnier, as well as being shorter and snappier. I’d love to know how exactly that change came about – was it Rob and/or Doug going back to the script and tinkering, or did it come about more organically with the cast during rehearsals? Relatively minor alterations to the next few lines reveal a handful of discarded details about the dead crew members – the first was “approximately 35”, the second was “male… Afro-Carribean… late twenties” – before a rare early example of a Series VIII-ification of a joke is averted.
CAT
(FZZZT) Hold it, hang five, guys, I’m getting something: (INDICATES THE [NOW OOV] CORPSES) He committed suicide, he committed suicide, he committed suicide, and the fish committed suicide: there’s some kind of link there that I can’t quite put my finger on.KRYTEN
(WISTFUL – FZZZT) Suicide …CAT
(SNAPS FINGERS – FZZZT) That’s it!
Next, when Lister finds the venom, he says “Kryten – what’s this stuff?” in the script, rather than “hang on a minute guys, check this” in the episode. We then go in to what is the first deleted scene in the relevant section of the DVD, where Kryten stands around blabbering whilst in mortal danger. Just to add extra layers of deletedness, there are a handful of differences between what was initially scripted and what was shot, most but not all of which were included in the Primordial Soup version of the script.
KRYTEN
(FZZZT) Just completing the chemical analysis. Ah. Oh. We have answers.LISTER
(FZZZT) For what?KRYTEN
(FZZZT) Unfortunately, for everything.LISTER
(FZZZT) What? What?KRYTEN
(FZZZT) Oh yes, uhm, ahhh, well … No, wait … ermmm … Yes. No. Better still … Yes. Uh, Suh, sir, I am invoking Space Corps directive 1947945, which clearly states that a mechanoid may issue orders to human crew members if the lives of said crew members are directly or indirectly under threat from a hitherto unperceived source, and there is inadequate time to explain the precise nature of the enormous and most imminent … yes, terribly imminent, death threat. Under these conditions I therfore empowered to issue the order – (IN THE SAME TONE) Get the hell out of here.LISTER
(FZZZT) I’m history.THEY MAKE TO MOVE OFF
In the version they filmed, Cat and Lister have already scarpered by the time Kryten gets to the order, so he doesn’t get to actually give it. As indicated by the red sections, some bits got trimmed down between script and location, and the actual directive number Robert gives is 1975456/6. Insert Series VI style gag here. What’s really interesting is seeing the tools they would eventually use to disguise the removal of this section, laid bare in the script.
INT. STARBUG COCKPIT. GLOOMY
SHOT: LISTER’S POV MONITOR, SHOOTING THE FLOOR AS HE RUNS TOWARDS THE AIRLOCK.
RIMMER
What’s happening?KRYTEN
(FZZZT) Entering airlock – we’re on our way back, sir.LISTER’S BOOTS JUMP INTO THE AIRLOCK. WE HEAR AIRLOCK DOOR CLOSE.
KRYTEN
(FZZZT) Repressurising, now.RIMMER
Kryten – what’s going on?
We assume that this was all shot as scripted, with the exception of Kryten’s “repressurising” line going to Lister, but then rearranged in the edit. We cut out of the previous scene early, and so the information that the crew have scarpered has to be conveyed another way. So when they cut to Rimmer in the cockpit, they have to borrow some audio from another episode. Both iterations of Kryten saying “we have to go” are taken directly from The Inquisitor. It was hiding in plain sight all these years, but now we know the reason why. Furthermore, the POV footage of the crew running away is used in full screen, rather than shown on Starbug’s monitor, which allows them to shorten the gap between Rimmer’s two lines. The effect of all of this is that the story beat of Kryten analysing the venom and the crew hastily running for the airlock in a panic takes about ten seconds rather than a minute or so, maintaining the action packed pace and elevating the sense of peril.
There’s one small but notable change to the airlock scene – Cat likens the situation to “Saturday night at the knitting circle” rather than the Wailing Wall. Then we go into the deleted scene of Rimmer’s attempted joke telling, which remarkably Chris performs almost completely verbatim from the script, even down to the placement of the pauses and stuttering. The subsequent Starbug scene has one brief addition which isn’t included in the deleted scenes, so it’s unclear whether or not it was shot.
RIMMER
This venom. Are we safe in here?LISTER
Rimmer – it penetrated the hull of a class D Space Corps seeding ship. In comparison, we’re a sardine tin.HOLLY
The venom is absorbed into the hull’s metal at a molecular level. It can pass through pretty well anything.CAT
Hey – we survived one dose. We can do it again.KRYTEN
That was only an incredibly mild exposure, diluted over who knows how long. A direct hit …RIMMER
It’s moving.
Perhaps having extra detail of how the venom works at this precise stage, making it fresh in the audience’s minds, would be too much of a blatant clue as to what’s going on in the subsequent scenes. Next up, a minor rewrite to Lister’s line and Cat’s subsequent reply.
LISTER
I say move. There’s only three alternatives – It thinks we’re either a threat, food or a mate. It’s going to either kill us, eat us or hump us. We’ve got two shots at staying alive: either we dress the Starbug in sexy octopus lingerie, close our eyes and think of earth, or we get the hell out of here, PDQ. Vote?CAT
Are you out of your mind? To be humped by a giant squid – on a first date? We go.
The dialogue remains the same for the remainder of the crew’s death, but the stage directions reveal some interesting details that didn’t make the final cut. We were supposed to see a tentacle ripping off one of Starbug’s landing legs, which was perhaps a little ambitious. Although it’s interesting to note that even in this very first draft, it’s specified that “WE SEE AS LITTLE OF THE SEA CREATURE AS POSSIBLE – SHADOWS, DETAILS, ETC”, so it wasn’t a decision based on the perceived limitations of the model, like with the Self-Loathing Beast earlier in this series.
The following stage direction is included in Primordial Soup, but I’m adding it here anyway because it’s so cool.
MODEL SHOT:
STARBUG EXPLODES AND EVERYONE IS KILLED.
SO WE NEED AN EXPLOSION WHICH IS SO COMPLETE, NO-ONE COULD POSSIBLY HAVE SURVIVED IT.
WE SEE DEBRIS SINK TO THE OCEAN BED, INCLUDING KRYTEN’S HEAD, AND MAYBE THE ODD LIMB OR TWO. HUGELY SAD MUSIC, AS WE TRACK KRYTEN’S DEAD HEAD TO THE BOTTOM.
AT THIS POINT, THE MUSIC CHANGES TO AN UPBEAT ELECTRONIC ARCADE-GAME VERSION OF THE RED DWARF THEME,
AND WE MIX TO …
The thing they mix to is of course the ultimately deleted scene of our boys as computer sprites. This section of the script contains an hilarious footnote.
By hooking an Amiga up with a genlock we might get something amazing and cheap
I’m not sure what they used in the end, but the result was certainly one of those two adjectives. For the record, the script isn’t exactly the same as the version on the deleted scenes, with some extra lines that weren’t recorded, and without Kryten’s much better answer of “only deeply unpleasant ones” when asked if he has any theories.
LISTER SPRITE
Is it just me, or did everything suddenly become two dimensional?CAT SPRITE
What’s happening?RIMMER SPRITE
Kryten? Any theories?KRYTEN SPRITE
My psi-scan does not appear to be functioningOVER THEIR HEADS, THE GIANT LETTERS:
GAME OVER
APPEAR
THEY ALL LOOK UP.CAT SPRITE
I have a very bad feeling about this.RIMMER SPRITE
Oh my God …LISTER SPRITE
This can’t be happening.KRYTEN SPRITE
I’m afraid it is, sir.
Also, in the version that was recorded, Cat’s line comes before Rimmer’s, and the GAME OVER text appears after Lister’s line. Now that we’re out of the game/in the hallucination, the script reveals a handful of unrealised ideas for how things should look. It’s interesting to note that some of these details were omitted from Primordial Soup, possibly in order to make the book closer to what readers will seen on the telly.
INT. GAMING BOOTH. DAY
LISTER, RIMMER, KRYTEN AND THE CAT IN THE SAME POSITION, BUT CONNECTED TO SOME COMPUTER BANKS BY VR-ISH HELMETS, SUITS, ETC. THEY HAVE FEED TUBES ATTATCHED THROUGH MOUTHPIECES. THEY HAVE A METAL ENDOSKELETON, PRESUMABLY TO INTERACT WITH THE GAME
One detail that is in the script book, but bears repeating anyway, is that Jake Bullet is apparently a “Cyberzoid”. The “high tech electronic add-ons to his mask” that are mentioned here didn’t happen, although it does specify that he has a metal skull plate. The dialogue in this scene has only very minor variations to what ended up on screen. Originally Rimmer replied to Andy’s question of how they got killed by saying “killed?” before Kryten mentions some kind of squid. And Kryten is scripted to say “didn’t possess a laser cannon capability” rather than “have”, while Rimmer was going to say “how on Earth” instead of just “how” before calling Andy a Brummie git. That’s the level of detail we’re at. Two small trims to Andy’s dialogue too; he was going to say “Coh! How long did you play this game?” before the insufferable pratt line, and “You really don’t know about Rimmer?” before explaining he was a special agent.
The only other change in this scene is that Andy originally said “Rimmer, in you go son” instead of Kryten, so before we move on, let’s just enjoy what has since gone down in history as a legendary stage direction.
FOUR FAIRLY GOOD-LOOKING, WELL-BUILT GUYS COME IN. THESE ARE THE NEW RED DWARF PLAYERS
(ARE YOU WORRIED, YET GUYS?)
The version in Primordial Soup puts the comma in a more conventional place. Into the Recuperation Lounge scene, and there are a handful of tiny extensions to some lines. Lister originally appended “I’m not me, am I?” with “I’m someone else”, while Rimmer added “I’m not dead” to the end of “I’m not a hologram”. The stage directions also say that he “BRAYS DELIGHTEDLY” after realising he’s not Rimmer. Cat’s next line simply says “who are we?” rather than including “the hell”, whereas there’s a rather harrowing extension to Lister’s theory.
LISTER
We’re the kind of sad acts who want to spend four years playing a computer game. Either we’re running away from God knows what, or we’ve got nothing worth living for in the first place. In Red Dwarf, we didn’t have much, but we had hope. Maybe that’s what we were doing in there. Maybe artificial hope’s the only hope we’ve got.THEY ALL LOOK AT THE FLOOR FOR A WHILE
The nurse then comes in with Duane’s clothes and possessions; originally she was going to be followed by an orderly bringing in the remaining three cases, but this was streamlined by simply having the nurse say “here are your party’s clothes and possessions”. Amongst those clothes, the script says “Hush Puppies” instead of “plastic sandals”. Perhaps this was changed to avoid potentially defaming an actual brand. A much more significant change occurs shortly afterwards, where instead of Cat/Duane’s line about druids and places of worship, we get this:
RIMMER
I’m sorry, but I’m afraid it makes perfect sense … Duane. Imagine a guy with no élan, no style, a misfit. Doesn’t it make total sense that this hapless creature would give his buck teeth to play someone like the Cat in a computer game?CAT
I’m going to kill him.LISTER PUTS OUT HIS ARM TO HOLD THE CAT BACK
CAT
Let me at him! I’m going to kick him silently to death with my Hush Puppies. I’m going to electrocute him with my Bri-Nylon shirt. I’m going to rub my head in his face until he passes out with Vitalis poisoning.
Some fairly funny lines, but Cat’s quiet, contemplative confusion throughout the scene is a better choice than the angry response. And we go straight into another alteration:
RIMMER
Kryten (FLICKS FINGERS) Open the next one.KRYTEN
(WHEELS ROUND) Listen, whoever you are: don’t push your luck by ordering whoever I am around, because, whoever I am, I’m almost certainly not the kind of guy who takes crap from whoever you are, OK? Probably.LISTER
All right, chill it, guys. This is a bad time for all of us.KRYTEN
(JABBING HIS FINGER AT RIMMER) I just want it clear that I’m not your on-board mechanoid anymore. So don’t order me around until we’ve established if I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t mind being ordered around, or I’m the kind of guy who gets uptight being ordered around by the kind of guy you are. Clear?
The minor variations in word order on the bits that weren’t cut are probably down to Robert’s memory rather than deliberate rewrites. Absolutely none of this is reflected in Primordial Soup, by the way. It does however include an extra bit of Rimmer trying to justify William Doyle’s piss-stained clothing, which is also in the deleted scenes verbatim so we won’t bother transcribing it here. The rest of the scene plays out virtually as televised, other than Lister/Sebastian having a “hover” in the long term car park rather than a limo, and one extra line from Rimmer/William:
RIMMER
Well. Clearly, you were privy to all the breaks and privileges life denied poor old William Doyle, here. While you were scoring goals at the Eton Wall Game, I, no doubt, was scoring smack for my old mum.
As the episode progresses, one interesting change is that the “Vote Fascist” and “Government Informer” posters are only seen, and not read out loud by our heroes. A no-brainer really, to have the messaging made clearer for the audience and keeping the action pacey. The scene with the cop plays out almost unaltered, other than Kryten being the one to ask why the Voter Colonel had been away for four years rather than Cat, and the cop amusingly referring to the little girl as “voter urchin”.
As we start seeing glimpses of the real world, Kryten was originally going to be holding a “SMOKING FLARE GUN” rather than a harpoon. There’s no mention of speed bumps in the subsequent car chase, instead the crew “BUMP UP AND DOWN ON THEIR SEATS AND LEAN FROM SIDE TO SIDE” as they navigate “THE IMAGINARY CAR PARK’S SPIRAL EXIT”. The penultimate trimmed section from the deleted scenes comes here, with Holly interjecting to tell everyone they’re all crazy. The only other tiny difference is that Cat originally said “I need to rest” as they head to the alleyway, presumably in reference to his imaginary bullet wound to the arm.
And in a case of Grant Naylor pretty much nailing the very first draft, very little changes between now and the end of the episode. The instruction for Kryten to “walk forward three paces” is given here as “walk to your right five paces”, which was presumably only changed due to the layout of the sets. After Rimmer asks if he’s quite finished being strange, he originally said “let’s get on with it”. Then after the lithium carbonate takes effect, there’s an extra Cat line after Holly welcomes them back to reality: “This is Reality? Really Reality?” After Kryten wraps everything up, we have the final piece of trimmed dialogue from the deleted scenes (Cat speculating about there being other squids out there, which is interesting considering what we learn in Back to Earth), before an extra few lines at the top of the very last scene.
INT. STARBUG COCKPIT. GLOOMY
OVER THE FOLLOWING DIALOGUE, KRYTEN & LISTER CLIMB INTO THE DRIVING SEATS, CAT AND RIMMER STAND BEHIND, HOLLY ON MONITOR. THEY FLICK SWITCHES AND MAKE CHECKS, PREPARING TO LAUNCH FROM THE OCEAN BED
KRYTEN
It occurs – if Earth ships have seeded other planets in this way, it is entirely possible we may encounter some bizarre and unusual life forms in the months to come.RIMMER
(LOOKS AT LISTER) I think we have more than enough of those already, quite honestly, Kryten.HOLLY
Flight co-ordinates programmed, switching to pilot co-operation until we hit the surface. You’ve got the stick, Dave.
In the end, only the first bit of Holly’s line is used, over a model shot. I wonder if Kryten’s speculation was intended as foreshadowing for future adventures, bearing in mind that Back To Reality was originally intended as the opening episode of Series V. Nothing they encounter for the rest of this run fits the brief, but it could have been an alternative origin story for the Psirens, Legion, the Kinitawowi or Epideme in the years to come.
The most notable thing about this draft is just how close it is to what ended up on screen. Some of the previous early drafts we’ve looked at have felt like completely different episodes, most notably the likes of Beyond A Joke and Nanarchy. But here the fundamental structure of the episode is entirely intact, and around 95% of the dialogue is present and correct, with only the most minor of alterations for the most part. Not that this makes its dissection any less fascinating; the best ever episode of the show was almost, but not quite, perfect from the get-go, but Rob and Doug weren’t completely satisfied with getting it so close at the first attempt. They couldn’t resist a sprinkling of tinkering to ensure that the magic they captured was utilised to its absolute fullest.
Previously on G&TV, we looked at Smegheads in Seattle, a 1998 production by KCTS 9, Seattle’s local PBS station. They’d arranged a visit from Craig Charles and Danny John-Jules, who came over to be interviewed, take part in pledge drives and meet the show’s many fans in the north-west corner of the US / the south-west corner of Canada. But Smegheads in Seattle was actually the second such programme produced by the station, a sequel of sorts to 1997’s Swirly Thing Alert, which featured much the same content but with Craig joined by Robert Llewellyn instead. Taking place over the 26th and 27th May to coincide with a Series VII marathon, highlights from the weekend’s events were packaged together into a whopping two hour compilation.
Both specials were originally posted to YouTube by a user named Harlz, but they seem to have deleted them both within the last year or so. So we’re now hosting them on our own channel, as well as on the Internet Archive. And if you’ve not seen Swirly Thing Alert before, there is much to unpack. Join us below the embed for analysis and a watch-along guide to some of the highlights (and lowlights).
As with Smegheads in Seattle, it’s a fascinating glimpse of a televisual world that’s miles removed from what we’re used to in the UK. We simply didn’t have Kelsey Grammar and David Hyde Pierce coming over and compelling Channel 4 viewers to send money to keep Frasier on the air over here. And as you can tell from the topics that the boys discuss, it’s a snapshot of a very specific moment in Dwarf history; after Series VII aired but before VIII entered production, with Chris Barrie’s status as a cast member unknown, Rob and Doug’s split still fresh, and Red Dwarf: The Movie just round the corner. Ahem.
The programme is split into distinct sections. After a bit of an introductory section with Craig and Robert on location at the Northwest Folklife Festival – eating hot dogs, confusing babies, demonstrating Riverdance, that sort of thing – they arrive to the studios to rapturous applause from the assembled phone bank operators. Then it’s The Big Interview, conducted by Ken Vincent of Smegheads in Seattle fame, which finds the guys in a happy, playful and quite possibly completely jetlagged mood. We then get highlights from the pledge drive itself, where they answer viewers’ questions put to them via anchorman George Ray (along with a couple of co-hosts who we’ll get to later).
Then, the biggest section is ominously titled THE EVENT, with highlights from two different Q&A sessions at an absolutely huge-looking convention-style… event, organised by the station. It’s just like watching a DJ panel, except that the impeccably polite people of Seattle always refer to the guests as “Mr Charles” and “Mr Llewellyn”. There’s just time at the end for The Little Interview, with Sarah Getz desperately trying to squeeze one last bit of content out of the pair before they depart.
Overall, there’s a fair amount of repetition within this package, with the boys being asked a lot of questions multiple times in different sections, and trotting out anecdotes that are not only hugely familiar to us now, but that are even familiar from within the same programme. But that’s the price you pay for the luxurious two hour running time, painting a hugely detailed picture of Craig and Robert’s time in Seattle, and of the American fandom of the time. Those guys are absolutely adored, particularly Craig, and particularly by women. The pair seem humbled by the adulation at times, but they’re nevertheless on top comedic form throughout, and the homespun charm of US public broadcasting also shines through.
Here are just some of our favourite moments from this two-hour archival gem.
8:08
Robert gives Kryten’s full name as “Kryten 2X4B-52RC”, like a complete idiot.
13.58
In a discussion on other comedy robots, Robert attempts a Marvin impression, but ends up sounding exactly like Neil from The Young Ones instead.
17.11Nine years after it was published, Craig quotes the notorious City Limits review absolutely verbatim… but then follows up by saying Series 1 only got 500,000 viewers, when it was in fact over 4 million.
33.08
The subject of The Movie is raised.
I think we probably will do one. They’ve raised a lot of the money for it already. The producers and the director, Ed Bye, are absolutely determined. They’ve booked the studios and you know… Officially, we’re doing a series, Series VIII, next year, in about a year’s time, and then after that, in the Fall of next year we’re supposed to be shooting Red Dwarf: The Movie. And also I think they’re going to combine it with a live stage show, where we’re actually trying out some of the dialogue we’ll use in the movie on stage so that we get an audience response and they’ll tighten it up and change it.
35.40
Craig does his joke about aliens reaching Earth and crashing.
36.27
Series VIII will probably be the last TV series, but then they want to make movies. They’ve got like four ideas for big movies to do after that, so the fantasy is that we’ll do the last series and then we’ll do a movie a year until we’re definitely Red Dwarf: The Next Generation!
Bless their hearts.
39.06
Craig once again flirting via the medium of poetry. It seems to work.
40.52
When asked if Rimmer will be coming back, Craig very interestingly gives a completely alternate explanation for why Chris wasn’t in VII – a schedule clash that meant Craig & Chris weren’t available at the same time, so they had to choose which of them would stay for the full run and which would only do half. Considering how candidly Chris has since spoken about his desire to leave after Series VI, this smacks of towing the PR line at a time when everything is much more raw; keeping up appearances while decisions are made about what happens next.
42.01
Craig and Robert magically swap places and the female presenter, Nancy Guppy, is replaced… by Jeff Winger from Community! Joel McHale started his broadcasting career on local television, on shows such as Seattle-based SNL-alike Almost Live! and KCTS’s own Bill Nye the Science Guy. A quick scout round the internet also brings us this later clip of him flogging Swirly Thing Alert based merch, including the actual VHS that we’re watching right now.
49.03
Impromptu Tongue Tied alert. Almost all the right words, not necessarily in the right order.
51.06
Craig bounds onto stage at THE EVENT, filming proceedings on his handycam. Where’s that footage? Seasoned fans will instantly recognise the setting and what they’re wearing, for reasons we’ll come to shortly.
57:13
More poetry, as Craig performs I Want To Feel Your Bum towards a young lady in the audience.
1:04:32 A woman makes a long-winded request to sit on Craig’s lap.
1:05:25
A child asks what ‘smeg’ means, and the guys scuttle off stage on their hands and knees. It’s at this point that we realise that Joel McHale was in Red Dwarf A-Z all along, and nobody noticed!
1:06:44 Somebody starts to ask a question about Rob and Doug splitting up, and a moment of sheer terror is captured in Craig’s eyes.
1:12:53
Craig praises Beyond A Joke in the most sarcastic way possible.
1:14:57
A brief glimpse of an absolutely terrifying Inquisitor costume.
1:18:43
Craig instantly reacts to a female fan’s appearance by saying “a pretty face and a cleavage you can ski down”
1:22:47Craig instantly reacts to a male fan’s appearance by saying “I want to take you home, beat you up and call you Barbara.” The comic timing on his reply is exemplary.
1:26:36Apparently they at one point explored the idea of Daleks appearing in Red Dwarf, where they’d be nice “politically correct” Daleks. For once we’re grateful to the Terry Nation estate.
1:29:28In a recent DwarfCast, we revisited the revelation that on her first day on set, Robert asked Chloe if he could stare at her bum to get it out of his system. Turns out the anecdote was out there all along.
1:30:46
When asked to “improv” a poem, Craig launches into George McGee.
1:39:06Someone requests that Lister has a nude scene in Series VIII. Be careful what you wish for.
1:54:10For the second time in this programme, Craig puts the Shipwreck My Soul moves on an interviewer.
1:55:31
Craig does the entire Smart Shoes routine from Queeg, impressively accurately considering it’s been nine years since Series 2 was recorded.
We end on a compilation of stills of the boys eating hot dogs. And why not? The overall feeling we’re left with is one of incredible warmth. They really had a whale of a time out there, and thanks to the endeavours of both the contemporary KCTS team, and the amateur archivists that keep this stuff online, we’re still able to enjoy it vicariously too.
“Jane Killed Flick”
It’s the end of a relatively minor era, as we conclude our coverage of Volume 1 of the Red Dwarf Smegazine. Get ready for the cross-over event of the century, as one character from Back to Reality meets another character from Back to Reality, along with about fifty other comic strips of varying quality. We also uncover some scandalous censorship on the news pages, discuss Robert Llewellyn being sodomised by a rabbit, covet tiny cardboard models, deride one of the worst April Fools jokes of all time, and stalk a baby. It’s quite the ride.
We recommend reading along as you listen; you can find scans of the mag at archive.org or Stasis Leak.
DwarfCast 176 – The Smegazine Rack – Issue #14 (278 MB)
Show notes Buy The Thursday Man by Grant Naylor on Amazon! * Robert Llewellyn on KYTV – with no actual sodomy, but plenty of slightly less rude antics * Limmy and the paper aeroplane * Book ‘Em and Risk It*, an accidentally topical G&TV * Norman Lovett plays with his dolls house * Cool to do drugs.
Well, here’s one for all the fans who wanted Doug to write a new novel. Please, ignore that monkey’s paw curling its finger…
Thank you to clem over on the forum for spotting that Doug Naylor will be releasing a new children’s book this September, entitled Sin Bin Island.
At the end of each year, four pupils from Cyril Sniggs’s Correctional Orphanage for Wayward Boys and Girls are banished to Sin Bin Island, an eerie place surrounded by eel-infested waters. Legend has it, the island has a secret tunnel, used to smuggle magic into mainland England. But in over 300 years the tunnel has never been found. Nor has any of the magic. This year, all that’s going to change.
How intriguing! We’ll have to wait until September to see if Cyril Sniggs’s controversial ‘abandon children on the secret magic eel island’ will pay off for the lad.
The book is aimed at children 9 to 11, and as someone with a child who will be approaching that age range when this is released I’m really looking forward to seeing what Doug can bring to not quite young adults’ fiction. This definitely seems to be one of those books that will be on the darker side of things, possibly more in line with things like Lemmony Snicket that anything else, and I really do hope he’s able to bring some of the Naylor magic that a lot of us experienced as kids reading the Red Dwarf novels, but this time to the next (next) generation.
2025 marks the fortieth anniversary of Comic Relief, the charity founded by Richard Curtis and Lenny Henry in the aftermath of Band Aid and Live Aid, to raise further funds for the victims of famine in Ethiopia. And today is Red Nose Day, the charity’s now annual fundraising event in aid of various good causes throughout Africa and the UK. There was a time when this was unmissable television, with the greatest names in alternative comedy taking over BBC One for an evening of innovative, subversive and hilarious sketches and stand-up. Nowadays there’s barely a comedian to be seen, with regular big name presenters introducing skits featuring reality stars and VTs about TV personalities taking on endurance events. And yet they seem to be raising more money than ever, with over £1.6 billion donated over the years, so it’s hard to argue really.
But it took a few years for the telethon format to be established, with the charity’s early revenue streams coming from one-off live shows, books, singles, albums and videos. The very first Comic Relief event was held at the Shaftesbury Theatre in April 1986 – a star-studded stage show over three nights, recorded for later broadcast and home release. And the video of said event is what we’re looking at today. I came across it recently and was shocked at just how many Dwarfy names were involved. The unmistakable voice of Chris Barrieis heard in a couple of Spitting Image skits, Howard Goodallis involved as part of Rowan Atkinson’s live troupe, Mike Agnew was the production manager, the editor was Ed Wooden, the producer wasEd Bye, and Paul Jackson is credited as both a director and for co-ordinating the VHS release. Add in Lenny Henry, French & Saunders, Billy Connolly, Stephen Fry, the aforementioned Rowan Atkinson and the entire Young Ones cast to the mix, and this is truly a gathering of all the biggest legends of 1980s comedy, on both sides of the camera.
It’s a strong opening as Rowan Atkinson appears basically as Mr Bean, several years before Mr Bean. Then we’re straight into Chris as Prince Andrew, making jokes about his sexual proclivities. If only they knew. A brilliantly deranged French & Saunders sketch is followed by a mediocre Howard Jones performance, before a classic Rowan sketch where he’s a vicar, with Howard Goodall on the organ. Ben Elton introduces Rik Mayall, dressed as The Young Ones’ Rick, singing a song about his arse, insulting the audience, swearing and doing a lot of one liners, some of which would later be immortalised in Bottom Fluff. The rest of the Young Ones gang then emerge to sing the inaugural Comic Relief single Living Doll, disappointingly with Bob Geldof rather than Cliff.
Bob returns in the next sketch, but with a rubbery face and voiced by Chris Barrie, who swears more in this brief skit than in the entire rest of his career. Then the real Bob pops up again, with Midge Ure and Stephen Fry, performing a Python sketch. Lenny Henry harasses a woman as Theophilus P. Wildebeeste, before Rowan returns to take the school register. Kate Bush is the next musical guest, and she’s followed by Nigel Planer’s Neil introducing Ben Elton, who unfortunately does some of his stand up. Rowan returns to save the day, singing a duet with Kate Bush, as you do, before Christopher Ryan (not as Mike Thecoolperson) introduces Lenny Henry and Frank Bruno performing Romeo & Juliet, obviously. Billy Connolly is the stand-up headliner, as is good and right, before the evening ends with the ensemble singing Do They Know It’s Christmas, despite it being April. You can glimpse several performers there who aren’t featured in the video, such as Angus Deayton, Pamela Stephenson and Rusty Goffe, so who knows what other treats fell foul of Ed Wooden’s scissors.
It’s well worth an hour and a half of your time, as it no doubt contains more laughs than this evening’s five hour telethon will manage.
As a community, Red Dwarf fandom has always been pretty good at knowing when anything Dwarf-related is about to drop. We’re there for new episodes, whether they’re premiering on TV or showing up a week early on an app; we know when to expect new DVDs and Blu-Rays to drop (even if Play.com doesn’t exist any longer to get them to us days ahead of release); and we have a pretty good idea of any Red Dwarf books, badges, T-shirts, mugs, magazines, posters, models and figurines that are coming our way. (Ahhh, so you’re a keyring man!)
It was a surprise, then, to learn from thomasaevans in the G&T forums at the start of this year that BearManor Media was publishing a new Red Dwarf book, Comedy, Chaos – and Cowboys! The Red Dwarf Companion by Joe Nazzaro.
And not only that, but that this book would be a detailed account of the making of Red Dwarf Series VI, based on notes taken for the contemporary (well, 1994) book release The Making Of Red Dwarf.
And not only that, but that this new book was also already available to order and read immediately.
For whatever reason, this book had gone completely under the radar of most of us, with even the most enthusiastic Red Dwarf fans unaware that it was even on the horizon.
But is it worth your time and money? Let’s find out.
MaroondudFirst impressions upon receiving the book and flicking through it are that it looks pretty cheap, especially given the not-inconsiderable price – just over £20 for the softcover that I purchased, with an alternative option to pay just under £30 for a hardcover version.
An Amazon print-to-order job – nothing wrong with that per se for a small-press, limited-interest title like this one – the book is a couple of hundred pages long and is made up almost entirely of text. And minimally-formatted text, at that, with the main body of the book – a diary of the making of Series VI – not broken down into chapters or other similarly digestible chunks, but instead just interrupted occasionally by capsule interviews (which would presumable be sidebar items in a more snazzily-designed volume).
Meanwhile, there’s only one cast photo in the entire book: a horizontal promo shot from Emohawk that’s bizarrely chopped in half and recomposited into a vertical image for the book’s cover, surrounded by a duff solid-maroon border. (The photo does reappear inside fully intact – albeit in black-and-white.)
Oh, and the thin cardboard cover quickly becomes more curly than Kevin Kennedy eating a packet of Quavers while watching the Three Stooges.
But evaluating a tome on the basis of its outer casing is the kind of mistake that a snappy idiom should really be coined to warn against. Because once you get past the somewhat cheap first impressions, the book has a lot more to offer.
BookwordsAfter a brief introduction that sets the scene and establishes Nazzaro’s seemingly unimpeded access to the production during the making of Series VI – as well as explaining that this book is essentially a full account of the notes that were massively condensed down for The Making Of Red Dwarf – we launch straight into the diary with details of filming for Psirens on location at Bankside Power Station.
And immediately, you get the sense of an account of the making of Red Dwarf that’s quite different to any other, with a level of depth and detail that simply doesn’t exist for any other series of the show.
I’m not going to spoil most of the details of this book, as the primary enjoyment of reading it comes from the myriad tiny discoveries that you make as you’re reading through Nazzaro’s accounts of how certain sequences were filmed, and when. And obviously, the degree to which you’re surprised by many of these details will depend on how well-versed you are in the behind-the-scenes details of the show. But even as someone who pays attention to this stuff, there was plenty here that was new to me.
Whether it’s finding out that the thing on Rimmer’s belt in Series VI is a Space Corps Directive computer (ultimately never referred to as such within the show), hearing about Clare Grogan’s awkwardness on set while filming her Psirens cameo, reading the deleted history of Kryten’s connoisseur chip or discovering yet another Covington Cross connection, there are countless small details revealed here that might not exactly blow your socks off, but could conceivably cause a lightweight scarf to flap around a bit.
For me personally, much of the interest came from reading additional details that I’d never heard before on how some of the effects in the show were achieved – like the process that the cast had to sit through to record their contributions to Legion’s face-morph effect, or the various ways in which Rimmer’s disembodied light bee is brought to life.
It’s also always revealing to hear about certain sets or props being reused in a way that isn’t immediately obvious on-screen, like the simulant ship bridge that doubles as its own escape pod, or the teleporter that also functions as an AR machine.
And even for the production elements that are more familiar, there’s still a pleasing time-capsule quality that comes with seeing now-classic moments of Red Dwarf lore – say, something like the “Mr Guitar” smeg-up – reported contemporaneously, as a live event captured by an on-set witness.
As well as these specific details, in places the book also touches on some of the more well-worn aspects of Red Dwarf in general and Series VI in particular. This includes the notably more formulaic approach to joke-writing – an element of the show that, if someone were deranged enough, could become the subject of a 5,000-word article – as well as the evolving interplay between the actors, with the book not shying away from now-hoary old tales such as Chris being annoyed by Craig spooking the horses on the set of Gunmen.
But given that it’s presented contemporaneously – in an as-it-happened diary format rather than with the distance of the 30+ years of history that have come and gone since then – it still feels like these aspects are spontaneous commentary rather than simply rehashing what is now received wisdom.
And inevitably, there were quite a few stories in here that were new to me, even if they might not be new to all Red Dwarf aficionados. There are details of the temptresses scene in Psirens being perceived to be a bit pony (and being reshot, only for the original version to be used after all); there’s a slightly unsettling account of Danny’s shock at being hit by discharge from blanks fired during the filming of Gunmen; and there’s an account of how the peanuts from Legion came back to haunt the set while filming Rimmerworld.
Sometimes it’s a little frustrating that pieces of information are repeated across the book – whether it’s facts about filming, descriptions of elements of the setup, or quotes that turn up both within the set diary and as part of the separate interview segments – but not to the extent that it’s a huge distraction.
More distracting, though, is the occasional sense of snide snarkiness or condescending irritability in the tone of the writing. I’m sure that there were moments when Nazzaro felt frustrated or annoyed on-set, but given that the main readership for this book is going to be people that would love to have been given the opportunity to catch even a glimpse of what he was able to experience for several weeks – and for a paying job, no less – it can sometimes seem a bit churlish for him to seem so pissed off at being there.
Thanks For De Emmony?As well as the various nuts and bolts of the filming process, a wider picture also emerges of the general sentiments of the cast and crew around the filming of Series VI – and I found it interesting that the contemporary impression differs quite a bit to the memories that have been shared by the cast since.
Compared with The Starbuggers documentary on the Series VI DVD, for example, it paints the picture of a more disorganised and chaotic set, with the actors often critical of Andy De Emmony and his approach to some of the setups.
More than once, there’s an implication that a lack of experience or lack of confidence on De Emmony’s part has contributed to the filming process being longer or more difficult than necessary, and there are also suggestions that his directorial emphasis is sometimes misplaced – that he doesn’t quite understand the tone of the show and its balance of sci-fi action and drama with sitcom comedy, or doesn’t quite grasp key aspects of the characters.
It makes you wonder whether the ultimate end result of Series VI – not only one of the highest-rated series of Red Dwarf among fans, but also the series that won the show its International Emmy Award – was so positive that a lot of these criticisms were quickly forgotten in the aftermath.
Which is what makes a contemporary set report like this all the more interesting, of course. It’s a more raw, more critical take on the production process, and it gives the book a unique point of view compared to other documentaries that have gone over the same ground.
Cans Of WormsThose criticisms of De Emmony and the production process aren’t the end of the bitching, either. There are multiple indications here from cast members of their dissatisfaction with the show, and again it makes for a fascinating contemporary account.
Some of these gripes are fairly familiar and well-worn by now: Robert Llewellyn bemoaning the uncomfortable (albeit improved) mask and costume that he has to wear as Kryten, or Chris Barrie complaining about Ace Rimmer’s wig not being quite right this time around, and affecting the performance.
Meanwhile, some of them are a little less well-known but still unsurprising, such as Chris’ feelings about how unsatisfactory the production process has been without Ed Bye at the helm, voicing sentiments here that evoke the Starburst interview where he shared the complaints that ultimately led to him leaving the show in Series VII.
But some of them are wholly new – to me, at least. These include the serious possibility of Danny John-Jules (and Cat) leaving the show altogether over a pay dispute – with Rob Grant and Doug Naylor supposedly having begun to write a version of Series VI without the character – only for the situation to be saved by a late-in-the-day phone call between Danny and Rob.
When you’re so familiar with the cast’s retellings of the behind-the-scenes process over the years – especially Danny’s general warmth and levity – it’s pretty arresting to hear stories of him having been told in the past that the role of the Cat would be recast if he didn’t agree to low pay (in comparison with some of his co-stars), and especially so to hear him coming out with quotes like “I’ve been working with a foot on my neck from day one” or suggesting that “Robert had been promoted above me” since Kryten joined the show.
Elsewhere, the interviewees also share various comments about the egos of Rob and Doug, complaints about late scripts and frustrations with organisational aspects of making Series VI, and even criticisms of the writing – such as Chris’s carping about the relatively brief and superficial use of Ace Rimmer in Emohawk.
(Which only makes it all the funnier that the two writers then incorporated many of these cast gripes into the “morale meeting” scene that kicks off Out Of Time.)
And it’s not just the cast who get detailed interviews. As well as dedicated conversations focusing on elements such as production design and costume, Rob and Doug also get their own interview – in which they tell a slightly different story about aspects such as script lateness, including teasing a couple of ideas that were planned for Series VI but never made it to the screen. And De Emmony also has an interview in which he’s able to put forward his own personal take on the filming process, even as he’s still in the middle of it.
It all makes you realise that no matter how much we’ve been spoiled with the documentaries on the DVDs – and more recently, on Dave – outside of the footage shot during the filming of the show itself, we very rarely get direct, contemporary accounts of the making of the show. We’re always hearing about making Red Dwarf after-the-fact: stories and anecdotes that have been honed to their most palatable form and shorn of the raw strength of feeling that’s evident in these pages.
It’s a far cry from the relatively sanitised making-of tales that you hear in most documentaries, and it all makes for the most unvarnished, warts-and-all account of making Red Dwarf that I’ve ever read – and that alone makes it essential reading for any fans of the show.
Having said all of that, despite the book providing maybe the most detailed overview of Series VI that we’re ever likely to get, there’s also a sense of things being missing from it when it comes to the larger context.
Most fans who are willing to spend twenty quid on an all-text making-of book about a specific series of Red Dwarf are probably going to have some awareness of other aspects that inform the production. Not just the previous history of the show, but also stuff like the problems that beset the production of Series V, or the then-recent attempt to remake the show in the US; as well as the future developments that are only vaguely foreshadowed here such as the split between Rob and Doug, Chris’s temporary departure or the recasting of Kochanski.
But aside from a couple of oblique references to some of these ideas in interviews, there isn’t really any acknowledgement of that wider context at all. It’s all presented as-is rather than being rewritten from a more contemporary viewpoint, which means that readers will have to make a lot of these wider connections themselves.
But when you put this book together with all of the other sources at our disposal – the documentaries, the books, the aborted Series VI making-of documentary that we saw snatches of on the DVD, even the Smegazines coming out at the time – you can piece together a picture of how Series VI came together that is perhaps more complete and comprehensive than any other era of Red Dwarf. And for any fan, that has to make it worth a read.
Future EgosBut wait: there’s more.
Because the very final pages of this book depart from the set-report format and tell the story of what came next in the production – not of Series VI, but of the very book that you’re reading.
As I mentioned at the top of this review, the extensive notes presented in this book were eventually whittled down to become 1994’s glossy account of the production of Gunmen, published as The Making Of Red Dwarf.
But as it turns out, the story of how this book became that book is almost as interesting as the production of Series VI itself; and the “story about the story” that makes up the final pages of this volume is as revealing as anything in the main body of the text.
Again, without spoiling the whole thing, we hear accounts of the general workings of GNP that feel pretty revealing of the chaos of the time – again suggesting that there were big egos at play when dealing with Rob and Doug, as well as a dysfunctional approach to Red Dwarf’s book publishing interests that also takes in the upheaval that was then happening with the (ultimately abandoned) third Grant Naylor novel.
Given his accounts of how he was messed around by GNP and his book effectively torn up and rewritten, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Nazzaro comes out of the experience sounding pretty disheartened – which makes it feel all the more cheering that his original extensive account did eventually make it to print, albeit 30 years later, and is now available for all to read.
Edit-emeNow, I’ve saved this final section for the end because I didn’t want to continually harp on about it during the discussion of the book’s content. But one major drawback for this title is that it is riddled with errors.
The occasional error is forgivable, but these errors are a lot more than occasional. And they run the gamut from factual errors (fairly rare, but still irritating), to all manner of other problems that really should have been caught in editing: typos, formatting errors, misspellings, sentences that just break off entirely and leave you
It isn’t nitpicking to call out these errors, because some of them really affect the book’s readability: when Q&A sections have questions from the interviewer in bold and answers from the interviewee in standard type, an unbolded question makes you wonder who else is speaking. When certain lines are repeated wholesale, it makes you wonder whether there’s been a printing or editing error and you’re reading the same section again.
It’s no exaggeration to say that it feels like an old text file of the original notes, dumped into a book with little to no editing or proofreading, and sold on to fans for twenty quid.
I have no idea whether the market for this kind of niche-interest book makes it financially viable to pay for extravagant indulgences like a proofreader or editor, and I’m sympathetic to anyone trying to get a small-press book like this published on a shoestring budget – but frankly, the errors still feel a little hard to justify given that there are people in the G&T community who would have done it for free.
So while (as I’m sure you can tell from what I’ve written above) I don’t regret paying for what I got, there’s also a sense that a little more care could have helped this book to feel special in a way that it struggles to achieve in such an unpolished state.
Maybe that thrown-together quality makes it a fitting tribute to Series VI, a series which this book makes clear had one of the most ramshackle production processes of the show’s history. And I don’t want to sound entitled or ungrateful for what is still a very interesting read.
But with a bit more effort and a bit more polish, Comedy, Chaos – and Cowboys! The Red Dwarf Companion could have ended up as a truly great read, rather than the merely good read that it turned out to be.
From the Robert Llewellyn interview in Smegazine Vol. 1 Issue #13, as recently revisited by the DwarfCast Smegazine Rack:
RL: But I’ve known Mac for years and years, in fact I did my first ever television work with him. It was in about 1980, I think, in some weird programme for Channel 4 – it was recorded before the channel started.
TS: What was that?
RL: Bookem and Riskit. It was a pretty appalling experience. It was the first time I’d done any telly and it was a bit of a shock – very different to Red Dwarf and very different to anything else I’ve done since. But it did get broadcast – once – I think it was on the third day Channel 4 went out, and it was watched by about 7 or 8 people over the whole country, including me.
This sounds like a job for the potty-mouthed archivists! We immediately set out to track down any known recordings of this obscure and elusive pilot, utilising all our detective skills, industry contacts and technical wizardry… only to discover that our good friend Jonsmad had already sent us a link to it months ago. So… good.
The upload comes via comedy writer Bill Matthews (creator of Never Mind The Buzzcocks and They Think It’s All Over, fact fans), who was a very early adopter of VHS. The sound is horribly distorted at the start, but it sorts itself out around twenty minutes in.
I absolutely love this. A glimpse at a time when both television and comedy were pushing new boundaries, reinventing themselves before our eyes. And it’s a time that’s vitally important to the genesis of our favourite show – while Robert and Mac were cutting their teeth here, Son of Cliché started on Radio 4 in the same month. Of course, not all of the material on display works, and some of it is downright awful. But I guess that’s the “risk it” part of the title, and you can’t fault the ethos of giving a platform to so many new and interesting acts – none of whom would ever have been considered for television just a couple of years earlier – and seeing what works. The great Arnold Brown delivering killer one liners to absolute silence is very much my cup of tea. Arden and Frost coming on at the end and completely stealing the show, doing their own brand of crowd work with an audience that includes Ben Elton and Andy De La Tour, alternative comedy pioneers who presumably just came along to see their mates. Oh, and another fun fact – mime artist Adrian Barclay played the notoriously terrifying kids’ TV character Mr Noseybonk.
As for our Red Dwarf contingent, Robert is unsurprisingly for this era there as part of his comedy song and dance troupe The Joeys. They do their number Men Rap, and if you’re struggling to make it out with the audio issues, here’s a cleaner version from Pyjamarama. Whereas Mac is part of a double act called The Chip Shop Show, which has shades of his more famous Human Jukebox set up, with its homemade but fairly elaborate props to aid the comedy. He whisks us off to the far off space year of 2023 for a sci-fi parody with some jokes not a million miles away from Red Dwarf. Clearly the man was destined for the role of Hollister even at this stage.
“A side-swipe at oven chips”
As we enter the twentieth anniversary year of one of the most seminal short films of all time, it’s an opportunity for us to reflect on our own pasts as we explore the The Movie: Yeah No Yeah No DVD, which features among its bonus material the entirety of Red Dwarf VII. It’s the most personal trip down memory lane in our Re-Disc-overy series so far, as we not only commentate on the fan films, but also reveal all the behind the scenes details of the haphazard production processes, cringe at our past selves’ incompetence, and consider how one simple film-making competition ultimately changed all three of our lives.
But that’s not all, as there’s an awful lot to discuss in the rest of this three disc package too. Join us as we attempt to make amends for our past criticism of someone who really didn’t deserve it, reminisce about the time Grant Naylor Productions threatened us with legal action, piece together Chris Barrie’s whereabouts during the bits of Series VII he wasn’t in, reveal the link between this DVD and the world of gardening, and begin to assemble our complete history of Red Dwarf via the medium of cancelling every single person involved.
DwarfCast 175 – Re-Disc-overy: Series VII (335 MB)
Show notes Contemporary reviews from Ian and Cappsy * The Flymo Garden Vac 2700W Turbo * The Movie: Yeah No Yeah No bonus features – the video bits are also on YouTube for convenience * They’re amazing, and they’re machines * Early drafts of all the Series VII scripts, plus our original analysis of Identity Within* from before the DVD version was made * This is what Danny found in his DVD case. Aww.
BUT BRITISH COMEDY GUIDE TOLD US THEY WERE FILMING IT LAST OCTOBER.
Things have been suspiciously quiet on the new Red Dwarf front for some time, following last year’s unconfirmed rumblings. While we were always cautious, we did expect there to be some confirmation from official sources by the end of 2024, following the well established pattern of such things usually coming several months after the cast start blabbing. But while there’s still no actual confirmation either way, Craig Charles has spoken to the Radio Times about it, and the outlook is suddenly much more pessimistic.
“I’m not sure that it will come back, to be honest,” he exclusively told RadioTimes.com.
“I know that the deal that we had to make it this year looks like that might not be happening now.
“I can’t really say any more on that because I don’t know much more, but I just know that there have been lots of conversations about cost, and I think [the episodes] might be too expensive.”
He clarified: “It’s not that we don’t want to do it, it’s a case of we’re trying to get it done… [it’s] happening in television all the time at the moment, there doesn’t seem to be that much money around.”
Well, bugger. As we’ve discussed before, it’s certainly true that there’s somewhat of a cash-flow crisis in British television at the moment, with new commissions slowing down significantly post-lockdown. I’d always feared that, away from the “main” channels, Red Dwarf‘s relative expensiveness might be its downfall. Scripted television, be it comedy or drama, is always more expensive than non-scripted. For a broadcaster like UKTV, they can churn out several series of a panel show or an authored doc for the same price as one Red Dwarf special. You might argue that Dwarf would get higher ratings, is more prestigious and has much more of a home media market than any of their other shows, and you’d be right. But schedules need to be filled, and money is not abundant. It’s sad, but it makes sense – scripted comedy may be beyond the reach of anyone other than the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky right now.
We can however take heart from the fact that all parties seemingly still want to make it happen. The cast and Doug are clearly up for it, and I’m certain that UKTV would still love to have new Dwarf at the heart of its original programming in an ideal world. Maybe it will be possible if things pick up in the next couple of years. Maybe there’s a way of adjusting existing plans to make it cheaper without compromising quality. Or maybe we have to come to terms with the fact that the show might not be coming back in its current format. Maybe it’s time to explore other media once more, if there are still stories that need to be told. Maybe we just say “sod it, it had a good run, let’s just enjoy what we’ve already got”.
The production of Red Dwarf has never been smooth. From 1994 onwards, there’s almost always been a mad scramble to get anything made. It took three years after Back To Earth to make Series X. It took three further years to make Series XI and XII, and then another three to make The Promised Land. That’s not normal. Making Red Dwarf is exceptionally difficult, at every stage of development. And as fans, we’ve always greeted each new production block with immediately wanting to know what’s coming next, and when that will be. We’ve never stopped and considered that maybe there’s nothing next, and maybe that’s okay. There is still hope, but maybe we ought to think about adjusting our mindsets, just in case.
UPDATE – 4:37pm, 20/01/25
Radio Times have now published the rest of what Craig said which is a lot more optimistic in tone, and quite spoilerific.
“It was never done on the cheap, Red Dwarf, [but] now you can make things look so much better for so much cheaper.
“Hopefully the stars will align and we’ll get it done because we all want to do it. The script is great.
“I can’t really tell you much about the script, but it’s very Lister-heavy and it involves a lot of this new AI technology and stuff like that.”
“I really wanted to make it,” Charles continued. “It’s an absolutely stunning script, and the bits that we’ve seen in mock-ups that we’ve we’ve mocked together, it just looks stunning.”
Charles went on to hint that the new episodes could involve Lister coming face-to-face with his younger self, saying: “I don’t know if this is giving anything away, but if you think that it’s me at the age of 60 acting against me at the age of 23… it looks stunning, you’re like, ‘F**king hell, how did they do that?!’
“But can we afford to make it? That’s the big thing.”
I haven’t decided what I think about the above yet, I’m too pissed off with the Radio Times for double dipping so egregiously. If you put all of Craig’s quotes together, you get a totally different picture than just the pessimistic ones on their own. They’ve sacrificed journalistic integrity for clicks. We shouldn’t be surprised.
We have some very sad news to report. As announced by his team on his Patreon, Tony Slattery has passed away following a heart attack, aged just 65.
Tony was at one stage one of the most ubiquitous figures on British television, having risen to fame as the breakout star of Whose Line Is It Anyway?. Panel show infamy soon followed, including multiple guest slots in the early days of Have I Got News For You, a stint as a team captain on the TV version of Just A Minute and hosting Channel 4’s The Music Game. His acting roles included the movies The Crying Game and Peter’s Friends, his own sitcom Just A Gigolo and of course Red Dwarf. One of the rare performers to have played two different characters on the show, he started off as the voice of the android actor in Kryten, before returning as Rimmer’s nemesis dispensing machine in Only The Good… He’ll be remembered as one of the most talented improvisers the world of comedy has ever seen.
Sadly, he’ll also be remembered for his well-documented fall from these huge heights. He suffered terribly with depression and substance addiction, eventually being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Those who attended Dimension Jump in 2018 can’t have failed to spot that these issues were still evident at that point. There was a very clear sense that he wasn’t being supported in the way he both needed and deserved, and that those who were supposed to be looking after him were doing nothing of the sort. Things seemed to be improving in recent years, with Tony’s public appearances becoming both more common and more coherent. It’s an absolute tragedy – if not a total surprise – that this brilliant genius has left us so soon, and that he’s done so without ever getting the opportunity to bounce all the way back.
It’s abundantly clear from the tributes being left online in the last hour or so that Tony was incredibly well loved, with fans and fellow comedians alike sharing their stories. If nothing else, the incongruity of his current Twitter banner would have amused him, I think. Rest in peace, Tony.
Ah yes, it’s time for our annual opportunity to take a breather from the relentless pace of Red Dwarf news, and reflect back on the last twelve months’ worth of exciting developments. Or at least it would be had there been any. Something nearly happened in the late Spring, but that was about it. Oh well, thanks for coming anyway. While you’re here, we might as well look back on the things that nearly happened anyway, plus some bits that did happen but weren’t deemed interesting enough for a proper news post at the time, and a reminder of the nonsense that we ourselves churned out to help fill the void. By which I mean: Welcome to the Ganymede & Titan Review of the Year 2024!
The biggest story of the year was of course the news that new Red Dwarf would definitely be filmed in October, if you have no sense of media literacy whatsoever. What actually happened is that Craig and Chris both made off-the-record indications at conventions that a new special was being worked on, which Robert failed to confirm or deny on one of his YouTube live streams. A couple of weeks later, Robert gave more details in another stream, which this time got picked up by the online press, and we ended up getting a bit angry about it.
Unfortunately, it seems that our scepticism was indeed well-placed. The proposed filming date of October has been and gone, the rumour mill has gone quiet, and there’s been absolutely no indication from any official parties that a new Red Dwarf project has been commissioned. The latest we heard was Chris saying in an interview that they’re planning to shoot a special in 2025. Let’s keep our fingers crossed, and hopefully nobody will jump the gun again this time.
In terms of things that have actually happened, UKTV had a big old rebrand, unfathomably changing the name of Red Dwarf‘s erstwhile home to U&Dave. We give it another eighteen months tops before they change it back. But in the meantime, they did do an advert in which a hologram of Cher beams on board Red Dwarf to dance with the Cat, so that’s technically some Dwarfy output this year, right? The show did appear on BBC Two this year as well, with Series III being repeatedin October and November. There was a brief moment of excitement when the Dave era disappeared from BBC iPlayer for a few weeks, but it’s all back now.
In terms of fan endeavours this year, a new book, Red Dwarf: Discovering The TV Series Volume I by Tom Salinsky, has hit the virtual shelves. It combines behind-the-scenes history with critical analysis of the episodes themselves, covering up to and including Series VI in this first volume, with the rest to follow soonish. Meanwhile, our long term podcast rivals over at Gazpacho Soup bowed out, bringing The Garbage Podcast to a close after twelve years as they completed their coverage of every single episode. So we won that. We won the podcasts.
Some small crumbs of further news to pad out this meagre feast. Pinewood closed down their TV studios, which means that if there is any new Dwarf, it won’t be filmed in the same place as it was from Series XI onwards. Props from Dwarf and many others were on display in Mike Tucker’s Set to Stun exhibition. Plus, Craig Charles appeared on the front page of the Daily Star, with a heartfelt endorsement of Angel Delight. It was that sort of year.
And finally, the late breaking news is that Doug is publishing a new novel in 2025, and all we know so far is that it’s not a Red Dwarf one. This is most welcome – his first non Dwarf project since 2014’s Over To Bill, which in itself was his first since The 10%ers.
And so on to our own endeavours this year, a year in which G&T’s output could be generously described as quality over quantity. The DwarfCasts are getting longer, while the opportunities for the three of us to gather together are getting rarer. Nevertheless, we’ve managed to tick off Issues 11, 12 and 13 of the Smegazine, and the Series VI DVD (with the Series VII edition currently in the edit) from our list of ongoing projects, as well as a special edition on all things Bottom. We’ve also been pissing about with videos a bit, such as a round-up of all the people and objects named Frank, an exploration of AI’s capabilities to produce Dwarf content, and a two part Sporcle quiz extravaganza.
Our written content has also been few and far between, but we’re quite pleased with what is there. Our pal Dave contributed a guest post on Red Dwarf‘s history with running jokes and repetition, I attempted to figure out exactly how many Starbugs have appeared in the show, we revisited a particularly momentous edition of Carrott’s Lib, and I dedicated far too much time to researching each and every actor to have appeared in both Red Dwarf and Doctor Who.
Oh, and we changed the rules of Smegle to stop people from being guaranteed a win if they guessed the right series. In your faces.
Before we sign off, we must of course raise a glass to those we’ve lost this year. Hinton Battle, who played the Cat in the first US pilot, but was better known as a prolific and multiple award-winning Broadway star, died in January aged 67. Then in June, we lost the great Nicholas Ball, Red Dwarf‘s original Simulant in Justice, at the age of 78. Here at G&T we continue to keep the flame burning for our friend Seb Patrick, and this year we had the pleasure of attending two events held in his honour: The Seb Patrick Experience, an exhibition of his various collections; and a special cinema screening of The King of Kong, put on by 90 Minute Film Fest.
So that was 2024, yet another year where there’s been a notable absence of proper Red Dwarf content, but where the fans have kept themselves busy anyway. The Smega-Drive continues to spread memes far and wide, and our Forum continues to bustle. We sincerely hope that next year will indeed see our boys return to the studio for another special, and/or that Rob Grant’s buttski finally bears fruit. But even if it doesn’t, we’ll still be here to entertain ya. Happy New Year and goodwill to all fans.
“Flicky Mint Cake”
Welcome back to the Rack! The latest installment in our periodical drama takes us back to March 1993, a time when perhaps too much information about the forthcoming Series VI is being made public, Rob and Doug’s relationship is definitely absolutely fine, and the elephant in Hattie Hayridge’s room goes unaddressed. Join us as we witness a space monkey genocide, “enjoy” a double length Androids and contemplate life as a living fridge, a sentient armchair and a big fish-frog thing. Plus spend far too long indulging in nostalgia for analogue-based editing systems. Seriously, that’s most of the podcast.
In order for any of the above to make sense, you’ll need a copy of the mag to refer to, which you can find via archive.org or Stasis Leak.
DwarfCast 174 – The Smegazine Rack – Issue #13 (204.6 MB)
Show notes The Smegazine strips organised by series, by Warbodog (huge spoilers if you’re reading the mags along with us) * Starburst’s review of the Smegazine * Danny found someone who likes Timewave* * Building a Human, because any excuse
The world’s longest running science-fiction series (if you ignore the sixteen years where only one actual episode was made) turns 61 today. Doctor Who is without doubt the second best British sci-fi show ever, and unsurprisingly there are multiple connections between it and Red Dwarf. In this article, we list the whopping fifty-five actors who have appeared in both shows, or in the case of Doctor Who, one of its official televised spin-offs. Not all of these people were credited on both shows, and some of them took some significant tracking down, but thanks to resources such as TARDIS Wiki, TOS’s Complete Guide, IMDb’s collaborations search, Movie Dude’s Pictorial Filmography and our very own Smega-Drive, we think we’ve caught them all.
We’re ignoring those who have only ever appeared in one or more of 1000+ audio plays produced by Big Finish, although a special shout-out has to go to Officer Rimmer‘s Captain Herring actor Stephen Critchlow, who appeared in 24 full length productions and almost all of their Subscriber Short Trips mini-episodes. But we start with the first guest actor ever to appear in Red Dwarf…
The third person seen on screen after Chris Barrie and Craig Charles was Robert Bathurst (b. 1957) as Todhunter. An actor of such prolificity that his filmography on Wikipedia is a whole separate page, it’s surprising that it was as recently as 2021 before he added Who to his CV, appearing as General Farquhar, the founder of UNIT, in Survivors of the Flux. Having set the organisation up and recruited Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, he was unfortunately assassinated by one of his key assistants, who turned out to be the big evil alien The Grand Serpent in deep cover.
Fellow The End cast member Mark Williams (b. 1959) appeared in three episodes of Red Dwarf as Petersen, before becoming far too successful to return in Series VIII. Nevertheless, he later portrayed another recurring character in Who, playing Brian Williams, the father of companion Rory (and therefore father-in-law to companion Amy) in the 2012 episodes Dinosaurs on a Spaceship and The Power of Three.
Of course, Johnny Barrs (1933-2018) needs no introduction to anyone with even the most rudimentary of Red Dwarf knowledge, but just in case you’re a complete thicko – he was an uncredited extra in both The End and Stasis Leak. His role in the former was of particular note – I think Joe knows what I’m talking about! And in our first example of someone whose Who appearance came before their Dwarf one, he had a full on credited speaking part in 1970’s The Mind of Evil as Fuller, a prison inmate who helped capture the Third Doctor and Jo Grant on behalf of The Master.
Technically the person with the most Dwarf appearances on our list, even though her name has never graced the credits that roll over the sound of her voice. Jenna Russell (b. 1967) is an Olivier-award winning star of stage and screen, employed in the late eighties by Howard Goodall to belt out lyrics about goldfish shoals, and later appearing in Doctor Who‘s 2005 two-part finale Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways as the Floor Manager of a Dalek-run version of The Weakest Link.
Moving on from The End, we find Stephen Meredith (dates unknown), an uncredited extra in Balance of Power. This could only have been in the disco flashback scene, although I couldn’t tell you for sure which of the assorted party-goers he is. He did however have a proper speaking role in 1983’s Doctor Who 20th anniversary special The Five Doctors, as the Gallifreyan Technician who unsuccessfully attempted to summon the Fourth Doctor and Romana to join the reunion.
Then we come to Noel Coleman (1919-2007), who despite what cast commentary originated folklore will tell you was still only in his sixties when he appeared as the Cat Priest in Waiting For God. That said, he did already look ancient by the time of his superb turn as General Smythe in 1969’s ten-part epic The War Games. Noted for featuring the first appearance of the Time Lords, and being both the Second Doctor’s final story and the last to be shot in black-and-white, Coleman’s character appears at first to be a British WWI officer, but turns out to be an alien War Lord taking part in a sinister simulation.
Ever the versatile comic actor, Lee Cornes‘s (b.1951) role on Doctor Who couldn’t have been much more different to the curmudgeonly Paranoia. He was The Trickster, a brightly coloured tribal jester, in 1982’s Kinda. He confounded Peter Davison’s Doctor with a combination of mime and acrobatics, which was reciprocated with a coin trick. He appeared in the last two parts of the story, although he never said a word, given that all the males of his species were mute. Therefore the planet Deva Loka never developed the podcast.
Already a veteran by the time he played Rimmer’s dad, John Abineri (1928-2000) was one of those actors who would frequently pop up in Classic Who, back in the days before home video and extensive repeats, when reusing guest actors was par for the course. He played four roles between 1968 and 1979, starting with Van Lutyens in Fury From The Deep, a gas rig engineer who falls victim to a parasitic seaweed. He then played major parts in two Jon Pertwee stories: General Carrington, head of the Space Security Service in The Ambassadors of Death (1970), and Captain Richard Railton, a Marine in Death to the Daleks (1974). Finally, he donned an extraordinary amount of green body paint as Ranquin, the leader of the squid-worshipping Swampies in The Power of Kroll.
On the other hand, Angela Bruce (b. 1951) only had one role in Doctor Who, but it was a significant one. A year after appearing as a female version of much-loved male character in Parallel Universe, she played Brigadier Winifred Bambera in Battlefield, the opening story of the final original season. She was only the second leader of UNIT we’d met, following the retirement of the great Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart. While she only made the one televised appearance, the character stuck around in expanded media following the show’s cancellation, in Virgin’s New and Missing Adventure novels, before Bruce reprised the role in audio form, appearing as a regular character in Big Finish’s UNIT spin-off.
Also in Parallel Universe, someone that appeared in one of Red Dwarf‘s most iconic scenes ever, but without getting their name in the credits. Jacqueline Boatswain (b. 1962) is one of the dancers in the Tongue Tied sequence, and she even gets a nice close-up at the start of the extended version seen in Smeg Outs and the Series 2 DVD, pictured above. She’s since gone on to be a very prolific actor, turning up in the Torchwood episode Reset as a scientist working for a pharmaceutical company illegally experimenting with alien biology.
Frances Barber (b. 1958) has a long history of villainous activity, from sucking out the Cat’s vanity in Polymorph, to being a transphobic twat on the internet. But in between these, she had a recurring role in the sixth revived series of Doctor Who (2011) as Madame Kovarian, otherwise known as “Eye Patch Lady”. She made fleeting, mysterious appearances throughout the first half of the run, before taking a starring role in the mid-series finale A Good Man Goes To War. Here it’s revealed that she’s in league with The Silence, and had kidnapped the Doctor’s pregnant companion Amy in order to brainwash the unborn child to eventually become the ultimate assassin, who turned out to be his wife River Song. Typical. She later reappeared in the actual series finale to put her plan into action, only for River to assassinate a robot duplicate of the Doctor instead. Like Angela Bruce, Barber went on to reprise the role for Big Finish, in Series 3 of The Diary of River Song.
Now we’re on to the good stuff. That drug-crazed Nazi transvestite you can see holding Lister is played by Robert Smythe (dates unknown), who was uncredited for his non-speaking part as Herman Goering in Meltdown. And Robert Smythe was no stranger to playing uncredited non-speaking parts in beloved British sci-fi series, racking up a whopping nine distinct appearances as a supporting artist in Doctor Who. For the record, these were: a guard in The Invasion of Time (1978); a different guard in Creature From The Pit (1979); a citizen in Full Circle (1980); a ceremony observer in Snakedance (1983); a police constable in Mawdryn Undead (1983); another citizen in Planet of Fire (1984); a gunrunner in The Caves of Androzani (1984); a Jocondan guard in The Twin Dilemma (1984); and finally, a plain old guard in Vengeance on Varos (1985).
Sticking with Meltdown, but moving on to someone who’s allowed to speak, Einstein was played by Martin Friend (1931-2024). You’d be forgiven for not recognising him from his starring role in the 1975 Doctor Who serial The Android Invasion, in which he was the main alien baddy, Chief Scientist Styggron of the Kraal. As part of a scheme to invade Earth, Styggron made a perfect duplicate of a picturesque English village, populated by life-like androids of its citizens, in order to provide a training scenario for the actual invasion. Not a million miles away from the Waxworld concept…
Now, I must confess that with this one, I’m not even 100% sure I’ve pictured the right person. Kevin O’Brien (dates unknown) is among the many actors to have an uncredited role in Meltdown, with TOS describing him as a “Hells Angel”. So I think that’s him there, second on the left – somebody that we only see for a few seconds, only ever from the back. Thankfully, his work as an extra in Doctor Who was much more prolific, appearing in either eleven or thirteen different stories in the eighties, depending on how you count 1986’s season-long story arc The Trial of a Time Lord. Those roles in full: a Pangol clone in The Leisure Hive (1980); a citizen (with fellow Meltdown-er Robert Smythe) in Full Circle (1981); cricketer in Black Orchid (1982); trooper in Earthshock (1982); photographer in Time-Flight (1982); guard in Arc of Infinity (1983); a Vanir in Terminus (1983); Ranulf’s knight in The King’s Demons (1983); crew member in Resurrection of the Daleks (1984); guard in Timelash (1985); resistance fighter in TToaTL: Mindwarp (1986); and finally a courtroom guard in two segments of The Trial of a Time Lord, Terror of the Vervoids The Ultimate Foe (1986). Phew.
Ah, now this is one I do know. Don Warrington (b. 1951) is a bona fide acting legend, and portrayed one of Red Dwarf‘s most memorable one-off characters as Commander Binks in Holoship. He had a similarly brief but iconic role in 2006’s Rise of the Cybermen, playing the President of Great Britain in the alternative universe known as Pete’s World, who becomes one of the first people to be de-le-ted by Doctor Who‘s second greatest monsters in the revived series. Prior to that, he also played the legendary Gallifreyan founding father Rassilon for Big Finish, appearing in six stories between 2002 and 2004.
Poor old Simon Day (b. 1967), he’s not even the most famous actor called Simon Day. A fellow crew member of the Enlightenment, he was Randy Navarro, aka Number Two. Twelve years later, he played a key role in only the second episode of the 2005 iteration of the show, as the big blue steward in The End of the World. He has the distinction of being the first character ever to be duped by the Doctor’s psychic paper. A further decade after that, Simon returned to Doctor Who as Rump, a wolf-like alien resident of the trap street in 2015’s Face The Raven. This time he was credited as Simon Paisley Day, presumably to disambiguate from the star of The Fast Show and Brian Pern.
The wonderfully named Trevor St. John Hacker (dates unknown) was uncredited in Red Dwarf, appearing briefly at the start of The Inquisitor as the replacement Thomas Allman. He was, however, fully credited in the 1980 Who story The Horns of Nimon, playing one of the titular horny beasts. The Nimon were a parasitic minotaur-like race who conquered worlds by draining energy directly from its inhabitants. Mr Hacker returned to the series four years later, playing a Dalek trooper in 1984’s Resurrection of the Daleks, this time uncredited.
Another prolific background artist is Michael Leader (1931-2016), who sadly never got a credit on either Dwarf or Who, despite his many appearances. He’s one of the hooded horde from Terrorform pictured above, but it’s hard to tell which one for obvious reasons. His four Doctor Who roles all came in the early 80s: a Pangol clone (alongside the aforementioned Kevin O’Brien) in The Leisure Hive (1980); a Terileptil in The Visitation (1982); a mutant in Mawdryn Undead (1983); and a soldier in The King’s Demons (1983).
Ah, now here we come to our first actor whose only Doctor Who credits are in the expanded universe. Anastasia Hille (b. 1965) was the new Kochanski briefly glimpsed within the game in Back To Reality (although, now I think about it, why would an NPC change so dramatically just because the game has new players?), and made her Whoniverse debut 24 years later in an episode of Class. Remember Class? It was rubbish. Nevertheless, Hille played Orla’ath in the episode Nightvisiting, the sister of Miss Quill, the undercover alien warrior posing as a school teacher. Although, it turned out that she was in fact just a branch of a sentient evil tree in disguise. Typical.
The legend that is Anita Dobson (b. 1949) – star of the most watched British scripted television moment of all time – had a very brief role in Red Dwarf, and was only approached to play Captain Tau in Psirens because Rob and Doug really wanted her husband, Brian May, to double for Lister’s hands in the same episode. It seems that her Doctor Who role is much more significant, even though it’s not 100% clear as to who she is at the time of writing. What we do know is she’s Mrs. Flood, companion Ruby Sunday’s mysterious neighbour, who first appeared in the 2023 Christmas special The Church on Ruby Road, before returning throughout the 2024 series in 73 Yards, The Legend of Ruby Sunday and Empire of Death. Given her penchant for breaking the fourth wall and soliloquising about stories, my current favourite theory is that she’s the Master of the Land of Fiction – check back here in a couple of years’ time to see how wrong I am.
A man with extremely impressive eyebrows even when they’re not doubled up with falsies, Denis Lill (b. 1942) was of course both the Simulant Captain and Brother Death in Gunmen of the Apocalypse. He also had two major roles in Doctor Who, albeit a little more spaced out. Firstly, he was in 1977’s Image of the Fendahl as Dr. Fendelman, a genius scientist and businessman, who fans of nominative determinism will have been unsurprised to learn was unknowingly under the control of the eponymous villain. He found himself in a similar situation in 1984’s The Awakening, where he played Civil War re-enactor Sir George Hutchinson, whose mind ended up being taken over by a massive evil face in a wall.
Gunmen is a particularly busy episode for Dwarf/Who actors, and next on the list is Imogen Bain (1959-2014), known to us as barmaid Lola. While she never appeared in Doctor Who proper, she did star in an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures, which is easily the show’s best spin-off. In the first story of the first series back in 2007, Revenge of the Slitheen, she played an estate agent called Janine, who was then killed and turned into a skin suit for rogue Raxacoricofallapatorian Florm Rox Fey Fenerill-Slam Slitheen. We’ll just call her Janine Slitheen for short.
Next up, Stephen Marcus (b. 1962), who played Bear Strangler McGee. His Who appearance also came in 2007, but this time in the main show, playing the Jailer at Bedlam in The Shakespeare Code. It’s a pretty minor role – he lets The Doctor, Martha and William Shakespeare in, offers to whip some of the inmates for their entertainment, then introduces them to Super Hans. Textbook.
Despite not technically having a speaking part, Dinny Powell (1932-2023) received a credit for his work in Red Dwarf, which is more than can be said for his multiple contributions to Doctor Who. The chicken-munching Brother Famine actor was a stunt man by trade, working on ten James Bond films among many others. For Who, he was a hired heavy in The Ambassadors of Death (1970); the notorious Auton policeman and Captain Yates’s stunt double in Terror of the Autons (1971); both an IMC guard and a primitive in Colony in Space (1971); a Peladonian guard in The Curse of Peladon (1972); and finally a Thal guard in Genesis of the Daleks (1975).
Time to round off our Gunmen of the Apocalypse section with someone who’s super easy to research. Everyone knows John Wilson (dates unknown), right? His role as a cowpoke was uncredited in Gunmen, but he had a full credited role in Doctor Who some nine years earlier. Unluckily for him, it was in 1984’s The Twin Dilemma, frequently cited as the Pete (Part Two) of Classic Who. He was a Jacondan guard who captured companion Peri and delivered her to his alien master, a big slug thingy. That’s him on the right in the Doctor Who pic. Given that his face isn’t visible, he has very few other credits, has one of the most common names imaginable, and is one of around thirty uncredited extras in Gunmen, whether he’s actually in the Red Dwarf picture is anyone’s guess.
One time DwarfCast guest Steven Wickham (dates unknown) is a fan favourite for both shows. He of course played Lister’s GELF bride in Emohawk, before returning nearly twenty years later to play the Chief BEGG in Entangled. With Who, his involvement in the television series itself is somewhat more limited, appearing in uncredited roles as a soldier in The Caves of Androzani and a Gastropod in the following serial The Twin Dilemma, both 1984. But as a long time fan of the show, his Who credentials were well and truly solidified by Big Finish, appearing in over 40 audio stories over the years. This includes several recurring roles, such as Bernice Summerfield’s AI assistant Joseph, and high-ranking Time Lord Valyes in the Gallifrey spin-off.
In possibly the most disproportionately sized role compared to subsequent fame levels of the actor in Red Dwarf history, Hugh Quarshie‘s (b. 1954) voice appeared as the Space Corps Enforcement Vehicle’s computer in Emohawk: Polymorph II. The fledgling young actor accidentally read all of his lines backwards, but this mistake was incorporated into the script. One stint in Holby City and a role in a Star Wars prequel later, he played Solomon, the leader of the Hooverville shanty town in the 2007 two-parter Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks.
Not to be confused with the keyboard playing physicist who has also appeared in Doctor Who, the renowned actor Brian Cox (b. 1946) played the King of Camelot in Stoke Me a Clipper. Having surprisingly dodged the classic era of Who, he eventually appeared as the Ood Elder in David Tennant’s (first) swansong The End of Time (2009-10), one of those characters who has a vision of the future but chooses only to give the Doctor cryptic clues about it rather than the full information he needs to save the day. He also played the show’s founding father Sydney Newman in the 50th anniversary docudrama An Adventure in Space and Time.
Another much-loved and distinguished television actor, one of the great Don Henderson‘s (1931-1997) final roles was as the Simulant in Beyond a Joke, a performance that shines through despite both the actor’s failing health and the audio effects that were added to disguise it. Ten years earlier, he was Gavrok, leader of the eponymous Bannermen in the penultimate story of Sylvester McCoy’s first season, Delta and the Bannermen. In both roles, he was a genocidal hunter who tortured his targets psychologically and physically, before coming to a sticky end himself as the heroes won the day. Plus, in Doctor Who, he got to kill Ken Dodd.
You may not realise it from his brief appearance as the doctor who examines Kryten in Back in the Red (Part Two), but Geoffrey Beevers (b. 1941) played one of the most iconic roles in all of Doctor Who. No, not UNIT soldier Private Johnson in 1970’s The Ambassadors of Death, his other role. Following the demise of his thirteenth and final incarnation (or the untimely death of actor Roger Delgado, IRL), the Doctor’s arch-nemesis the Master somehow clung on to life as his body decayed. This decomposing incarnation, affectionately referred to as the Crispy Master, was first played by Peter Pratt, but Beevers made it his own when he took on the role for 1980’s The Keeper of Traken, reintroducing the character who’d play a huge part in the series over the following decade. At the conclusion of the serial, the Master possesses the eponymous Keeper’s body, which meant that Beevers passed the baton on to Anthony Ainley, but he returned to the role decades later for Big Finish, playing various versions of the Master across dozens of stories.
Sticking with Back in the Red (Part Two), Jemma Churchill (b. 1960) played the imaginatively named First Woman Officer, the one who reprogrammes Kryten, with a somewhat evil glint in her eye as she does. The karmic punishment for this was delivered to her Doctor Who character, Jean in 2021’s Village of the Angels. Firstly, her foster child Peggy goes missing, then while she’s looking for her she gets sent back in time by a Weeping Angel. Arriving in 1901, she then gets set upon by another Weeping Angel, is turned to stone and dies in agony. Churchill also makes an appearance in Peter Davison’s semi-official 50th anniversary romp The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, as well as several Big Finish audios.
Sticking with Back in the Red (Part Two) and numbered women officers, the Second Woman Officer was played by Sue Kelvin (dates unknown). She’s one of the many women who Rimmer coerces into sexual encounters, this one being particularly hilarious because she’s a bit fat. This characteristic was also key to her Doctor Who role as Suzette Chambers, friend of Sylvia Noble and customer of Adipose Industries, in 2008 series opener Partners in Crime. We see her enjoying a lovely night out when suddenly all her body fat is converted into tiny alien creatures. Luckily the Doctor reverses the process just in time, and she survives.
Sticking with Back In The Red, although this time it’s (Part Three), and nameless women who mainly exist as sexual objects for the main cast, Yasmin Bannerman (b. 1972) played the first Ground Controller, ie the attractive one that the Cat woos with the inexorable Blue Midget dance. Six years later, she turned up in the second ever episode of New Who, The End of the World (2005), playing the hugely memorable character of Jabe, a tree person who befriends the Doctor and ultimately sacrifices her life so that he can save the day. She also has several roles in the expanded universe, such as police officer Kathy Swanson in the Torchwood episode They Keep Killing Suzie (2006), and Seventh Doctor companion Roz Forrester for Big Finish.
Currently starring in an advert for funeral care that makes it look like he’s actually died himself, Shend (b. 1957) is well-remembered for many hardman roles in 90s and 00s comedies, including of course Warden Knot in both Cassandra and Pete (Part One). He’s never been in Who proper, but he did have a prominent role in the same Torchwood episode that Yasmin Bannerman was in, They Keep Killing Suzie. Shend plays Max Tresilian, an associate of the deceased team member Suzie Costello who was unknowingly brainwashed by her into becoming a Trojan horse. Having killed three people in order to get locked up in the Torchwood vault, he then recites some poetry which triggers a lockdown of the hub, trapping the team inside so that the dead Suzie can be resurrected. Every time he hears the word “Torchwood”, he reacts with a violent attack of fear and despair, making him the most relatable character in the entire series.
An incredibly difficult man to research, Dana Michie (d. 2012) is thankfully the last person on this list whose contributions to both shows went uncredited. He was an unnamed Canary in Cassandra, whereas around a quarter of a century earlier he was an unnamed prisoner in 1973’s Frontier in Space. Totally typecast.
And now we reach the last person on this list who was uncredited in Red Dwarf, but at least they have a really distinctive name to make them easy to research. Mark Jones (1939-2010) was a Canary in Pete (Part One). Sigh. There are only a handful of scenes containing Canaries in that episode, and none of them look old enough to be pushing 60 at the time of recording, so I’m going to say that’s his arm just on the right of frame there. His Doctor Who role was much more substantial though, playing Arnold Keeler in the 1976 season finale The Seeds of Doom. Keeler was a botanist employed by the villainous Harrison Chase, who stole an alien plant alongside Boycie from Only Fools and Horses. Whilst examining the specimen, he became infected and started turning into a plant himself, specifically a giant Krynoid.
If that Before They Were Famous show was still a thing, then Holly Earl‘s (b. 1992) appearance in Red Dwarf would be a prime candidate. She was just six years old when she played the Young Kochanski in Pete (Part One), and unable to correctly pronounce the word “Vimto”. She continues to be a very active actor as an adult, and was in her late teens when she appeared in Doctor Who‘s 2011 Christmas special The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe as the eponymous widow’s eldest daughter Lily Arwell. She went on to reprise this role for Big Finish, with the adult Lily serving as an elderly Winston Churchill’s nurse. Of course.
Rounding off 20th Century Dwarf with someone who guested in its very last episode. David Verrey (dates unknown) played the excellently named Big Meat in Only The Good…, and like Imogen Bain his chunkier qualities were also at the forefront of his Who role, in the 2005 two-parter Aliens of London / World War Three. He was Joseph Green, a backbench MP who temporarily became Acting Prime Minister due to a series of unfeasible events during a UFO crisis. It turns out that Green had been killed and turned into a skin suit for a Slitheen some time earlier, and had manipulated events in order to gain power. He was killed when the Doctor blew up Downing Street with a big missile.
Into the Dave era, a time when Red Dwarf and Doctor Who are in production at the same time, thus providing ample opportunities for jobbing British actors to ply their trade in both of this country’s leading sci-fi institutions. The first such figure is Mr. Cholmondley-Warner himself Jon Glover (b. 1952), who played the complex character of “Man” in Back To Earth (Part Two). While he hasn’t been in Doctor Who proper, his Whoniverse contributions are numerous. In 2010, he voiced characters in two Sarah Jane Adventures stories, playing a Shansheeth in Death of the Doctor and a pair of robots in The Empty Planet. Additionally, he lent his vocal cords to the 1985 Radio 4 serial Slipback, and multiple Big Finish adventures.
Lucy Newman-Williams‘s (b. 1976) role in these two shows have both involved being television presenters of some kind. She was All-Droid Jayne in Trojan, demonstrating the Stirmaster, as well as being one of the voices on the end of the phone when Lister is trying to order one. Whereas in Who, she was a newsreader in 2015’s The Magician’s Apprentice, announcing to the world that all the aeroplanes had stopped in mid-air.
While it was common for people to play different characters in different serials in the classic era, it’s much more rare in modern times. Mark Dexter (b. 1973) is one of the few actors (other than those who specialise in creatures and prosthetics) to have managed it, with appearances sandwiching his memorable turn as Howard Rimmer in Trojan. He appeared in River Song’s debut story, Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead in 2008, playing “Dad”, a simulated father figure in a virtual landscape, charged with looking after CAL, a little girl who’d been turned into a computer or something. His second role was as a real historical figure, the mathematician, inventor and computing pioneer Charles Babbage, in 2020’s Spyfall, where he crosses paths with the Doctor in her pursuit of the latest incarnation of the Master.
Everyone’s favourite Series X guest actor, Kerry Shale (b. 1952) played the Medi-Bot and Denti-Bot in Fathers & Suns, along with the absolutely fine and completely inoffensive character of Taiwan Tony. Based on this, you may have expected him to have been in the 1977 Doctor Who classic The Talons of Weng-Chiang, but instead he turned up in 2011’s Day of the Moon as Dr Renfrew, the director of an orphanage who was unknowingly being controlled by The Silence. The orphanage itself had long been closed down, but Renfrew stayed on to take care of its one remaining resident, a little girl who grew up to become River Song.
One of several Dave-era guests whose entire contribution to Red Dwarf played out on a diegetic screen, Emma Campbell-Jones (dates unknown) was the woman in the black-and-white film the crew briefly watch in Entangled. She’s had two roles in Who, the first being Dr Kent in The Wedding of River Song (2011), a scientist monitoring time anomalies in an alternate timeline. The second has become rather more significant over time. She played Cass in the 2013 webisode The Night of the Doctor, which unexpectedly brought back Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor in a prequel to the forthcoming 50th anniversary special The Day of the Doctor. A decade later, Big Finish decided to do some classic Big Finishing, and brought the character back as a full-blown companion of the Eighth Doctor, with Campbell-Jones reprising the role, starting with the 2023 audio anthology appropriately titled Cass.
In a unique case of the eras crossing over in this direction, Gary Cady (b. 1959) is the only guest star of the Dave era of Red Dwarf whose sole contribution to Doctor Who was in its classic era. Long before his memorable turn as Dominator Zlurth in The Beginning, a very young man with the same distinctive Kevin Keegan style chin played Luke Ward in 1985’s The Mark of the Rani. An assistant of train nerd George Stephenson, Luke was hypnotised by the Master and made to lure companion Peri into a minefield. Unfortunately for him, Luke stepped on a mine himself instead, and was transformed into a sentient tree. Typical.
For a man that has been in literally every television programme ever made, Kevin Eldon (b. 1959) left it relatively late in the lifespans (to date) of Britain’s top two sci-fi series before making his mark. He didn’t get round to Red Dwarf until the Series XI opener Twentica, and he waited until 2018’s It Takes You Away before bothering with mainline Doctor Who. Here he played Ribbons, a mysterious alien trader who dwelled in an anti-zone between universes, who is eventually killed and eaten by moths. However, this was not Eldon’s first contribution to the wider Whoniverse. In 2001, deep into the dark of the Wilderness Years, BBCi (as the online output of the broadcaster was then known) produced Death Comes To Time, a lengthy and extremely dull animated adventure, designed to bring the series to a close by killing off the Doctor permanently. Eldon played new companion Antimony, an android who had been adopted by the Doctor as a son, and didn’t know that he was an android. But he didn’t even last til the end of his debut story, being shot to death by John Sessions.
Prior to her great guest turn as the cheating harlot Professor Barker in Samsara, Maggie Service (dates unknown) had a very minor role in Peter Capaldi’s debut story Deep Breath in 2014. She was Elsie, one of the people who witnessed a great big dinosaur thrashing around in the River Thames in the late Victorian era, alongside her husband Alf who insisted it was all a fake, part of a government conspiracy of some kind. Blink and you’ll miss her.
The man behind the creepiest character in Red Dwarf history – Give & Take‘s Asclepius – is Jami Reid-Quarrell (b. 1978), who cornered the market for extremely creepy villains for a brief period in the mid-2010s. He appeared as three different characters in 2015’s Series 9 of Doctor Who alone, starting with Colony Sarff in the opening two-parter The Magician’s Apprentice / The Witch’s Familiar. As his title suggests, Davros’s assistant Sarff was actually a group of snakes, able to co-ordinate and contort into a vaguely humanoid form. Then he portrayed the Doctor’s ultimate nightmare in the seminal Heaven Sent, where he was Time Lord fairy tale monster The Veil, before becoming a Cloister Wraith – an apparition of a dead Time Lord – in the finale, Hell Bent. Oddly, he’s yet to appear in Who again after this huge purple patch, but did put in a turn as a robot Ofsted inspector in the spin-off Class the following year.
The man who gives arguably the best guest performance of the Dave era as Butler in Krysis, Dominic Coleman (b. 1970) has a scandalously minor role in the Whoniverse. He plays a generic policeman in the Torchwood Series 2 episode Sleeper (2008), attending the scene of an attempted burglary turned suspected murder. He lets the Torchwood team in and is promptly shut out by Captain Jack, never to be seen again. Damn you, Barrowman.
Sticking with Krysis, Butler’s old mate Equahecta was played by Robert Nairne (b. 1989), who went on to become the only Red Dwarf guest star to appear in the Fourteenth Doctor’s extremely brief era. He was one of the Wrarth Warriors in the comic adaptation The Star Beast (2023), before swiftly returning for the 2024 series opener Space Babies as the Bogeyman, a man literally made of bogeys. Curiously, his name changed in the seven years between his Dwarf and Who appearances, and he now goes by Robert Strange. How nairne.
Here we have a curious case where it’s not just the actor who’s appeared in both shows. The Mercenoid in Can of Worms was played by Bentley Kalu (b. 1972), who had previously been in the Ponds’ 2012 swansong The Angels Take Manhattan. Here he played Hood, henchman of crime boss Julius Grayle, who locked Rory in a basement with a load of baby Weeping Angels. Even more interestingly, the costume he wore in Dwarf came from Doctor Who itself, having originally been that of the Ultramancer in 2013’s godawful The Rings of Akhaten. It was subsequently used in a space-themed sketch on the short-lived Walliams and Friend, so it’s still awaiting the opportunity to appear in something half decent.
In The One Where Everyone’s Kryten, one of the ones who was a Kryten was actually one of The Inbetweeners, James Buckley (b. 1987). Keen to avoid Red Dwarf‘s folly of making one of its most famous and contemporary guest stars almost entirely unrecognisable, when he appeared in the 2020 Doctor Who episode Orphan 55, they put him in a wig that was identical to his usual hair aside from it being green. He played Nevi, a mechanic who lived and worked with his son at a spa resort on unknown planet that had been devastated by pollution and war, which turned out to be Earth all along when the Doctor found the Statue of Liberty buried on a beach or something.
The poor sod who had to play the flute-playing Guru (aka Derek) in Timewave was Paul Leonard (dates unknown), who went on to appear in 2021’s The Halloween Apocalypse, the opening chapter of the lockdown-affected mini-series Flux. He played James Stonehouse, the real life figure who was a sceptical associate of Joseph Williamson, who built an elaborate system of tunnels underneath the city of Liverpool, which still exist to this day. The purpose of these tunnels is unknown; in the show, it was to provide refuge during a cataclysmic space-time disaster, but in real life it’s presumably to do with the acquisition of hubcaps.
Another actor with the misfortune to be cast in Timewave was Joe Sims (b. 1980), whose performance as Tutt Johnson is easily the best thing about the episode. Five years later, he turned up in the pre-titles sequence of 2022’s The Power of the Doctor, the BBC centenary special and Jodie Whittaker’s swansong. He played Arnhost, the Deputy Marshall of a space train that gets raided by Cybermasters (Cybermen/Time Lord hybrids), and is injured before being rescued by The Doctor, Yaz and Evil John Bishop. Like many others, Sims also has a notable role in the Big Finish audios, as Mark Seven – an android originally conceived as part of a proposed Dalek spin-off series in the 1960s, now audio-only companion of the Tenth Doctor.
This guy surely wins the award for having changed the least between their appearances in these shows, despite them taking place a decade apart. Having served as the regular warm-up guy for almost every studio recording of the Dave era, Ian Boldsworth (b. 1973) finally followed in Tony Hawks’s footsteps by making an on-screen appearance as Steve in M-Corp. This came ten years after his role in the iconic Doctor Who episode Blink (2007), where he played Banto, owner of the video store where Sally Sparrow came to piece together the Doctor’s Easter Egg messages to her.
Aaaaaand finally, ensuring that at least one actor from every single Red Dwarf production block has been in Doctor Who, we have Mandeep Dhillon (b. 1990), Sister Luna in The Promised Land. Her Who role was as Shireen, a close friend of companion Bill Potts, in 2017’s Knock Knock. Shireen and Bill rented a house together as part of a larger group, only to discover that the landlord was intending to use them as food for a race of alien woodlice who were keeping his terminally ill mother alive by turning her into wood. Typical.
So there we have it – fifty-five actors who have appeared in both Red Dwarf and Doctor Who. But the connections don’t stop there. We could have included the various stunt performers who worked on both, such as Gareth Milne (stunt co-ordinator on various episodes of RD III-V; double for Peter Davison in two 1984 stories), Nick Hobbs (uncredited stuntman in Terrorform; multiple roles in Who including Aggedor in The Curse and The Monster of Peladon), or Tom Lucy (another uncredited Terrorform stunt performer; later stunt co-ordinator throughout Series 3 and 4 of New Who and the first three series of Torchwood).
Plus of course, there’s the crew behind the scenes. We estimate that at least 90 people have credits on both shows, many of whom in the field of special effects. Our beloved Peter Wragg worked on four Classic Who stories, as well including playing the Fendahleen in 1977’s Image of the Fendahl. Several members of the Model Unit were around in those days, and indeed for the new series too, such as Paul McGuinness, Nick Kool and Peter Tyler. This lot were of course responsible for the easter egg of the hidden TARDIS in Red Dwarf’s landing bay. Other visual effects artists to work on both shows include Jim Francis, Steve Howarth and of course Neill Gorton, who along with the rest of the Millennium FX team was responsible for the majority of prosthetic and make-up effects in Dwarf from Series XI onwards, and almost all of modern Who and its spin-offs.
Other notable figures include editors Graham Hutchings and Nick Ames, director of photography Ed Moore, graphic designer Matthew Clark, production designer Keith Dunne, technical manager Jeff Jeffrey and costume designer Howard Burden. He’s been with Red Dwarf ever since Series III, and was across Series 7 and 8 of modern Who, designing the iconic looks for three Doctors – Eighth, War and Twelfth. He even went as far as borrowing the badges from the uniforms in Trojan and using them in the Doctor Who episode Nightmare in Silver. As a side note, a bit of the Eleventh Doctor’s TARDIS console later ended up being part of the groinal exploder in Entangled.
Finally, a special mention has to go to Mike Tucker, a bona fide legend for both fandoms. He’s provided visual effects on Red Dwarf for Series 1-VII and XI-XII, but his contributions to the Whoniverse are almost incalculable. As well as his effects work on both eras of the show – and miscellaneous spin-offs such as 30th anniversary mini-episode Dimensions in Time, documentary 30 Years in the TARDIS, the reconstructed version of half-finished Tom Baker story Shada and various trailers for The Collection Bluray releases – he’s also a prolific writer. He’s written or co-written fifteen Doctor Who novels (including At Childhood’s End with Ace actress Sophie Aldred, and the recent The Evil of the Daleks novelisation with Jamie actor Frazer Hines), multiple short stories, comics, non-fiction books and half a dozen Big Finish audios.
Red Dwarf and Doctor Who really are two peas in a pod, and with at least one of these series still in active production with no signs of stopping, this list will no doubt expand in the years to come. Our fond hope is that one of the main cast members crosses over into the other show at some point, rather than just having many mutual guest stars. The closest we’ve come so far is that Hattie Hayridge was in four episodes of the Big Finish spin-off The Adventures of Bernice Summerfield, while the narrator of the 2020 documentary series Red Dwarf: The First Three Million Years was one David Tennant, who’s probably best known as the Caretaker in the 2003 web animation Scream of the Shalka. But perhaps Chris, Craig, Danny or Robert could be a new companion’s grandad, or maybe Sylvester McCoy would make a great rogue simulant. Or Norman Lovett might finally land the role of Davros. With all of time and space to play with, the possibilities are endless.
As we once again prepare to stick our fingers in our ears and try not to think about things for the next four years, let’s take the opportunity to hark back to a far happier time, ie before many of us were even sodding born. We’re heading back to 1983 to take in a crucial component of the Grant Naylor oeuvre. Having pretty much mastered the art of radio comedy with the first series of Son of Cliché, it was time to take on television, and the pair began successfully submitting sketches for the likes of Paul Squire, Cannon & Ball and Three of a Kind. But arguably the most quintessentially Rob-and-Doug feeling project of this era was Carrott’s Lib. Starring Jasper Carrott, one of this country’s greatest ever stand-ups, this was a pre-Spitting Image topical, satirical comedy, broadcast live on Saturday nights on BBC One.
Paul Jackson produced the first series, but we’re going to focus instead on the first episode of series two, for reasons that will become apparent. The first thing to note is the date – the series started just eleven days after the first series of Son of Cliché concluded on Radio 4, and given how last-minute a lot of those scripts were, Rob and Doug presumably had very little time to breathe between projects. This series also established a new supporting cast for Jasper: future Cadbury’s Caramel bunny Jan Ravens, alongside the trio of Nick Wilton, Nick Maloney and Chris Barrie. Now where have I seen those guys together before?
Huge thanks to Jonsmad for pointing us in the direction of this YouTube upload:
Be honest, how many of you assumed the newsflash at the start of the YouTube video was going to be part of the show?
There were other Dwarfy figures associated with the show, of course – Kim Fuller and James Hendrie among the writers, editor Ed Wooden and music from Son of Cliché‘s Peter Brewis – but you can really see the Grant Naylor DNA coursing through the script. There’s a simile joke about someone’s sexual appetite (in this case a cabinet minister rather than a mountain lion or first year nursing student), and lines about a group of people with an IQ of 6 (in this case National Front members). Chris Barrie does his Richie Benaud at one point – familiar to anyone who’s seen Universe Challenge, but this particular sketch has several of the exact same lines as a similar one in the first ever episode of SoC. Plus, of course, we’ve got Chris playing an actual puppet version of Ronald Reagan, while Spitting Image was still just a glint in Fluck and Law’s eyes.
None of which can top the ultimate crossover – the sketch in which Nick Maloney plays Fred Gorman, a company boss appearing in his own advert, is lifted directly from episode six of Son of Cliché, which aired on 29th September, just over three weeks earlier. Other than a few additional acknowledgements of the visual medium, it’s pretty much word for word, with Maloney as the lead in both sketches. An early example of Grant Naylor’s ability to upcycle their existing material to reach a wider audience.
Other highlights of the episode include a Mastermind sketch where the specialist subject is video nasties (which has Rob’s fingerprints all over it), a performance from The Animals, and gags about both Jimmy Savile and Prince Andrew that seem incredibly tame compared to the jokes that you’d make about those two today. While not quite the complete set, there are more episodes on YouTube, and I for one am looking forward to searching for more golden nuggets from the start Grant Naylor’s imperial phase.
Since its introduction in Series III, Red Dwarf’s shuttle craft Starbug has become almost as iconic as the eponymous ship itself, spawning t-shirts, models, playsets, televised competitions and even a giant life-sized version as part of an elaborate ad campaign. Both its interior and exterior have changed dramatically in looks over the years, and it’s established almost immediately that there are actually multiple Starbugs in existence, allowing us to headcanon away those inconsistencies with relative ease.
When a new set was built for Series XI, a knowing reference to this was included as part of the set design, with the ship’s interior baring branding that reads “Starbug 19”. But is this number accurate? Does it correlate to the number of Starbugs we’ve seen on screen, or was it chosen arbitrarily for the purposes of the gag? Let’s investigate, as we delve through the episodes to tally up just how many times the ship’s been destroyed and then reappeared, and track some of the changes and features which are unique to each iteration.
- BackwardsThe very first Starbug we see is the one that Kryten uses to take his driving test in Backwards. It’s on screen for less than four minutes before it’s flown through a time hole and crashed into a big lake. The last we see of it is when it’s beneath the surface, being menaced by unrealistically gigantic fish, before Rimmer and Kryten escape on the handy inflatable dinghy that must have been among the emergency supplies on board. Lister is later able to track the wreckage down by homing in on the flight recorder, but that’s the full lifespan of what’s technically the only original version of the show’s most iconic shuttle craft.
That said, we know there’s at least one other variant that the crew have used off-screen prior to the events of this episode, as Kryten learned to fly in the identically-controlled Starbug 2. We don’t know for sure whether these lessons took place after Kryten joined our crew, or whether he started learning in his prior life on the Nova 5 or the SS Augustus. It’s up to personal interpretation as to whether Starbug 2 is completely identical to the craft we know as Starbug other than the registration number, or whether the Starbug 2 is a whole different model to the Starbug 1, and it’s just the controls that are the same. If Kryten first learned to fly whilst crewing a more advanced, high budget ship than the Dwarf, it’s possible he had access to a much swankier transporter, which would explain his initial struggles to adapt to Starbug 1.
- Backwards – MaroonedThe very second Starbug we see is the one that Lister and Cat use to rescue Kryten and Rimmer in Backwards. Note how the number on the door that separates the cockpit from the unseen mid-section changes from a 1 to a 2. This particular model was fitted with a cloaking device, something which was never used again after this episode, despite its inherent usefulness. It would no doubt have come in handy whilst hiding from the likes of the Centauri in Beyond a Joke or the Feral King in The Promised Land, or when under attack from Simulants or future selves.One can only conclude, therefore, that the cloaking device was unique to this particular ship, and not a standard feature for all Starbugs. An optional extra, perhaps, that the JMC were too tight to fork out on for every member of their fleet.
It was a huge shame, then, that this particular Starbug was hit by a flaming meteorite and crashed into an ice planet just one episode later. It’s not explicitly confirmed, but we can safely assume that this Starbug was a write-off – the terrain and weather conditions made it near impossible to dig the ship out of the snow, and at the end of the episode it looks very much like Lister is gathering up his things and heading out, ready to head back to the Dwarf on Blue Midget, and leaving the uniquely souped up shuttle craft to gather ice.
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BodyswapStarbug appears in just three episodes of its debut series, but it gets destroyed every single time. The latest short-lived Starbug is half-inched by Rimmer-in-Lister’s-body, and suffers an almighty and destructive crash following the rest of the crew’s pursuit. Even the interior is destroyed in this crash, so it seems unlikely that the ship was ever recovered; we see Blue Midget returning to Red Dwarf alone afterwards. Poor old Starbug The Third – there’s less than two minutes between its first and last appearance on screen, but at least it lived its best life, taking part in one of the show’s greatest ever effects sequences, and even getting to show off with a barrel roll in the meantime.
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Camille – TerrorformSo after our crew managed to wreck three separate Starbugs in as many episodes, they must have started using a model that was made of stronger stuff. After some relatively uneventful voyages in Camille, Justice and White Hole, it does suffer an almighty crash in Dimension Jump. But for the first time, it survives, possibly thanks to Ace’s intervention, and it duly returns to Red Dwarf. Next up, the crew gather around Starbug’s navicomp in Meltdown, although they don’t actually use it to fly anywhere, before more successful trips in Holoship and The Inquisitor. It was all going so well until an accident in an unknown location at an unknown time with an unknown cause, later revealed to be a consequence of a psi-moon reshaping itself to mimic Rimmer’s mental state. Typical.
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Terrorform – Back to RealityAnd so Cat and Lister once more set out in a new Starbug to rescue Kryten and Rimmer after they crashed the last one. The Starbug introduced in Terrorform has a significant feature that hasn’t been seen on any other models on screen – it’s fitted with caterpillar tracks, so that it can travel across land. They were able to navigate most of the psi-moon’s terrain, but not the swamp, forcing the crew to make use of a rowing boat, which may well have been stowed on board for emergency use, like the motor-powered one used in Backwards. The ‘Bug was also susceptible to quicksand, and damn near became the second casualty in one episode, before it escaped following a four-way hug.
In fact, this particular Starbug was the first to survive its screen life intact. It was used in each remaining episode of Series V without incident, other than the huge crash and subsequent explosion we witnessed in Back To Reality, which was later revealed to be merely an hallucination. After returning to the real world, we last see this Starbug hitting the retros on its way back to Red Dwarf. If it did get destroyed, as the vast majority of its siblings did, then we didn’t see it on screen.
- Psirens – Back in the Red (Part One)Now, according to Prelude to Nanarchy, the crew never made it back to the Dwarf after Back To Reality, with Kryten’s nanobots having escaped and transformed it into a planet before they can get there. But this can’t be the case; surely the Starbug that the crew wake up on in Psirens is a different model to any that we’ve seen them use before, as the interior is so vastly different. The cockpit has doubled in capacity, the mid-section is much bigger, and it even leads off into a separate kitchen area, which would have been damned useful in Marooned. Perhaps this suddenly spacious spaceship is a later model – maybe even the Starbug Mark 2 that Kryten learned to fly in – that presumably must have just been at the back of the cargo hold, out of sight for the previous three series.
As the saying goes, this Starbug is built to last, sustaining the crew as their makeshift home for fourteen full episodes, during which time it’s rarely off screen in one way or another. It’s improved further by the kindly Simulants in Gunmen of the Apocalypse, upgrading the drive interface and the engines, as well as arming it with laser cannons. And it crashes more times than a ZX81: hit by a giant flaming meteorite in Psirens; submerged in lava in Gunmen; shot by a Space Corps enforcer and subsequently crashed into a GELF moon in Emohawk. It ultimately survives each time, before the thing is blown up completely by the crew’s future selves at the end of the series.
But it got better. The resultant paradox undid that timeline, restoring the ‘Bug, and as an extremely tenuous consequence, the ship’s cargo deck was enlarged by 212%. We also learned that Starbug (or at least this type of Starbug) is modular, with the entire rear section able to be detached. [Well, this is where we learn this if you class the Xtended versions of the episodes as canon; we learn it much later if you don’t.] And once again there are further upgrades during the series, when Epideme gives Kryten a method of making the ship 300% faster.
There’s very little in the way of crashes in Series VII, possibly thanks to the influence of a competent navigation officer in Kochanski, who gets them out of dangerous scrapes in Ouroboros, Blue and Beyond a Joke. But alas, nothing lasts forever, and the longest-serving Starbug is finally seen off in the opening episode of the following series, crushed to death in Red Dwarf’s rapidly shrinking corridors and spectacularly exploded.
7-12. Only The Good…With Starbug’s starring role coming to an end, we barely see it in Series VIII, with a leggy CGI Blue Midget and various generic shuttle ships preferred on the rare occasions that anyone is seen leaving the mothership. But then you wait all series for a Starbug and six come along at once, when the resurrected crew are forced to abandon ship. We see a total of six Starbugs flying off into the distance, along with fourteen Blue Midgets. Assuming the number of evacuees is in the vicinity of the 1,169 crew members that Red Dwarf initially had, that’s around 58 people per shuttle craft, each of which can only comfortably accommodate four or five. So there must have been more escape ships, and presumably more Starbugs were among them, we just don’t see them on screen.
- Trojan – The Promised LandAnd so we move on to the Dave era, which was much lighter on visual effects for its first couple of iterations. The closest Back To Earth gets to featuring Starbug is customising a green Smart car, while there are two fleeting appearances in Series X: it takes them to the eponymous Trojan and back in Trojan, and is seen parked at the BEGGS’ settlement having been lost in a poker game in Entangled. Blue Midget is the default for the rest of the series, but Starbug is back in a big way in the following series opener Twentica, with an all new interior that’s clearly got the same vibes as all previous Starbugs, even if the actual details are vastly different.
The iconic ship’s full time return is heralded in the traditional manner, with an almighty crash within the first few minutes. But it survives, and successfully returns home to become a regular fixture in the series once more, even utilising its submarine mode (previously only seen at the start of Back To Reality) to reach the eponymous wreck in Samsara. That would have been handy in Backwards. It goes on to appear in every episode of Series XI with relatively little incident, other than Butler’s well-meaning sabotage in Krysis. We don’t see the interior beyond the cockpit until Can of Worms, where the signage in the rear section reads “Starbug 19”. While this is only the 13th iteration that we’ve seen on screen (and only the seventh that our crew have been seen to use), there is that big old nine year narrative gap between Series VIII and Back To Earth, during which time anything could have happened.
The ship continues to play a prominent role at the start of Series XII, appearing in each of the first three episodes before taking a back seat for Byte Two. It’s evident from Cured that the crew have been using this particular model for a while, with it being run down to the extent that it requires a special improvised start up procedure, and lacks the ability to turn right. Meanwhile, Siliconia shows us that it’s equipped with a fairground style grabbing claw. It then has a starring role in The Promised Land, where we learn not only that it has a hybrid engine and a hover mode, but that it’s modular, with the entire rear section able to be detached. [Well, this is where we learn this if you don’t class the Xtended versions of the episodes as canon; we learn it much earlier if you do.]
- The last bit of The Promised LandIt’s not entirely clear how the above Starbug ends up returning to Red Dwarf – Holly vaguely says “I’ll come and get you”, but we don’t really see what he does to drag the engine-less, fuel-less semi ship through space. Either way, it’ll never fly again, thus becoming at least the sixth Starbug that the crew are confirmed to have destroyed. But they didn’t wait long before hopping in their (minimum) eighth iteration, using it to attack the Feral Cat ship, resurrect Kryten, and return Luna, Sol and Peanut home. It’s only on screen for a few minutes, but that’s just enough time to see that this particular Starbug has an monitor on which one of the “power output level” read-outs is labelled “G&T”. So it’s our favourite one. In a lovely bit of attention to detail, you can just about see in one brief shot that a sign on the wall in the mid-section has been updated to read “Starbug 20”.
If and when there are new episodes of Red Dwarf, and if and when Starbug features, we’ll assume that it’s this one unless told otherwise. So, that’s fourteen Starbugs seen on screen in total, with eight of them being used by “our” crew. Well, technically we do see one additional Starbug – the future selves’ one in Out of Time – but as that’s just our Starbug fifteen years later, in a timeline that no longer exists anyway, we won’t include it in our totals. We’re also going to assume that the one from the AA adverts is the standard Dave era iteration. So not quite twenty; whether the crew’s televised adventures run for long enough to reach that golden figure on-screen remains to be seen, but we’re only a handful of crashes away…
Thanks to Quinn, Moonlight and Andrew Orton for corrections.
Ah, it’s October. The month where the new Red Dwarf special(s) go into production. After all, it was reported extensively online back in May, and none of the publications that giddily jumped on the bandwagon have since issued any updates or corrections, so we assume it’s all going ahead. We should be getting the official announcement any moment. Here it comes. Any moment. Aaaaaany moment. Any moment… NOW.
It hasn’t worked. It’s almost as if you should take what the cast say about any new projects with a pinch of salt, as even if the details are correct to the best of their knowledge at the time, plans change, and nothing is official until it’s announced by the appropriate channels. This is a lesson that desperately needs to be learned by the entire population of comments sections everywhere else that Red Dwarf is discussed online. Nevertheless, the latest unconfirmed whisper is in, and this time it comes from Chris Barrie, via ITV Anglia:
We hope next year to, in 2025, to shoot a special. That’s the plan I’ve heard. The others might throw more light on it, I don’t know, but yeah, that’s the plan. I think all four of us are up for it, yeah.
“The five of us!”, wails Norman Lovett, probably. Furthermore, according to Stephen Abootman in our comments, Doug denied the rumours whilst doing a massive winking face at a different convention over the weekend. The complete radio silence after Robert abruptly stopped doing live streams was of course understandable, but it is reassuring that plans do definitely appear to still be afoot, even if they have slipped back by at least a few months.
One thing, though – if they don’t already have studio dates booked, the production might have to look for a new home. Deadline reports that Pinewood are closing down their TV studios in 2025, in a further blow for an industry that’s simultaneously struggling to find facilities for high end drama and comedy, whilst its broadcasters are steadfastly refusing to commission any. Pinewood has hosted Red Dwarf since Series XI, and served both production and audiences well, with it being marginally easier to get to than the show’s former home, Shepperton.
And finally, even if we have to wait a little longer for new Red Dwarf to hit our screens, there will at least be some old Red Dwarf on the telly this year. Following 2023’s repeats of Series 1 and 2 on Friday nights, the run continues a little under a year after it paused. Backwards is being repeated on BBC Two at 10pm on Thursday 3rd October, with Marooned set for an airing at the same time the following week. I think there’s a pattern emerging. There is much excitement to be had here, and so many mysteries to be solved. Will this just be Series III, or will they double it up with Series IV like they did last year? Or will this be a complete run through, which possibly might include the Dave era too? And will they accidentally air the Re-Mastered version of Marooned like their pals over at UKTV keep doing? It’s going to be a lot of fun finding out.
U&UKTVPlayG2U&Dave&Knuckles
Righty dokey matey bloke flap old salty seadog amigo skip-jack jockstrap piano tuners, we’re back with another in our occasional series of Dwarf-adjacent commentaries, this time covering Bottom Series 2, Episode 4, Parade. Not only is the series produced and directed by Ed Bye, this particular episode guest stars both Robert Llewellyn and Lee Cornes, which is as good an excuse as any to rabbit on over this episode and tackle your Bottom-shaped waffles. We cover pretty much all the affiliated spin-offs – the live shows, the Fluff video, Guest House Paradiso – as well as discussing what happens when TV schedules are affected by real life events, how Rik and Ade could have fitted in to Red Dwarf and trying to figure out if there’s any modern equivalents to this madness.
It became apparent while recording this one that we didn’t have quite as much to say in the commentary as we do for Dwarf and the other adjacent shows we’ve covered, so we’ve added the soundtrack to the episode in the background, so that you can be entertained by the gags and by imagining the fight sequences.
DwarfCast 173 – Bottom Parade – Commentary (184 MB)
Show notes* Our recent Hammersmith bench-based pilgrimage. * The opening theme is a cover of BB’s Blues (as opposed to BB’s Theme) * Here’s a full rip of Bottom Fluff, just because.
“Clifford the Big Bastard of a Dog”
With apologies for the delay, it’s finally time to get back on the rack! Our Smegazine odyssey reaches February 1993, a very interesting time in Red Dwarf history, as the magazine’s news page documents. In this episode, we uncover the origins of Entangled, some foreshadowing of The Promised Land and the first ever use of the smeg hammer. Other super relevant and definitely on-topic discussion points include the Bottom Exposed documentary, various 1990s adventure game shows, and the state of the Hitchhikers franchise after Douglas Adams’s death. Oh, and the results of a caption competition from two years ago. We may not be fast…
We recommend having the magazine in front of you as you listen, and you can find scans over at archive.org or Stasis Leak.
DwarfCast 172 – The Smegazine Rack – Issue #12 (105 MB)
Show notes Returning the shout-out, even though we recorded this months before his shout-out to us, Stuart Millard on Scavengers * G&TV covers Cyberzone* * Terrible news – turns out the photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s arses was photoshopped after all * Bryan Lewis Saunders’s Drugs project
We’ve set a lot of Red Dwarf quizzes in our time, but are we any good at answering them? Well, Part 1 of this video should give you a decent idea but unless we are still in any doubt, it’s time to find out… again!
Want to play along? You’ll find a big list of quizzes underneath the video – take them, then watch the vid, then tell us how you did. Oh, and you’re probably better off clicking through to YouTube and going full-screen if you want to see what we’re typing properly.
- People
- Places
- Opening Lines Part 1
- Opening Lines Part 2
- Opening Lines Part 3
- DVD Chapters
- The End – Full Credits
We’ve set a lot of Red Dwarf quizzes in our time, but are we any good at answering them? Well, we already know that Cappsy isn’t, but what about Ian and Danny? It’s time to find out, as we put our reputations on the line by taking on a series of Sporcle quizzes that probe every aspect of our mental capabilities. Want to play along? You’ll find a big list of quizzes underneath the video – take them, then watch the vid, then tell us how you did. Oh, and you’re probably better off clicking through to YouTube and going full-screen if you want to see what we’re typing properly. Byte Two coming soon!
- Characters with the most lines
- Follow that Line
- Tongue Tied lyrics
- Episodes by last line
- Red Dwarf A-Z
- Guest stars
Repetition, Running Gags and Callbacks in Red Dwarf
We’re once again opening our doors to long term G&T regular Dave, bringing us his latest deep analysis of one of the show’s core elements.
Like all sitcoms of a certain age, Red Dwarf has a tendency to repeat itself from time to time.
I’m not talking about in-the-moment repetition like the White Hole sequence that gives this article its title, or the Terrorform gag about Kryten’s short-term memory being erased – those are deliberate repeated phrases that give a single joke the necessary rhythm and cadence. I’m talking about episode-to-episode and series-to-series recurrences of the same ideas, jokes, lines and structures, and the way that these have accumulated as the show has gone on.
George Lucas famously once said about the repeated plot points and ideas in the Star Wars saga that “it’s like poetry: they rhyme”. And if you subscribe to that way of thinking, then Red Dwarf is full of these metaphorical rhymes – some of them inspired reprises of past ideas that are as delightful as Rimmer, Zimmer and Yul Brynner; but some of them as lazy and uninspired as Kindle, Dwindle and Wind’ll.
The conventional wisdom around Red Dwarf is that repetition – in terms of a formulaic approach to the show’s writing, particularly its running gags – starts to rear its head most conspicuously in the sixth year of the show. But while I think that Series VI’s label as the poster boy for formulaic Dwarf is fair to an extent, I’d also argue that the seeds of this approach are sown much earlier, with several notable examples of repetition and formula cropping up throughout the show’s classic era.
Let’s talk about them!
Did You Erase The SOS Distress Call From Your Memory?Perhaps the first really obvious example of the show settling into its groove and finding an explicit plug-and-play joke formula is Holly’s SOS messages that begin from the second episode, Future Echoes, and run throughout the rest of Series 1 and most of Series 2.
As well as serving as a recap of the show’s concept (for viewers living in a now-unthinkable late-80s era in which post-broadcast catch-up was impossible without an off-air VHS copy), these messages provide a dedicated slot for a quick opening gag, separate from the rest of that episode’s storyline, that gives the audience an easy (and reassuring early) nailed-on laugh, and sets the tone from the outset – almost like an in-show warm-up man.
In other words, Norman Lovett was the 1980s sci-fi equivalent of Seinfeld.
It’s interesting that this approach only lasted for the initial two series, though. On the Series III DVD, you can see examples of similar messages recorded by Hattie-Holly that were never used. And while the DVD intro to the Series III deleted scenes suggests “that they were cut speaks volumes about the writers’ opinions of their material”, I don’t know if that’s altogether fair.
Because Hattie’s SOS gags are just as funny as Norm-Holly’s jokes, really – especially in retrospect, when you realise that the joke about the AA man not turning up could have offered the longest setup in sitcom history for the eventual Stellar Rescue adverts – and they also provide a welcome opportunity for a bit more Holly material, in an era when the character was already beginning to be sidelined in favour of Kryten.
I wonder whether the real reason for dropping the SOS gags was that Rob and Doug simply didn’t feel that these openings were needed any more. Along with all the other overhauls that came with Series III – not least the more complex and ambitious storylines – I could imagine them feeling that a long intro sequence ate into the runtime of the episodes; that the show was becoming established enough that it didn’t need a Porridge-style voiceover to explain the setup to viewers every episode; and just maybe, that these openings were becoming a bit too familiar, formulaic and cosy for a show that was at that time being revamped to appear as fresh and forward-looking as possible.
Indeed, throughout Series III there’s a general sense of actively not trying to consciously repeat previous highlights of the show. While the addition of Kryten certainly does represent an idea from a previous episode being reused – even becoming a permanent part of the show – the character immediately creates a different crew dynamic that helps to separate Series III (and beyond) from what has come before.
What’s more, the storylines venture off-ship more often, and even if certain general story ideas like time-travel do crop up again, it’s in a way that feels new and interesting, rather than a repeat of earlier hits.
Instead, I’d argue that it’s Series IV and especially Series V where we start to get hints of the show becoming a little more backwards-looking – or at least, history-acknowledging – in multiple ways.
Oh Right, I’ve Seen This! It’s Not As Good As The OriginalOne of the most conspicuous and on-the-nose continuity references in Red Dwarf history comes as early as the second episode of Series IV, DNA, when Lister recalls while fighting the Mutton Vindaloo Beast that it was “twelve months ago to the day, the Polymorph”.
There’s no real reason for this callback other than to lampshade the fact that, yes, the show has yet again done a story in which Lister’s Indian meal becomes a monster that tries to kill him – albeit in more distinctive and different circumstances than you’d expect that incredibly narrow and specific synopsis to allow. But for me, this reference to an older episode is a hint that the show is starting to acknowledge the burden of its history and to become a little bit more backwards-looking, both in terms of story concepts and running jokes.
Viewers might also be forgiven for experiencing a little déjà vu with one of Series IV opener Camille’s Cat-Lister scenes, with the ‘Tales Of The Riverbank: The Next Generation’ sequence feeling like a conscious attempt to repeat the success of Series III opener Backwards’ Flintstones dialogue. Perhaps it’s not technically a repeat of an earlier joke, but it’s definitely an early sign of leaning into a formula. Even Camille is itself the second time in the space of five episodes that the show’s plot has revolved around a GELF that can change its appearance – albeit with a distinctly more romantic flavour than Polymorph.
A better example of building on the past is the reappearance of Talkie Toaster in White Hole. He’s still very much the irritating presence that he was in Series 1, but now with material that’s more tailored to his specific functionality, along with an amusingly inadvertently antagonistic relationship with the newly super-smart Holly that provides the novelty of a genuinely new character dynamic among the cast – if only for a few brief minutes.
Moving on to Series V, an early episode sees Red Dwarf exhibit what is maybe the show’s first outright rehash of a pre-existing gag, just to mine it for more laughs: Lister in The Inquisitor reminding Rimmer of his afternoon on the Samaritans’ switchboard, a direct reference to the classic Lemming Sunday routine from The Brittas Empire. (Er, I mean The Last Day.)
However, in fairness this example is quite smoothly done. In context, Lister’s recall of an earlier embarrassing piece of Rimmer’s history makes sense, and Rob and Doug lessen the sense of familiarity by mixing this reprise of a past gag with other, more original “callbacks” to conversations that we never saw (in fact, it’s so organic-feeling that for years I was convinced in a Mandela-effect style that the Fiona Barrington/hand in warm compost joke was also a reference to a Series 1-2-era line), as well as chucking in general established trivia about Rimmer like Judas being his middle name or his BSc standing for Bronze Swimming Certificate.
You could also argue that Terrorform’s Taranshula scene is an attempt to recapture the underwear-based hilarity of Polymorph’s boxer shorts sequence, although lacking the outrageous sex-comedy aspect of Kryten’s groinal attachment flapping about mid-rescue. (Sadly the show wouldn’t contrive a way to make extended jokes about Cat and Lister having sex until The Promised Land special, decades later.)
But then there’s maybe the most memorable Series V callback-gag of all: Kryten in Quarantine irritatedly describing Rimmer as a “smee-heeee”, just like he did back in Camille – a joke that was already a running gag in that episode, but which becomes a full-on catchphrase for the show with its reuse here (and we’d see it used again in subsequent episodes like Gunmen Of The Apocalypse and Stoke Me A Clipper, and even many years later in Siliconia).
Elsewhere, explicit continuity references are beginning to accumulate – like Demons & Angels’ offhand mention that the Triplicator is an adaptation of Meltdown’s Matter Paddle, or that same episode referencing Lister visiting a parallel universe, seeing time running backwards, giving birth to twins and playing pool with planets. Again, there’s no real need to refer back to these past episodes other than as a neat callback for fans – although it does make for a great setup for the Pot Noodle joke.
But as well as these callbacks, Series V is also the birthplace of a more formulaic approach to gag-writing, of the type that we’d see in full force later. A proto-Series-VI writing approach manifests in V in the form of Kryten’s repeated rebuttals of the Cat’s suggested plans, due to “just two minor drawbacks”. This joke actually originated as a one-off in Series IV’s White Hole – when Kryten told Cat that they didn’t have a power source for the lasers, and didn’t in fact have any lasers – but Rob and Doug clearly thought that it was such a good joke format that it was worth mentioning twice. Or indeed, four times – it shows up in twice in Holoship (becoming a kind of mini-running-gag within that episode) and then again in Terrorform.
But as we all know, this embrace of gag-writing formula was just the beginning. Because when Red Dwarf returned for a sixth series, formulaic jokes went from being the exception to the rule.
You’ve Just Come In And Said Exactly These ThingsSo, we come to Series VI. Which is, as any Red Dwarf fan knows, the series to cite when it comes to formulaic running gags and stock situations.
And in a lot of ways, it’s difficult to argue with that conventional wisdom. With its regular roll-out of Space Corps Directives, “deader than” similes, references to how fast Cat’s nasal hairs are vibrating and inventively insulting comparisons to the shape of Kryten’s head – not to mention the curiously repetitive structure of its cockpit scenes and its reliance on stumbling across derelicts to kick off each episode’s plot – Series VI seems to go out of its way to provide a formula for Red Dwarf that would allow even the most incompetent AI chatbot to put together the bare bones of an episode without too much trouble.
There are reasons for this approach. The increasing pressure of writing deadlines on Rob and Doug (along with all of their other responsibilities) is well-documented, to the extent that it’s remarkable that Series VI turned out as well as it did. So under those circumstances, why not give yourself an easy go-to formula for certain jokes, some guaranteed woofers, in the same way that other great sitcoms often did? After all, later series of Blackadder certainly weren’t averse to leaning on their extended similes or Cunning Plans to get a big laugh; Fawlty Towers had no qualms about making repeated references to Manuel’s Barcelonian heritage to reliably induce an audience reaction – why should Red Dwarf be any different?
The truth is, I don’t think that this formulaic approach is truly a bad thing, in and of itself. In particular, Rimmer’s inaccurate quoting of Space Corps Directives is actually a neat bit of continuity back to Quarantine, where Rimmer read and absorbed (albeit inaccurately) the Space Corps Directive manual, and even at that time volunteered his own ridiculous directive (about Lister flossing his teeth with the E-string of his guitar and spraying sugar puff sandwiches over his bunk). This is just a refinement of that concept into a convenient gag format that can be dropped into conversations at virtually any time.
The same is true of stuff like the jokes about Kryten’s head or shape or Cat’s “deader than” jokes. Yes, they’re somewhat repetitive and formulaic, but you still have to do the work of giving each example a funny punchline of its own – making up a ludicrous alternative Space Corps Directive or an amusing comparison to Kryten’s angular features – and let’s be fair, finding the right words to make even a formulaic joke function properly still requires some not-inconsiderable effort.
The truth is, I think that the formulaic approach to gags of Series VI is just part of a wider sense of increasing repetition and reliance on old ideas that underpins this run of six episodes. It’s the series that gave us Emohawk: Polymorph II, an episode that manages to be a sequel to three separate Red Dwarf episodes from the preceding three series, but which struggles to match any of them as it buckles under the weight of having to find amusing alt-forms for its transforming antagonist, provide hilariously geeky accoutrements for Duane Dibbley, and create sufficient opportunities for Ace to absolutely insist that the people he encounters smoke him some kippers (another Red Dwarf catchphrase that eventually became a grating as it was once delightful).
Series VI is also the series that gave us Rimmerworld, an episode that builds on Me²’s idea of multiple Rimmers leading to a horrible situation by giving us… even more multiple Rimmers leading to a horrible situation. Even a great, imaginative, award-winning episode like Gunmen of the Apocalypse still includes a Space Corps Directive gag in all but name (OK, this time, it’s an “All Nations Agreement” article) and at a key moment falls back on another “smee-heeee” from Kryten.
And a legendary story like Out Of Time can feel a little familiar in its Stasis Leak-like clash of younger and older versions of the cast and its Back To Reality-esque warping of what we know about the show’s overarching story (ironically, droid-Lister gets far closer to evoking Blade Runner than Back To Earth ever did).
Yes, it’s inevitable that a show that’s six years old will start to repeat beats to some extent, but given all of the above examples, it’s easy to see how Series VI has become a bit of a byword for Red Dwarf becoming dependent on running gags, bogged down by repetition, and overly reliant on formula.
And yet.
And yet.
Legion.
Because Legion is one of the best, tightest, funniest, most imaginative half-hours of Red Dwarf – maybe even of sitcoms full stop – that have ever been produced. And yet it’s a veritable check-list of all the formulaic things that fans gripe about when it comes to Series VI.
After opening talk of exploring derelicts, Starbug gets pulled towards yet another abandoned space-station to explore. Within the same sentence, Kryten is referred to as “butter-pat-head” and Cat’s nostrils begin vibrating faster than the springs on a Spaniard’s honeymoon bed. Moments later, Rimmer is misquoting a Space Corps Directive and Cat is declaring the crew deader than tank-tops (and then again, a few minutes later, deader than A-line flares with pockets in the knees).
And yet.
And yet.
And yet what Legion also does, of course, is to couple these formulaic elements with all manner of utterly fantastic original elements. This is an episode that can boast an intriguing and dramatic central concept that’s directly tied to our characters and their personalities; no less than two completely separate but equally inspired jokes about switching lights on; throwaway gold like “don’t get your double-helix in a straight”; and even a revolutionary and fundamental change to Rimmer’s hologrammatic status that allowed him to do so much more for the remainder of Red Dwarf’s long history.
These original gags and compelling concepts propel the episode forwards – and in doing so, they make the formula-based moments feel like the icing on the cake, rather than a crutch on which the show feels overly dependent. This distinction between overly relying on existing ideas and merely using them to garnish an otherwise innovative script is, I’d argue, what makes the difference between Red Dwarf’s repetition and formula feeling stale and obvious, or feeling like just one additionally fun element of a show that is otherwise still excelling. And it’s a distinction that became increasingly important in the show’s later years.
Beyond A (Running) JokeSeries VII saw arguably the most significant changes that any series of Red Dwarf has had to bear. As well as co-creator Rob Grant stepping away from the show, we also saw the mid-series departure of Rimmer, a new Kochanski, and a new approach to filming the show that removed the studio audience. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that – especially early on – Series VII clings to Red Dwarf’s history to provide some stability amid a sea of change.
So we have a first episode, Tikka To Ride, that not only directly reprises the time-drive plot from Series VI’s closer (albeit with some fresh contradictions), but couples it with an idea first jokingly mooted back in Timeslides – the Boys From The Dwarf paying a visit to JFK’s assassination and standing on the grassy knoll.
The nostalgia ramps up even further in Stoke Me A Clipper, which features the return – again – of Ace Rimmer, elevating the character to a legacy hero with almost godlike status, in a seeming response to his real-life popularity. And not only that, but Lister’s eulogy for Rimmer during his funeral reads like a “greatest hits” for the character, sending him off with references to Alexander the Great’s chief eunuch, underpants on coat-hangers, name tags on condoms and whiskers on kittens. Er, I mean, Rachel his inflatable sex-doll. It makes you realise how far we’ve come from the Lemming Sunday mention in The Inquisitor, when an entire speech is basically cribbed from funny gags from earlier, better episodes.
As Series VII goes on, it starts to feel a little more confident in its own ideas. While Ouroboros is ostensibly another throwback to the past – this time with the reappearance of Kochanski – it also marks a new status quo for the show, with a sense of a new beginning.
Or at least it would do, if the show didn’t keep resorting to further throwbacks all the time. The sense of leaning on the past persists, when – even as a new version of Kochanski is being (re)introduced to the show – we get a flashback-based Rimmer cameo, before the audience has even had a chance to miss him: a sign of insecurity that feels comparable to that time that Matt Smith’s Doctor showed up again the episode after his regeneration to literally reassure Peter Capaldi-Doctor’s companion (and the audience watching) that everything was still going to be okay.
And that’s not the end of it. Just a couple of episodes later, in Blue, we have Rimmer coming back yet again to make a flashback cameo appearance, as well as a further dream-sequence with Lister in which things get really meta via a joke about Rimmer’s Space Corps Directive jokes. Along with one of the crew members actively resenting Kochanski’s presence at all times, you could almost be forgiven for thinking that the show wasn’t entirely comfortable with moving on from the past.
But wait! Series VII has one more chunk of familiarity-bait left to offer up, with the closing episode, Nanarchy, providing an opportunity for Norman Lovett to step back into his all-time finest role of “man smiling while he rides a wave of nostalgia-fuelled applause” – a part that he’d play again before Red Dwarf is over.
By the time Series VIII rolls around, the floodgates have well and truly opened on resurrecting Red Dwarf’s past – quite literally, as it turns out, with various members of the ship’s crew (including Captain Hollister, Chen and Selby) turning up early on in Series VIII to inform everyone that Mark Williams is now too rich and famous to do the show.
Explicit continuity callbacks abound in Series VIII, with Back In The Red in particular featuring countless references to the show’s history. The positive viruses from Quarantine play a particularly significant role, tales of Lister’s past adventures are sprinkled throughout, and the general impression of the show attempting to recreate the past becomes stupidly literal with the replication of the original Series 1/2 bunkroom.
And the less said about the Dibbley family, the better.
While you could argue that Series VIII is laudably more successful than Series VII in creating a new vision for the show, and in coupling its nostalgic callbacks with genuinely new elements, it’s unfortunately a vision for the show that is largely rubbish and new elements which are largely pretty shit.
Is it any wonder that we didn’t see Red Dwarf for a decade after that?
Every Callback Is Dead, Dave (Era)Inevitably, once a show gets as old as Red Dwarf, there’s going to be some echoing of old ideas. There’s also a simple logic to the fact that, the more episodes a show racks up, the more history there’s going to be to refer to. However, you still have choices to make about how you acknowledge the past, and how you weave it into stories that can still offer something fresh and new. But in the Dave era, the rehashes of past jokes and ideas became more explicit than ever.
The Back To Earth miniseries turned out to be an extended (budget-friendly) riff on Back To Reality – which is an approach that is perhaps forgivable for what was originally positioned as a one-off-revival, but less so for the full trio of new series that followed. In fairness, the signs from Series X were fairly promising. Most of the episodes have fairly original plots, and the most obvious callbacks to earlier Red Dwarf history manage to do something inventive with the reference.
The final sequence of The Beginning contains two of the most conspicuous back-references in Series X, but I’d argue that both of these acquit themselves by offering more than just a hollow, empty regurgitation of the past.
The gag about how the crew escaped the cliffhanger at the end of Only The Good… is maybe the most meta reference the show has attempted outside of Back To Earth, but it gets by on its cheeky charm: a quick joke about how the show isn’t going to address that gap in its history is frankly far more fun than a five-minute exposition-dump that creates an unnecessary continuity bridge between the BBC and Dave eras.
And Rimmer’s triumphant exclamation of “the slime’s coming home” – helping the end of The Beginning evoke the end of The End – is perhaps a little forced, but forgivable when you factor in the knowledge that Doug wrote this story as a possible Last Ever Episode, and wanted to create something that could act as a 2012 bookend to that First Ever Outing from 1988.
Maybe the most substantial example of Series X relying on something from the show’s past, though, is the father-son shenanigans of Fathers And Suns – which is actually a pretty good example of how to take an old idea and build on it to turn it into something new and different. Lister’s argument with himself as his own dad is a very inventive and fun way to acknowledge Ouroboros while doing something entirely fresh with the idea – although it would take a couple more series before the show reached the same heights again.
Because Series XI and XII, for all their great qualities, don’t half love to lean on Red Dwarf history a lot of the time. One trademark gag-formula is seemingly endless variations on the “they’ve taken Mr. Rimmer” joke from Holoship, in which something happens to Rimmer, and (this is brilliant), everybody else on the crew is (you’re going to crack up at this), everyone is (wait for it) – actually really happy about that!
But there are other, even clunkier rehashes of past glories in XI and XII. Perhaps most egregiously, Can Of Worms decides that it’s time for yet another Polymorph episode, without really managing to add anything extra to the mix except for an odd subplot about Cat’s virginity. For the most part, it just feels like “let’s do Polymorph again, but worse”, and its position as the finale of Series XI suggests that Doug was expecting that to result in a lot more goodwill than it ends up generating.
At least when Samsara mentions that the Karma Drive is related to the morally-oriented technology of Justice, or Kryten in Officer Rimmer reminds the titular protagonist that he has a poor history with making copies of himself, it’s an explicit acknowledgement that “yes, we’ve done this idea before”. Not that this really excuses it, but at least it lets us know that it’s a conscious retread.
(Which makes it all the stranger when Series XII’s Skipper so conspicuously avoids mentioning Ace Rimmer, when the entire back half of the episode is based around alternate dimensions in which different decisions are made. But maybe that was avoided because to even mention Ace might set up the expectation of a cameo later on, and even Skipper doesn’t want to go that far.)
In Series XI, it’s only really Give & Take that bucks the trend, standing out as another Legion-esque example of taking a formula of ideas that are well-established in Red Dwarf – whether it’s Stasis Leak’s time-travel, Ouroboros’ causality loop, the tired old exploring-a-derelict plot catalyst, or the generally Kryten-like aspect of Snacky evolving from a humble service droid to a science expert – and coupling this formula with other aspects that sparkle and delight, helping to make these old ideas feel fresh and new.
Compared to its predecessor, Series XII fares better in terms of story ideas, but worse in terms of explicit callbacks and nostalgia-bait. Especially in the final three episodes, the weight of references becomes almost unbearable at times – whether it’s Mechocracy’s old archive clips and reintroduction of Talkie Toaster, M-Corp having the actors reprise the opening of The End (but not before also rehashing the Uncle Frank story from The Last Day – with Cat even commenting “you already told us this story!”), or the apparently endless references to the fucking Om Song.
And as for the second half of Skipper… well, the tone is set by Norman Lovett again getting a round of applause simply for turning up as Holly. Yes, there’s a fun play on the “everybody’s dead, Dave” routine from The End, but even that feels like more of a command performance for longtime fans than a genuinely inventive twist on an old gag.
That feeling of history-for-its-own sake is compounded by a slew of further cameos and callbacks – Captain Hollister, the original Red Dwarf model, the old Series 1/2 sleeping quarters – that seeming exist only to push our nostalgia buttons and give us a warm fuzzy feeling, rather than actually building on that history with anything new. (We should probably be thankful that Ace didn’t turn up after all, as it would probably just be more of the same.)
So which episode saves the day in this respect? Which one runs against the grain of Series XII and actually does something genuinely innovative with a past concept?
In many ways, it’s the least likely hero of them all. Because it’s only bloody Timewave.
Yes, in a twist greater than Chubby Checker teaming up with John Travolta while Katy Carmichael from SPACED enjoys a lemon-and-lime-flavoured spiral ice lolly in the background, it’s perennial punching-bag Timewave that actually features the smartest and most innovative resurrection of an old Red Dwarf gag in the whole of Series XII.
Its late-in-the-game subversion of the Space Corps Directive gag structure – with a swift pre-interruption “Shut up, Kryten” from Rimmer after he knowingly gets his citation wrong – is a genuine delight, and one that proves that you can do more with these old ideas than just mindlessly rehash them for a bit of nostalgia-fuelled audience recognition.
(Although even with this example, you can argue that the G&T Dwarfcast sting from Chris Barrie got there first.)
David, David Lister, Lister Listy, Lister ListyWe can be thankful, then, that the final Red Dwarf episode of the Dave era (for now anyway, pending any further announcements from ActualKryten on Twitter), The Promised Land, seems to acknowledge the weaknesses of empty nostalgia that we saw in XI and XII, and take a different approach.
Because while The Promised Land might at first glance appear to be another nostalgia trip – drawing on elements from the very earliest days of Red Dwarf, like Lister’s supposed godhood and the fate of the other Cat people – it does so in a way that builds on these concepts and does something interesting and new with them, rather than simply rehashing them for a quick hit of recognition. (Although it certainly has small moments that do that too, like Rimmer “going through the gears” of all his classic outfits as he takes on his new Diamond Light mode.)
But in the main, The Promised Land feels less like someone ticking off callbacks to Red Dwarf history, and more like the work of a writer who wants to take some of the show’s lesser-examined ideas and approach them from a new angle. So we get a more complex society of Cat people, and a genuinely interesting look at what their (misplaced) faith in Lister means to the true believers; we get an exploration of existential questions around Rimmer’s status as a hologram that the show has avoided until now, but which make for some surprisingly compelling moments of pathos; and we get a deadpan take on a rebooted Holly that (for a substantial chunk of the story) actually gives Norman Lovett something new to do after 30 years, and also sets up a triumphant return of classic-Holly that feels funnier and more lively than anything he’s done since Series 2.
Even the relationship between Rimmer and Lister – the very core of the show, that has anchored it since the first moment of the first scene of the first episode – gets a fresh examination in The Promised Land, with the instant-classic “moonlight” scene that shows that Red Dwarf still has something new to say about its characters after more than three decades.
If anything gives me hope for the show’s future, it’s The Promised Land – because it seems to represent a tacit acknowledgement that if you’re going to repeat yourself, if you’re going to look backwards, if you’re going to mine past episodes for ideas, then there has to be a point to that; there has to be something more than just an empty rehash.
By all means refer to the show’s rich history when it makes sense, by all means mine laughs from running gags, and by all means feature callbacks. But make these the additional garnish that the formulaic gags were in Legion, the perfect finishing touch that heightens an already great script – not a crutch, or a substitute for fresh ideas and new thinking.
Because, like Legion before it, The Promised Land shows that the current version of Red Dwarf excels most spectacularly when it’s doing new things with the characters and concepts that we’ve come to know and love over the years, taking these old ingredients and combining them with new ones to make an exciting new meal, rather than a plate of reheated leftovers.
That’s how Red Dwarf can reconcile its history with its future: by giving us new ideas that feel like they build on everything great that’s come before, rather than leaning on it.
or: Why We Insist On Being Grumpy Bastards Every Time This Happens
If, like me, you’re known amongst your more neurotypical friends, family and colleagues as “the Red Dwarf fan”, you’ll have received umpteen messages in the last couple of days, reacting to the “news” that new Red Dwarf has been “confirmed”. These normies will then have been confused by your lukewarm response, before you have to tediously explain that nothing is actually official yet, and the articles that they’ve seen online are just discussing the rumours we’ve known about for months. “But look”, they reply, “it says it right here, the Scrapheap Challenge guy announced it”. At this point, you have to choose between launching into a full scale rant about the intricacies of television commissioning, or just saying “yeah, looking forward to it” in order to maintain the illusion that you’re a well-adjusted individual like them.
It’s especially frustrating when you can also see this happening on a much wider scale. Us lot – you, me and anyone else who’ll visit a fansite for a sci-fi programme from the 1980s – know the score, but there are vast swathes of Dwarf fans who have a much more casual relationship with the show. They might love it every bit as much as we do, but they’re not as obsessive about the details as we are, and are less likely to have been following the series of small scale leaks that we’ve been tracking. But all of a sudden, they’re all over social media in the last two days, sharing their excitement at the confirmation of something that isn’t actually confirmed. But here’s the thing – it’s not their fault. They’re being let down by the people they trust to provide information.
First of all, rumour control. Here are the facts. Robert Llewellyn did a live stream on his personal YouTube channel on Wednesday evening. The VOD has since been taken down, but the relevant section has been snipped out so that we can see exactly what he said.
We knew we were going to do more Red Dwarf, and we’re now actually doing it in the middle of October til the middle of November this year. Three… well, a 90 minute special. Three half-hours. And the whole point was that we don’t announce that until it’s confirmed, and we knew that. So then I was at a science-fiction convention sitting next to Craig Charles, and everyone that came up and said “are you doing more Red Dwarf?”, he just said yes! […] Anyway, so yes, we are making more. I can’t believe I’ve agreed to do it, I’m insane. I’m much too old.
Our interpretation of that is the only real piece of new information is the October-November shooting dates, which hadn’t previously been mentioned. There’s two ways of taking the “90 minute special / three half-hours” bit. It either means that it will be broadcast in three parts, or it could simply be Robert comparing the runtime to the standard episode length. Either way, we won’t know for sure until we’re explicitly told by UKTV and/or Grant Naylor Productions.
So that’s how we’d report the news, complete with context and caveats. But we don’t have adverts on our site. We’re not run for profit, so there’s no incentive for us to lure people over to boost our stats. Unfortunately, the vast majority of news sources on the internet are much less discerning; they rely on your clicks to generate income in order to pay their staff and remain viable, and so it doesn’t matter to them what you’re clicking on, as long as you’re clicking.
And so when Jay Richardson of the British Comedy Guide saw the YouTube video, it somehow became an EXCLUSIVE. Red Dwarf IS returning. It’s a “new three-episode special”. The absolute gall of the phrase “British Comedy Guide can exclusively reveal” is staggering. It’s an abhorrent display of total disrespect towards your audience. In fact, it’s just a plain lie. You’re not exclusively revealing shit, you’re transcribing a publicly available livestream. Furthermore, you’re reporting your own interpretations of what was said as fact. This “three episodes” thing is going to be attached to whatever this project is for good, and we don’t even know if it’s true. It’s bad journalism, but sadly that’s what this industry feeds on right now. Nuance goes out of the window when you need to get page views in order to get paid.
Then it snowballs. British Comedy Guide got there first, so that allows other publications to follow suit. The Radio Times says Red Dwarf is ‘returning to TV with 3 brand new episodes’, citing BCG as their source. They haven’t watched Robert’s video themselves, they’re just copying what Jay Richardson said. And how do we know? Because Jay Richardson got his facts wrong. The British Comedy Guide article states that “Llewellyn yesterday confirmed the show’s return on his Fully Charged YouTube channel”. He didn’t, it was his own YouTube channel, not Fully Charged.
And yet the Radio Times article says “Robert Llewellyn reportedy [sic] confirmed the news on his Fully Charged YouTube channel”. Thus confirming that they’re just re-writing what the other website says, with no attempt to verify the information. This article has not been fact-checked. They’re just repeating what they’ve heard verbatim. And if that’s the case, why should we trust anything they report on? All it takes is for these click-hungry demons to report on something you personally know something about, for you to realise that this is how it works. And it’s very worrying. We know that it’s not that important a mistake, we know that there’s bigger worries in the world than the accurate reporting of Red Dwarf rumours. But if they’re getting this wrong, because they have to churn out as much content as they can as quickly as possible, what else are they getting wrong?
Incidentally, by the time the story reached the absolute depths of the gutter, ie. The Sun, it had somehow mutated to “Robert Llewellyn, who played the mechanoid Kryten, told the British Comedy Guide…” Oh, did he now? Not content with repeating other people’s inaccuracies, you introduce your own because you haven’t even bothered to read the thing you’re copying properly. Leave the Red Dwarf reporting to us, you focus on hacking the phones of murder victims.
There is one crucial piece of information buried at the end of all of these pieces. Very deliberately placed at the end, because they’re not banking on people getting that far – as long as they click the article, it doesn’t matter if they actually read it. To quote the original BCG piece:
UKTV declined to comment.
And you know why they declined to comment? Because Red Dwarf‘s return is not confirmed. UKTV would be the people to confirm it. But hey, who cares about piffling details like that when there are misleading headlines to write. Most news organisations have this as part of their process – they write their article, then ping an email to the channel’s overworked PR department to give them the right to reply, then publish as soon as they hear back either way. It’s theoretically there to ensure the story is true, but it doesn’t stop them from publishing details that are completely unconfirmed and unverified, leaving the disclaimer until a point where most people will have scrolled away.
But, you may ask, why hasn’t the news been confirmed by the channel yet? Well, because it’s bloody well up to the channel when they announce it, regardless of how leaky the cast are. There are numerous reasons why they wouldn’t want to say it out loud just yet. It’s possible that contracts haven’t been signed yet – it may well be verbally agreed but not signed on the dotted line, and it’s far from uncommon for early stages of pre-production (such as checking the actors’ availability and pencilling in dates) to start while the legal departments are still going over the finer details of the commission. Not only that, they’d surely want to include confirmation that all four (or five?) regulars are returning in any press release, and they can’t do that until they’ve all signed their contracts.
Alternatively, even if it is all officially signed, sealed and delivered, it’s still their prerogative to announce it in their own good time. Take a look at the television industry right now. It’s on its arse. Nobody’s got any money, and so every single commercial broadcaster is scaling back its commissioning. They’re making fewer new programmes than ever before, and so naturally they want to control the release of information. No point shouting about all your big new shows now and then having nothing to announce for six months, they want to pace themselves.
Incidentally, this is often at odds with the wishes of the production companies and creatives behind the programmes, as they’re usually keen to get news of their successful commission out there as soon as possible, to prove to their peers and competitors that they’re still keeping their heads above to the water. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all of Robert’s previous live streams stayed up on the channel, but this one was taken down, once it started taking off to a point where UKTV were undoubtedly aware of it.
Not all of the blame for the current confusion lies at the door of what passes for online journalism, although most of it does. Things would no doubt be a little more under control if we still had official sources of Red Dwarf news. Back when reddwarf.co.uk was updated on a weekly basis, they’d be able to elude to the show being in the news even if they weren’t able to officially say anything. A “watch this space” type placeholder was enough to assure people that things were happening behind the scenes, and that they’d be the source of the eventual news that people could truly trust. But we don’t even have @RedDwarfHQ any more, and so we’re in the faintly ludicrous position where the closest thing we’ve got to an official social media account is Robert Llewellyn tweeting in character as Kryten to 8,400 followers, looking to all and sundry like a parody account.
Look, we have no doubt that Red Dwarf is probably coming back. It seems extremely likely that everything Robert said in his live stream is true (or at least true to the best of his knowledge, as things stand), and that there will be official confirmation at some point in the next few months. It’s not that we don’t believe the stories, it’s just… well, we’ve been burned before. Consider this. In 1997’s Swirly Thing Alert special (coming soon to G&TV by the way), Robert Llewellyn told viewers of Seattle’s KCTS:
I think we probably will do [a movie]. They’ve raised a lot of the money for it already. The producers and the director, Ed Bye, are absolutely determined. They’ve booked the studios and you know… Officially, we’re doing a series, Series VIII, next year, in about a year’s time, and then after that, in the Fall of next year we’re supposed to be shooting Red Dwarf: The Movie. And also I think they’re going to combine it with a live stage show, where we’re actually trying out some of the dialogue we’ll use in the movie on stage so that we get an audience response and they’ll tighten it up and change it. […] It won’t be a Hollywood film, they want to do it with the original cast in Great Britain, but with American names too.
Everything he said was true, to the best of his knowledge, as things stood. But if the internet of 1997 was like the internet of 2024, the headlines would write themselves. Red Dwarf: The Movie CONFIRMED. It will be shot in Autumn 1998. It will be directed by Ed Bye. It will feature big-name American actors. The funding is in place. There will be a live stage show too.
And that’s just the most notorious example of the countless abandoned Red Dwarf projects that were discussed but never saw the light of day. We’re confident it won’t, but this latest special-slash-mini-series could go the same way. Which is why it’s important, as fans, to hold your fucking horses, and curb your excitement until we have official confirmation from the right people, at which point we’ll shout it from the rooftops. But unfortunately, when we do, those normies we mentioned at the start will go “pfft, this is old news, I saw it online ages ago”. UKTV and Grant Naylor will be denied the splash and the buzz that they’d been planning for, just because one journalist saw an opportunity to get a decent number of clicks from a premature and totally bogus “exclusive”, and kicked off the news cycle early.
“Nic Farey is why we have to take off our shoes in airports”
Even by the standards of the Red Dwarf DVDs, the series VI set was special and probably represents the arguable pinnacle of the original set of releases. As such, Cappsy, Danny and Ian had a marvellous time reliving an absolutely packed release of musical insight, more SFX behind the scenes goodies, plus a very amusing and previously unknown tale regarding Craig and horses!
DwarfCast 171 – Re-Disc-overy: Series VI (125 MB)
Show notes* Ian’s review * Cappsy’s review * Sonic The Hedgehog music theory * Howard Goodall: How Music Works * Howard’s 30th anniversary song * Laredo’s website, with lots of up-to-date pictures and links to things that have been filmed there * Lionel Blair rides bareback before facing down a load of cowboys wanting to unload on him. * Bee Gees vs Chaka Khan
It’s funny to think that just over a year ago, we were convinced that Red Dwarf was dead and buried, a victim of an ongoing legal battle with no end in sight. That was until it ended. And since then we’ve been teased with the prospect of a new spin-off series, whilst also regaining a modicum of hope that the OG Dwarf would return at least once more. While there is still no official news – and as usual we’d like to clarify that nothing is confirmed until it’s announced by the production company and/or the broadcaster – we’ve now entered what we’ve come to recognise as the preliminary phase that usually indicates that such an announcement may be forthcoming. Yes, the cast have been blabbing again.
The first such occurrence happened in the Liverpool Echo back in December, with Craig stating:
We’re in talks with the BBC and UKTV to do another series of Red Dwarf. It hasn’t been on the BBC for so long but now they’re in talks with UKTV to do a co-pro that will go out on Dave and the BBC.
That’s a very interesting detail, and a plausible one. With both eras of the show now streaming on iPlayer, plus both UKTV and Baby Cow being part-owned by BBC Studios (the commercial arm of the public service broadcaster), it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that any new productions would be available on multiple channels and/or streaming services.
After a few months of quiet, there’s been a sudden flurry of cast activity in the last couple of weeks – certainly enough to prompt us off our arses to round it all up. On the first weekend of April, Craig and Chris both attended Comic Con Prague; there’s a roundup of coverage on Tumblr, and their Q&A panel has found its way to YouTube. The pertinent part is around 17 minutes and 40 seconds in:
CHRIS: We could be doing more…
CRAIG: Yeah, yeah, we’re talking about doing a new one now, a new 90-minutes special. Bit like Promised Land, that format, so…
Chris then changes the subject before he reveals any more, but the seed was sown, and then reaped by Robert in a YouTube live on Sunday 14th, the day after he’d appeared at a convention in Newcastle with Craig and Danny.
[reading a comment]”Will there be more Red Dwarf? It’s my absolute favourite show.” [laughing] I am not at liberty to say. Which is such a giveaway! ‘Cause I didn’t think we were meant to tell anyone, and I don’t think we are, but Craig was telling everyone yesterday. So it’s not impossible. It’s not confirmed, it’s not confirmed but it’s not impossible that we will be making a further Red Dwarf experience.
There’s a small chance that “experience” refers to something other than a televised project, but my money would be on that being a catch-all term for a special or a series, with Robert not wanting to go into as much detail on the format as Craig did in Prague. There was a further live stream from Robert on Tuesday 16th, during which he mostly managed to keep schtum save for a brief mention towards the end:
[reading a comment] “It’s OK, Chris and Craig blabbed at Prague Comic Con.” I thought they did, ’cause when I was with Craig the other day he was blabbing about it. I’ve been trying to be good and not saying anything.
Here’s hoping for more live streams in the future, we’ll probably end up getting the script a line at a time. With all these mentions flying about, the story of Red Dwarf‘s possible return is just starting to get picked up outside of our little corner of the internet, so do be extra wary of clickbait and sensationalism. We’ll say it again – nothing is confirmed until Grant Naylor Productions / Baby Cow / UKTV / the BBC say it’s confirmed. But we’re all allowed to be just a little bit excited. Sometimes you live, you die, you live again, you die again and then you live again again.
Thanks to Stephen Abootman, Zamppera and si for alerting us to all of the above in our forum. Do make sure you’re keeping an eye in there and our comments as more news trickles in.
If there’s one thing we like more than speculating wildly about all things Red Dwarf, it’s pissing about with the latest silly internet fads. For our latest Video DwarfCast, we combine the two by using ChatGPT to answer all those burning questions. What is Red Dwarf: Titan going to look like? Who’s going to play the young versions of our favourite characters? What would a redesigned Starbug look like? Or a redesigned skutter? How would Kryten do on Robot Wars? And can 2024 artificial intelligence do a better job of drawing Rimmer on the bog than Kryten can?
(As should be perfectly clear from the video itself, we in no way condone the use of A.I. as a replacement for human artistry in any way. It’s a laugh, innit?)
“There’s two scythes to every story.”
In this very exciting instalment of our journey through all things Smegazine, Cappsy, Danny and Ian are joined by two very special guests – Chris Barrie’s nipples. Listen along as the five of us discuss neural networks, yuppies, Kochanski’s giant forehead, Norman Wisdom’s popularity in Albania, whether or not Back To Reality was actually any good, and how The Inquisitor is accidentally responsible for the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein.
It’s best to have the magazine in front of you as you listen. If you don’t have an actual copy, scans are available on archive.org or Stasis Leak, you freeloading bastard.
DwarfCast 170 – The Smegazine Rack – Issue #11 (110 MB)
Show notes G&TV covers Cyberzone * John’s ancient Episode Orders article, and Christopher Wickham’s oft-linked-to Red Dwarf Broadcast Guide * We couldn’t find the footage of Norman Wisdom pissing about ahead of Albania vs England, but here’s a bit of C5’s coverage to prove we weren’t making it up * Dave’s competition winning Inquisitor vs Judge Dredd comic * FAO Jane Killick in late 1992: all the changes made in the Red Dwarf Omnibus * G&TV covers The Reconstructed Heart*
At the start of Red Dwarf‘s 35th anniversary year, things had never seemed grimmer for the health of the franchise. The protracted legal kerfuffle between the show’s creators was dragging on into its third calendar year, with no indication whatsoever that it would end any time soon, and any possibility of new material dwindling with each passing day. But as 2023 comes to an end, despite there still being no solid news in terms of actual production, there has been so, so much to give us hope that Red Dwarf shall live again.
The first indication came on the day of the anniversary itself; exactly 35 years to the minute that The End first aired, a short message was released which would have been fairly unremarkable if not for one extraordinary detail. It was signed by “Rob and Doug”. The first collaboration between the pair since 2007’s Bodysnatcher. It wasn’t much, but it was something – some small beacon of hope that perhaps they were willing and able to put their differences aside – and it completely changed the mood of the fandom overnight.
Sure enough, just under a month later, our wildest hopes were confirmed – the legal kerfuffle was officially over. For the first time, both Rob and Doug are now free to pursue their own Red Dwarf projects, and the possibilities are endless. Of course, we knew back in March that the buttski floodgates wouldn’t be opening immediately, and indeed they’re yet to secrete even a dribble after nine months and counting, but the possibilities are there. We were lucky enough to discuss some of those possibilities with Rob himself in an exclusive interview.
One of the things he told us was that he was keen to continue working with Paul Jackson and Ed Bye, and when the three of them appeared at a BFI screening of Backwards in November, he took the opportunity to unveil his latest project – Red Dwarf: Titan, a prequel set during shore leave on the eponymous moon, co-written with Quanderhorn collaborator Andrew Marshall. He elaborated in a subsequent interview (not with us, the bastard) that the show will feature younger versions of Lister and Rimmer, be set “one universe to the side” of the main series, star a whole new cast, with the original cast making guest appearances, and is planned to be both a TV show and a novel. A sizzle reel exists, but we have no idea whether any broadcasters or publishers are on board.
But I’ll tell you which broadcaster is interested in the type of audience Red Dwarf attracts all of a sudden – the BBC, who out of the blue decided to put the entire series, including the Dave era, on BBC iPlayer. Well, eventually – Krytie TV was missing at first, leading to a brief manufactured panic about wokeness, even after it turned out to be a technical error that was quickly fixed, and it took another month or so to resolve some rights issues with Back To Earth. But it’s all there now, and we can focus on the important things, like whether iPlayer or UKTV Play has the best selection of thumbnails.
But not only that, Auntie also gave Red Dwarf some linear love too, with Series 1 and 2 repeated on BBC Two, airing on their original channels for the first time since 2007 and 2003 respectively. We were hoping that this would be the start of a complete run through, but it seems to have stalled twelve episodes in. It was fun while it lasted, however, particularly continuity announcer Duncan Newmarch paying tribute to his 1988 predecessor (and not for the first time).
This all felt like a slightly belated tribute to Red Dwarf‘s 35th anniversary, which we celebrated in the traditional manner with The Coral Canvass, our very latest and very greatest episode ranking. A change in methodology gave us by far our biggest response yet, and there were some shocks along the way, with a brand new worst episode ever and a shake-up to the top four for the first time in a decade. All of which was discussed in great detail in our first ever live video DwarfCast, along with the inaugural edition of Clochebusters, the year’s hottest new game show format.
There was more video fun to be had later in the year, firstly when we ruined the word “Kryten” for everybody, and then when we tracked down the ancient Macromedia Flash trailer for The Official Site. This was just one of the ways we lived up to our moniker of potty-mouthed archivists this year, along with highlighting the Red Dwarf RPG‘s retrieval from the digital scrapheap, and uploading a lovely clean copy of the Red Dwarf episode of Whatever You Want. But our biggest project of the year was undoubtedly Cappsy’s painstaking reconstruction of reddwarf.co.uk, rebuilding and restoring the site from multiple caches. It remains baffling and sad that we’ve had to do this, but we’re very proud to have saved some of Andrew, Seb and Curtis’s fantastic material from eternal obscurity.
As ever, we’ve tried to fill the gaps between actual news as best we can, and this year our DwarfCasts mainly focussed on progressing through our two concurrent series, ticking off Smegazine Issues 7, 8, 9 and 10, and re-disc-overing Series 2, III, IV and V on DVD. Additionally, there were a couple of special editions; I’m particularly proud of the documentary celebrating 40 years of Son of Cliché, and we ended the year with a good old Christmas special.
And in our final act of self-aggrandisement for the year, our other bits and bobs of content included a couple of editions of G&TV, taking in Danny’s appearance on CBBC’s Chute! and a full, terrible episode of Craig’s chat show Funky Bunker. I also spent an afternoon pissing about with a new Photoshop feature instead of working, and, rather more substantially, raided the newspaper archives to examine Red Dwarf‘s context in the TV schedules of its time. Oh, and of course there were 365 new rounds of Smegle’s Difficult Daily puzzle, some of which were actually difficult.
Sadly, with a show of Red Dwarf‘s age, no round up of the year can be complete without mentioning the people we’ve lost in 2023. Jake Abraham, known to us as the alternative Lister in The Inquisitor and to millions more from his role in Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, passed away from cancer in October, leaving behind a powerful lesson about how he left it too late to seek treatment. We also said a sad goodbye to John Pomphrey, one of the show’s key founding fathers and genuine Red Dwarf royalty.
And so as we once again gear up for a night of aged popstars serenading us across multiple BBC channels, and hoping that the barrage of fireworks doesn’t wake our various children and/or cats, we salute John and Jake, as well as raising a huge glass to you, our loyal readers slash listeners slash viewers, who have brought so much joy and entertainment to our year with your continued support, Smega-Drive memes and semi-comprehensible waffling. From Cappsy, Danny and Ian, a very happy new year to all of you.
“If it wasn’t shit, it would be perfect.”
We thought we ought to do something slightly out of the ordinary for our landmark 169th episode, so here’s two specials in one – it’s time for some Christmas Waffles. Once again our lovely listeners slash readers provided us with a veritable smorgasbord of tasty topics, which we gobbled up whilst writing fan-fiction about the ship’s Secret Santa, sharing our ultimate Red Dwarf Christmas wishes, pondering the best box sets of all time, weighing up the current state of the fandom, and coming up with a really good idea for a Christmas special. Plus, like all great festive episodes, we end on a good old sing-song. We apologise for nothing.
DwarfCast 169 – Christmas Wafflemen Special (46.8 MB)
A very Merry Christmas from Cappsy, Danny and Ian to everyone who’s enjoyed and/or tolerated our stuff in 2023. Our annual review of the year will be along during the festive perineum, before DwarfCasts return to delight your ears and sometimes eyes in 2024.
Show notes Our fellow Dwarfy podcasters / YouTubers: The Garbage Podcast, Everyone’s Dead Dave, Shipwrecked & Comatose, Better Than Life, Red Dwarf Nerd, Gallifrey Gals * All the leaves are brown… * Frank Kelly’s Christmas Countdown*
“Disgustingly Northern”
As we continue our series revisiting the now decades-old DVD releases, the main thing we re-disc-over this time out is that Series V tempts us down conversational side roads like nothing else. So join Cappsy, Danny and Ian as we discuss Juliet May’s short-lived tenure as director, attempt to get to the bottom of conflicting stories about Red Dwarf USA, and uncover more examples of institutional racism within the Metropolitan Police. We also speculate as to what the visual effects workshop smelt like, hunt down pictures of Timothy Spall dressed as a pig, and confess the real reason behind our lukewarm response to the fan commentaries nearly twenty years ago. Strap yourself in, this is a waffley one.
DwarfCast 168 – Re-Disc-overy: Series V (127 MB)
Show notes Ian’s review from November 2004 * A much more succinct explanation of what “crossing the line” means * It’s a fucking emu! * Timothy Spall develops PTSD in The Tale of Little Pig Robinson * Holoship* Xtended – Pete Part Three did a complete edit while John Hoare posted one scene from his version. * Ian’s slow motion face * Creating new lines from existing dialogue
Way back at the turn of the century, three Red Dwarf fans competed for not one but two money-can’t-buy prizes. Whatever You Want was a Saturday night entertainment show, hosted by Gaby Roslin for four series between 1997 and 2000, and inexplicably not featuring Status Quo as the theme tune. It was part of a lineage of similar programmes, preceded by Jim’ll Fix It and followed by Tonight’s The Night with John Barrowman – Roslin definitely the most wholesome of those presenters – that strove to make ordinary people’s dreams come true through the magic of television. While there were smaller items throughout each show, the main focus was a game show element that pitted enthusiasts with a shared interest against each other for the biggest prize of the night. And on 13th May 2000, it was Red Dwarf‘s turn.
The three superfans chosen to compete were called Vicky, Rob and Jane, the latter of whom later became the Chair of The Official Red Dwarf Fan Club. And the prizes were very special indeed. Firstly, a custom-built Starbug, made for the show by the legendary Bill Pearson, overseen by the equally legendary Jim Francis, both of whom had recently worked on Series VIII. Not only that, the lucky winner would also spend a full week on set, and have their name in the credits, of Red Dwarf: The Movie. This sets an ongoing world record for the longest delay between winning and receiving a competition prize.
After airing over 23 years ago, the programme was never repeated or included on any commercial releases. As it was a few years too early for catch-up services or social media, it never resurfaced online, and has been pretty much considered lost media. But guess what? Gaby Roslin’s not the only one who can make Red Dwarf fans’ dreams come true…
Here we have all the Red Dwarf related bits of the episode, which takes up a good third of the show’s running time. Within that, there’s just been one edit for YouTube Content ID purposes, where we’ve had to speed up a clip from Back To Reality to avoid the video being taken down.
We’ll leave you to enjoy the full very-very-early-noughties aesthetics, and to ponder what the hell the end game has to do with being a Red Dwarf fan. We will just point out, however, that you can see former GNP supremo Helen Norman, along with a barely-out-of-short-trousers Andrew Ellard (then Fan Club mag editor, very soon to be website editor) behind Gaby during her opening link. Want some further reading? Here’s a scan of the relevant section of Better Than Life #33, with contemporary reports from all three contestants.
“Magnum Ed Bye”
It’s been far too long, but we are finally back on the Rack to continue our odyssey through the wonderous world of early 90s publishing. Join Cappsy, Danny and Ian as we take a deep dive into the epic Jake Bullet story that graces the cover, welcome another legendary Red Dwarf fan writer to the fold, marvel at the versatility of Chris Barrie’s face, discover an obscure sci-fi writer that none of us have heard of, and attempt to figure out why a parody of Red Dwarf USA bears absolutely no resemblance to Red Dwarf USA. Mostly though, we rip the absolute shit out of everyone who took part in the all-episodes survey. Without looking, see if you can guess what the people of 1992 thought the second worst episode ever was. The 1992 idiots.
It’s best to read along before or during your listen of the podcast. If you don’t have a physical copy of the magazine, simply configure your time drive for December 1992 and head to your nearest newsagent. Failing that, look at a scan of it on archive.org or Stasis Leak.
DwarfCast 167 – The Smegazine Rack – Issue #10 (120 MB)
Show notes The famous Casablanca poster that the magazine’s cover pastiches * The Last Temptation of Kryten (the fan fiction that launched a thousand headcanons) * Oh Bosanquet, Howard Goodall’s second contribution to Not The Nine O’Clock News * Disturbing content warning – what became of Hoggle from Labyrinth* * The Kryten tissue dispenser, as featured in this article on Gazpacho Soup
As you may have gathered, we’ve currently got a bit of a bee in our bonnet about media going missing. Ever since being described by the official site as the “potty-mouth archivists” of Red Dwarf, we’ve taken the epithet to heart, to the extent that this description is now backed up in a complete rebuild of said official site. We’ve come a long way since the 50s, 60s and 70s, when master tapes of major TV shows would be reused or binned as a matter of course, and any current releases of significant media are backed up by fans almost immediately. But there does seem to be a bit of a blind spot at around the turn of the century and a few years either side, things that were released recently enough to be documented online, but before decent upload speeds and significant storage space were available to all.
Which brings us on to the Red Dwarf RPG, released in February 2003 by Deep 7 – then a fledgling and relatively new indie, now going strong for nearly twenty-five years, with games such as Arrowflight, Santa’s Soldiers and Grimmworld released to much acclaim. It was only ever officially released in the US, although it was easily accessible for purchase at conventions and online within the UK, and it spawned a couple of further additions, the A.I. Screen accessory (complete with the Extra Bits expansion pack), and the Series Sourcebook, which ambitiously converted each episode to a playable format.
All of which is long since out of print, and incredibly difficult to get hold of. Well, you can currently buy a copy of the main RPG book, if you’re willing to part with £1,774.05 for it. Furthermore, digital copies are very hard to find too, particularly in the case of the expansion packs. The licensing rights to produce such a Red Dwarf game have long since expired, which makes official reprints or digital releases extremely unlikely. So unless someone happens to, I don’t know, upload high-res PDFs of absolutely every piece of material that Deep 7 produced for Red Dwarf, it’s likely to be lost forever.
Oh, look at this! G&T regular Ben Paddon (they of Jump Leads fame), has sent us a link to archive.org, where someone has uploaded high-res PDFs of absolutely every piece of material that Deep 7 produced for Red Dwarf. What a coincidence! A huge thank you to all involved.
Most people would have written this video off as a bad idea as soon as they remembered what the seventh episode is called. Not us.… Read More
"Doctor Fitzwilliam: Village Rectologist"
At 6:30pm on Tuesday 23rd August 1983, unsuspecting Radio 4 listeners were ambushed by the very first episode of a seminal new sketch show. Featuring a hugely talented cast, performing the work of two writers who were on the fast track to greatness, it was notable not only for its inherent quality, but for what it would eventually spawn. The programme was, of course, Son of Cliché, without which this podcast would not exist. So in a break from the usual format, we present our fortieth anniversary tribute in the form of a documentary, showcasing some highlights from the series, analysing what made it so great, and of course focusing on the moments that had the biggest influence on Red Dwarf. Think it was just Dave Hollins: Space Cadet that Rob and Doug drew upon? Think again.… Read More
Hot on the tails of Red Dwarf returning to its mother channel’s bosom via iPlayer, today’s weekly release of the television schedules sees the news that The End is to be repeated on BBC Two at 10pm on Friday 25th August. It’s not yet clear whether this is a one-off, or the start of a… Read More
"The Manly Adventures of Buff Squidward"
Rejoice, for our journey through the Smegazine archives continues with quite possibly the best issue yet. The first ever Duane Dibbley comeback! Tonnes of dirt on Red Dwarf USA! Loads of exciting news, some of which actually ended up happening! Some tedious prose pieces to keep us all grounded! Plus, we think we've uncovered the first published work of an acclaimed comics writer and Red Dwarf fan. All this and more, in far too much detail even by our standards.… Read More
As discussed in our recent Channel Hopping article, there was a brief period in early 1997 when Craig Charles had three different programmes on air, across three different channels, every Friday night. I'd assume we're all familiar with BBC2's Red Dwarf VII, while Channel 4's Captain Butler is still inexplicably available in full on demand. But what of the other, much more obscure offering, late night ITV's Funky Bunker? Usually starting so late at night it would conclude in the early hours of the following morning, it was a chat show/variety show hybrid in the short-lived genre of post-pub television, ie disposal entertainment, designed to be consumed exclusively whilst drunkenly picking through a kebab, to fill the silence and distract from the growing sense of existential dread.
But was it any good? Well, here's a random full episode on YouTube (no way of knowing the date, for some reason I can't find any comprehensive episode guides online), so let's see what the show's got to offer. Brace yourself.
… Read More
Here at Ganymede & Titan, we're never afraid to tackle the big issues surrounding Red Dwarf. Over the last twenty years we've dealt with accusations of racism, homophobia and sexism within the show, gone through the trauma of seeing our beloved co-creators waging war through the courts, and hosted endless debates about which of Series VII and VIII was the shittest. This week, almost the entirety of Red Dwarf was published on BBC iPlayer, including all but three episodes of the Dave era. It's all still available on UKTV Play of course, meaning Mummy Beeb and Daddy Dave have joint custody of all their kids and step-kids. And so there's now a new question to settle. A question that will tax our collective IQs to their very limits. Which platform has the best thumbnails?
Let's go through series by series, awarding points to each streaming service based on which image we prefer for each episode. The iPlayer thumbnails are on the left and can be distinguished by the black background, while UKTV Play is on the right against blue. (If you're on mobile, you'll probably want to tap to expand.) While we're here, we might as well also cover any oddities or discrepancies in the metadata. Honestly, this is going to be pretty niche. Strap in.… Read More
Yesterday, Doug Naylor updated his Twitter to say that an announcement was coming, and sure enough, at one minute past midnight, the BBC published a press release to say that all twelve series of Red Dwarf, plus The Promised Land, are coming to BBC iPlayer. This is great news for the show, with the exposure that comes from having your boxset front and centre on one of the UK's biggest streaming platforms, free to access and free from ads. And it's really significant that the Dave era is included too; it's not entirely unprecedented, and not surprising given the links between UKTV and the BBC, but it's a rare treat to see shows that originated on other channels appearing on iPlayer.
However, now that the episodes have turned up, there's a problem.
Updated with a quote from the BBC below… Read More
"The Gall of Gary Barlow"
The third Red Dwarf DVD was released twenty years ago this November. It's time for another voyage of re-disc-overy, as we cast our minds back to a time of the online retail wild west, blossoming friendships and intense fansite rivalry. Although in practice, we probably spend more time reminiscing about our early Dimension Jump experiences than anything else, thanks to the choice of extra to receive the commentary treatment this time round, Hattie's DJ Diary. The surrounding, extremely waffley discussion takes in such topics as Red Dwarf's history with the AA, Craig Charles's overdue royalty payments, and farting in Ronnie Corbett's face. Each and every special feature is covered, we just hope that whatever you're using to watch your DVDs these days can actually access the menus...… Read More
The new Beta version of Adobe Photoshop has an interesting feature called Generative Fill. You highlight a section of a canvas, and it uses AI to figure out what should be there, based on the rest of the image. Immediately, people started using it to extend famous artworks, album covers and the like. My immediate thought - what happens when you put Red Dwarf images through it?… Read More
It cannot have escaped anyone’s attention that Red Dwarf turned 35 years old this year. It’s easy to underestimate just how long ago that was in terms of television as a medium. The BBC Television Service was launched on 2nd November 1936. That was only 86 and a half years ago – the lifespan of Red Dwarf to date covers around 40% of the entire history of scheduled broadcasting. And so it goes without saying that British telly in 1988 looked very different to the landscape of today, but just how different? What else was on BBC Two when each series of Red Dwarf first aired, and what was the competition on the other channels?
Using a combination of the amazing BBC Programme Index and newspaper archives, we’re going to answer those exact questions for the first episode of each BBC series in detail, along with an overview of how the rest of the run panned out. For some readers, this will be a nostalgic reminder of the television of their childhood, adolescence or young adulthood. For those that are too young or too foreign to have lived through it, it’s a window into a bygone age. Either way, the power of hindsight allows us to spot the subtle clues that television was changing before our eyes, as we piece together the transition from one era to another, through a Dwarfy prism.
Monday 15th February 1988BBC Two
5:30 Olympic Grandstand
7:40 Barry Douglas
8:10 Horizon
9:00 Red Dwarf
9:30 Moonlighting
10:15 Split Screen
10:45 Newsnight
11:30 Weatherview
11:35 Olympic Report
12:10 Open University
12:40 Close
Red Dwarf launched in the middle of Olympic season, specifically the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary, back when the snowy edition would take place in the same year as the sunny one. Viewers of BBC Two on that fateful day would have been treated to action from the figure skating, men’s luge, cross-country and speed skating events, before soaking up a little culture from pianist Barry Douglas playing a bit of Rachmaninov and Shostakovich.
Immediately preceding The End was Horizon, BBC Two’s flagship science documentary strand, running from 1964 to the present day. This edition was titled Struggling For Control, and concerned air traffic control in an increasingly cramped airspace. It makes sense to schedule your new science-fiction programme after your established actual-science programme, and there’s a similar crossover of potential audiences afterwards, with comedy (albeit comedy drama) from American import Moonlighting starring Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd.
After this, the fun is over as the channel reverts to covering serious stuff considered too niche for BBC One, firstly Split Screen, a pair of short films presenting opposing views on single-faith schools, Newsnight (another series that’s still going today) and the weather, and some highlights from the day’s Olympics. Finally, a couple of things that will be foreign to any readers currently under the age of 20 – televised modules for Open University courses, which ceased linear broadcasting in 2006, followed by the channel shutting down for the evening, rather than just chucking out repeats or joining a rolling news service.
Other programmes are availableLooking to the immediate left of Red Dwarf‘s spot in the schedules will show the same thing for 51 of the 52 20th Century episodes – BBC One’s main news bulletin was always at 9pm, until it got nudged back an hour in October 2000. Competing entertainment offerings therefore came via the two commercial channels, with ITV showing crime drama Hard Cases at 9, while Channel 4 launched a new series entitled A Prospect of Rivers, celebrating the role of rivers in British life and landscapes. It was a very different channel back then.
Elsewhere that day, comedy fans didn’t have a great deal to choose from, the highlight undoubtedly being Eric Sykes leading a star-studded cast in Mr H Is Late at 8pm on ITV. Beyond that, there’s only a showing of US sitcom Who’s The Boss? in ITV’s late night schedules, plus short-lived Noel Edmonds game show Whatever Next at 8:30pm on BBC1. Rose-tinted myths about olden days telly being packed with hit comedy after hit comedy be damned.
Look ahead…For the first half of Dwarf‘s first series, Monday nights on BBC Two were virtually identical, the only variation being different one-offs airing between the Olympics coverage and Horizon. After the Games finished, the gaps in the schedules were filled with the return of Tomorrow’s World, public access strand Open Space, and airings of vintage (even for 1988) films Those Endearing Young Charms, The Spanish Main and The Big Steal. At the same time, Split Screen was replaced by Indelible Evidence, a series of murder-based documentaries.
After the end of their rivers documentary series, Dwarf‘s competition on Channel 4 for the last two episodes of Series 1 was Into Nicaragua, following two Brits working in the Nicaraguan health service. And following the conclusion of Hard Cases, ITV put another hard-hitting drama against Balance of Power, Waiting For God and Confidence & Paranoia, namely Bookie, the gritty tale of Glaswegian gambling addicts, before a new series of Boon launched opposite Me². Also, their early evening comedy spot was taken up by Andy Capp, an adaptation of the Daily Mirror comic strip, with former Likely Lad James Bolam as the eponymous misogynist, while BBC1 significantly upgraded Edmonds with Tim Brooke-Taylor in sit-com You Must Be The Husband.
Tuesday 6th September 1988BBC Two
5:30 Screen Sleuths: Calling Bulldog Drummond
6:50 DEF II Animation Week
8:00 Floyd on Britain and Ireland
8:30 Brass Tacks
9:00 Red Dwarf
9:30 Frederick Ashton: A Master Class
10:20 ScreenPlay Firsts: The Riveter
10:55 Newsnight
11:40 Weatherview
11:45 Championship Darts
12:10 Open University
12:40 Close
So considering the competition, it’s perhaps not a huge surprise that the first few episodes of Series 1 achieved ratings good enough for an immediate recommission. It was remarkable even then for a second series to follow on so quickly from the first, and unsurprisingly BBC Two isn’t a massively different place in September 1988, even though Dwarf did shift from Mondays to Tuesdays. With no Olympics to deal with, this is perhaps a more typical schedule of the time than we had back in February, with several umbrella titles for certain strands in evidence in the listings.
For example, it was common for a long time for BBC Two to begin their peak-time offerings with a film; in this case, Calling Bulldog Drummond was being shown as part of a Screen Sleuths season. This was followed by a double-whammy of umbrella titles; DEF II was the dedicated yoof section of the evening (presided over by future Gunmen of the Apocalypse denier Janet Street-Porter), and it was at this time having an animation season, featuring clips, documentaries and a serialised version of Yellow Submarine, shown over three nights.
Following this, it’s a somewhat scattergun approach to tone and genre for the rest of the night. The legendary Keith Floyd’s latest piss-up is followed by an uncompromising examination of the Police Complaints Authority, and then the debut of everyone’s favourite mechanoid. Afterwards, a bit of ballet in tribute to recently deceased choreographer Frederick Ashton, and then another strand within a strand – ScreenPlay was the channel’s umbrella title for one-off dramas at the time, and ScreenPlay Firsts was a subset of that, showcasing new writers and film-makers. The block of programming from Newsnight onwards is pretty much set in stone at this point (albeit with a flexible start time, depending on the duration of the previous programme), with the British Darts Championship providing the sporting highlights quota.
Other programmes are availableAs an alternative to a deranged mechanoid preserving the corpses of three women for centuries, ITV offered up The Black Museum, a look inside Scotland Yard’s collection of Jack The Ripper artefacts, such as “post-mortem photographs of three disfigured victims”. Lovely stuff. Meanwhile, Channel 4 showed Hud, the 1963 Paul Newman western.
Over on BBC1 immediately before Dwarf, a new sitcom called Double First launched with an hour-long episode at 8pm. Telling the tale of a former Oxford graduate reduced to grilling burgers for a living, the series was produced by our old friend Gareth Gwenlan. The only other comedy options throughout the day were repeats, with ITV showing Auf Wiedersehen Pet (which is more drama than comedy) and Channel 4 airing The Cosby Show (which is more true crime than comedy, in hindsight). Edmonds was back on BBC One with Telly Addicts if that counts (it doesn’t), while C4 did have a couple of interesting looking space documentaries that may have been relevant to Dwarf fans, particularly The Stars at 8pm, which dealt with white dwarfs, red giants and black holes.
Look ahead…Once again, BBC Two stayed pretty similar for the majority of the run, with series and strands such as Floyd on Britain and Ireland, Brass Tacks and Screenplay Firsts all continuing throughout, with the exception of Parallel Universe day, which saw the former two replaced with live coverage of the Wildscreen Awards for wildlife film-making. In the 9:30 slot however, a new documentary series on the human brain, The Mind Machine, started straight after Better Than Life, and ran for the following six weeks.
On the other hand, ITV put out a different show opposite Dwarf every single week, namely a showing of The Outlaw Josey Wales, In From The Cold (a profile of Richard Burton), Fields of Fire (a drama set in post-war Australia), Airplane! (which started before the watershed at 8:30pm, so presumably cut to buggery) and an entire evening dedicated to the hundredth anniversary of Jack The Ripper, in a strangely macabre parallel to the first week. Over on Channel 4, documentary Face Value – The Hollywood Portrait and one-off comedy The Giftie could be seen opposite Better Than Life and Thanks For The Memory respectively, before they settled in to a new documentary series entitled What Is Truth? for the remainder of the run.
On the comedy front, Double First continued its run on BBC1, while repeats on various channels included Fawlty Towers, The Good Life, Rising Damp and The New Statesman. The latter is an interesting one, as the first series originally aired on ITV in 1987, and yet this repeat run a year later was on Channel 4, despite Yorkshire TV being in the midst of producing the second series for ITV to air in the new year. Unthinkable today, but more common back when ITV was operated as a series of local franchises, which each retained certain rights over the programmes they produced for the network. There were much closer links between ITV and Channel 4 prior to the Broadcasting Act of 1990, which saw C4 gain more independence and responsibility for its own programming and advertising from 1993 onwards.
Tuesday 14th November 1989BBC Two
6:00 Film: How To Commit Marriage
7:30 South Africa Under the Skin
8:00 The Last Launch
8:30 Floyd’s American Pie
9:00 Red Dwarf
9:30 Made In Latin America
10:30 Newsnight
11:15 The Late Show
11:55 Weatherview
12:00 Talk of the 80s
12:35 Close
Skipping ahead a year or so, this is probably the best example of the wildly lurching tone and subject matter of your average BBC Two schedule of old. We kick off the evening with a classic Bob Hope and Jackie Gleason romp, before the latest in a series of personal reports from South Africans living under Apartheid. There’s an indication of Red Dwarf‘s historical context for you – it’s so old that Apartheid was actually a current thing when the first four series aired. After that is The Last Launch, an observational documentary series covering the collapse of Britain’s shipbuilding industry and the consequent mass redundancy in the North East. But hey, here comes Keith Floyd again, cooking clam chowder and getting pissed on Californian wine.
Then after a comedy about a backwards bar fight and a poo going back up someone’s arse, Made in Latin America – a programme that sounds like it’s going to be fun – covers brutal dictatorships. Newsnight is followed by The Late Show, which is nothing to do with David Letterman or Stephen Colbert, but was a recently-launched arts programme hosted by a pool of up-and-coming young presenters such as Paul Morley, Kirsty Wark and Mark Lawson. Yes, Red Dwarf is that old. Before BBC Two goes to bed for the evening, there’s just time for a look back at the decade that’s about to end, as Barry Norman interviews Sebastian Coe. I hate Sebastian Coe.
Other programmes are availableIn the 9pm slot over on ITV was the latest episode of Capital City, a drama following the personal and professional lives of a group of investment bankers. Yep, this is the 1980s alright. Meanwhile, Channel 4 had Bandung File, a long-running documentary strand focused on Black and Asian journalism. This particular edition covered the current tensions in Afghanistan. What a different place the world was.
Comedy wise, as well as repeats of Dad’s Army and I Love Lucy on BBC One and Channel 4 respectively, it was a good day for new episodes of sit-coms. ITV had Shelley, starring Hywel Bennett as “the thinking man’s layabout”, which had returned the previous year after a five year hiatus. Whereas Channel 4 had the intriguing-sounding Snakes and Ladders, starring John Gordon Sinclair (best known as Clare Grogan’s boy in Gregory’s Girl) and Adrian Edmondson, set in a dystopian Britain where a literal north-south divide has been established, which was followed by Julian Clary’s ground-breakingly rude comedy game show Sticky Moments.
Look ahead…Remarkably, almost all of the above mentioned programmes remained in place throughout Series III’s run. This is one of those peculiarities of scheduling known as the Christmas Pull-Up, in which series are more likely to be synced up in the later months of the year so that they all end at the same time – ie. just before Christmas, when the regular schedules need to be cleared for special festive programming. Floyd’s American Pie (in which the TV chef puts his penis in an apple pie, presumably) is an exception, which had its last episode on the same day as Backwards aired. The lead in to Marooned a week later was another historical landmark – a one-off called Commons on Camera, marking the first time television cameras were allowed to record parliamentary sessions. The following week saw a new series of Food and Drink in that slot, while over on Channel 4, Snakes and Ladders came to an end on the night Polymorph aired, with its place being taken by One Night Stand – showcasing American stand-up comedy – for the remainder of the run.
Thursday 14th February 1991BBC Two
6:00 Film: Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure
7:25 Animation News
7:35 First Sight
8:05 Bleak House
9:00 Red Dwarf
9:30 40 Minutes
10:10 Small Objects of Desire
10:30 Newsnight
11:15 The Late Show
11:55 Weatherview
12:00 Weekend Outlook
12:05 Open University
12:35 Close
Into the 90s now, and another new day of the week for Red Dwarf to slot into, its third in just four series. Thursday clearly suited the show, as it only shifted for one of the remaining BBC series, before being established as the Dave era’s default broadcast day for Series X onwards. It’s not a particularly Valentines-themed evening on BBC2, unless a young and stubbly Sean Connery does it for you, in which case you’d enjoy Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure. A brief look at some animation is then followed by magazine programme First Sight, tonight exploring how technology may allow office workers to work from home. It’ll never catch on. This however was only shown in London, the East and South-East, as different regions of the UK had their own local programming in this slot. The various areas had similar strands such as The Midlands Report, Close-Up North, Southern Eye and Western Approach. In modern times, there can still be variations in the schedules between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but it’s only really local news bulletins that are narrowcast this granularly.
The nations are reunited for the BBC’s latest, but by no means the last, adaptation of Bleak House, this one starring Diana Rigg and Denholm Elliott. Then after the main event, 40 Minutes, a documentary strand that ran from 1981 to 1994, themed around the running time rather than the subject matter. This week, novelist Wendy Perriam reveals the sexy side of Surbiton, before Small Objects of Desire presents a history of the cigarette. Then it’s a familiar end to the evening; the only programme we’ve not seen before being Weekend Outlook, further weather news looking ahead at the next few days.
Other programmes are availableAny viewers put off by the sight of a huge ugly blob could turn over from ITV’s TV Times Top 10 Awards with Des O’Connor to watch Camille instead. Channel 4 meanwhile did whatever the 1991 equivalent of ctrl+F was to their catalogue, and screened the 1979 rom-com TV movie Valentine, starring Jack “Grandpa Joe” Albertson and Danny DeVito. Other than repeats of Kate & Allie and Desmond’s on Channel 4, comedy is thin on the ground on the day’s schedules, with one notable exception. Fans of Chris Barrie enjoyed the perfect cross-channel double bill, with the final episode of the first series of The Brittas Empire airing at 8:30pm on BBC One.
Look ahead…Remarkably, BBC Two managed to show a different Tarzan-related movie in the 6pm slot for the entire six-week run of Series IV. The only change to the schedules for the second week was a new series called Bicycle starting after 40 Minutes, charting the history of the, erm, bicycle. The following week saw Bleak House replaced in the schedules by Scottish sitcom City Lights and the new series of Top Gear, at this point a half-hour magazine about cars, rather than a mouthpiece for right-wing manbabies. Over on BBC One, Brittas‘s slot was taken by Doctor at the Top, the last and least well-received TV iteration of Richard Gordon’s Doctor series, while a repeat run of Open All Hours after the news gave us a solid 90 minutes of comedy across the BBC channels.
Dwarf‘s direct competition from DNA onwards came from The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes on ITV, with Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke as Benedict Cumberbatch and Tim From The Office respectively. Channel 4 meanwhile had The Orchid House, a four-part adaptation of Phyllis Shand Allfrey’s pioneering novel, starring a young Liz Hurley and Polymorph‘s Frances Barber among others. The schedule remained pretty set in stone across the board for the remainder of the run, until the last week when the second series of The Crystal Maze began on Channel 4 at 8:30pm. The fact it started half an hour before Dwarf but continued throughout will have caused many a conflict of which to watch and which to tape for early 90s teenagers.
Thursday 20th February 1992BBC Two
6:00 Olympics Today
8:30 Redundant
9:00 Red Dwarf
9:30 Fire in the Blood
10:20 Talking to Myself
10:30 Newsnight
11:15 What The Papers Say Awards
12:00 Weekend Outlook
12:05 Open University
12:35 Close
For the second time, Red Dwarf finds itself sharing the airwaves with the Winter Olympics, this time hosted in Albertville, France. All time sportscasting greats David Coleman and Des Lynam are both on duty for live coverage of the men’s 1,000m short-track speed-skating final. This was previewed in the listings as Britain’s best chance of a gold. We did not medal, in this or any other event. Still, never mind, BBC2’s following this up with the last in a series looking at the effects of mass redundancy in former mining and manufacturing communities. The perfect lead in for the start of Red Dwarf‘s best ever series.
The serious subject matter continues for the rest of the evening; Fire in the Blood examines the threat of Basque terrorism to Spain’s unity, while the short Talking to Myself features investigative journalist Duncan Campbell demonstrating “how he manipulates the press, controls interviews and protects the weak against the strong”, it says here. Standard BBC2 late night fare for the rest of the evening, but What The Papers Say is a programme with a fascinating history. The newspaper review programme started off as a Granada production for ITV way back in 1956, before moving to Channel 4 when it launched in 1982. It briefly returned to ITV in 1988, before being poached by BBC Two in 1990, where it ran until 2008, clocking up a seriously impressive 52 years on air. Just when it seemed dead and buried, it then turned into a Radio 4 show from 2010 until 2016. The awards ceremony was an annual event celebrating the best print journalism from the last year, with this edition hosted by Russell Davies, best known today as the reason the Doctor Who showrunner has his middle initial in his pen name.
Other programmes are availableStar-studded American drama LA Law was the 9pm competition on ITV, while Channel 4 presented a series simply titled The Germans, which this week examined contemporary attitudes to immigration in the country that had only been reunified in the last couple of years. Comedy was dotted about the schedules, with BBC One having a solid hour from 8pm consisting of a Last of the Summer Wine repeat and – for the second and final time – the last episode of The Brittas Empire coming on the same night as the first episode of Red Dwarf. This itself faced competition from a repeat of Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out on Channel 4, who also had Just For Laughs later in the evening, presenting highlights from the Montreal Comedy Festival.
Look ahead…The Olympics were over by the time The Inquisitor aired, and so BBC2 was able to revert back to the familiar early evening films, regional magazine strands and Top Gear, plus a new series Abroad in Britain immediately before Dwarf, investigating outlandish or unusual examples of British architecture. Another change occurred from Quarantine onwards, when Fire in the Blood was replaced by War Stories, a series on the Falklands conflict, thankfully followed by comedy from Nigel Planer in The Nicholas Craig Masterclass.
Elsewhere, while LA Law remained wedged in ITV’s 9pm slot, Channel 4 offered a different programme against Red Dwarf almost every week, starting with The Barlow Clowes Affair (documentary on a recent financial scandal), The Camomile Lawn (period drama adaptation), The Trainer Wars (documentary about shoes and that), and finally Israel: A Nation is Born (documentary series) for Dwarf‘s last two weeks. BBC One continued their commitment to comedy, with a new sitcom about three generations of West Indian women, Us Girls, taking Brittas‘s slot. They also had comedy repeats after the News most weeks, with a feature length Only Fools and Horses on February 27th rounding off a solid block of BBC comedy from 8pm to 10:50pm.
Thursday 7th October 1993BBC Two
6:00 Film: 633 Squadron
7:30 World Chess Championships
8:00 Plain Tales from Northern Ireland
8:30 Top Gear
9:00 Red Dwarf
9:30 The Dog’s Tale
10:10 Small Objects of Desire
10:30 Newsnight
11:15 The Late Show
11:55 Weatherview
12:00 Instruments in Flight
12:30 Close
Back to the familiar pattern of BBC Two kicking off its evening schedules with a film, this one very much in line with the British obsession with the Second World War. The 1964 flick 633 Squadron, which is all about bombing the shit out of some Norwegians, has a main character called Roy Grant, which caused me to do a proper double take while looking it up. This is followed by some high-octane “sporting” “action” from the World Chess Championship, which is actually more interesting than it first appears; due to a dispute with the International Chess Federation, the two finalists (Garry Kasparov and Nigel Short) quit the governing body and staged the match themselves, creating a schism in the chess world which lasted until a reunification in 2006. This is followed by the heart-warming tale of the Northern Irish border village of Garrison, where the Catholics and Protestants are united by a shared passion for fox hunting.
It’s a lighter tone for the rest of the evening, with Psirens preceded by Top Gear and followed by a programme all about doggos from around the world. Then Small Objects of Desire, which also shared a schedule with Dwarf back in 1991, looks at bras, like your dad does when the Littlewoods catalogue arrives. Once again, it’s a familiar end to the evening; Instruments in Flight is an Open University programme, but was granted its own identity in the TV listings. This did happen now and again when the shows were considered entertaining enough to be of interest outside of those who were studying a specific course, such as (much later) the Robert Llewellyn hosted Hollywood Science.
Other programmes are availableOpposite Dwarf on ITV was the second instalment of a three-part Taggart, in which there had presumably been a muddurr, while Channel 4 were screening an edition of Critical Eye, another of their documentary strands that sought to provide oppositional viewpoints to the political mainstream. This edition covered female genital mutilation, a topic that wasn’t widely known about in the UK at the time. On a much lighter note, comedies dotted throughout the days schedules included a Laurel & Hardy short on C4, a new episode of Waiting For God (the nursing home sitcom, not the Series 1 episode) on BBC1, and The Upper Hand on ITV. For those who don’t know, this was a rare example of a trans-Atlantic sitcom remake being successful; it was an adaptation of Who’s The Boss?, with Tony Danza’s role of a male housekeeper played by the oldest of the McGanns, which ran for seven series. Less successful was Billy Connolly’s US vehicle Billy, broadcast in the small hours on ITV, which by now was running a 24 hour service. Dwarf fans may also have been interested in Channel 4’s The Music Game at 8pm, a pop-themed panel show hosted by the then-ubiquitous Tony Slattery.
Look ahead…The regional magazine slot (First Sight et al) returned to BBC Two from Legion onwards, which otherwise remained pretty similar for the majority of the series, with the early evening films getting longer and/or starting later once the chess tournament finished. The first major change occurred during the fifth week, with A Cook’s Tour of France (the cook in question being Mireille Johnston) preceding Top Gear. It was all change immediately after Out of Time though, with The Dog’s Tale making way for Blood and Belonging, a look at the rise of nationalism in post-Soviet Europe. Hooray.
From Gunmen onwards, the competition on ITV was All In The Game, a semi-autobiographical drama about a young British footballer signing for Barcelona, co-created by Gary Lineker. No, really. Over on BBC One, the hour between the News and Question Time was taken by Crimewatch UK on the first Thursday of every month, but was dedicated to comedy the rest of the time. It was “don’t have nightmares” week for Psirens and Rimmerworld, but the three episodes in the middle had repeats of One Foot In The Grave and Absolutely Fabulous for comedy fans to enjoy straight afterwards. For Series VI’s final week on air, new sitcom If You See God, Tell Him took the slot, starring Richard Briers and written by David Renwick and future Rob Grant collaborator Andrew Marshall. Oh, and the October 21st edition of The Music Game had Tony Hawks as a guest, for a double whammy of Red Dwarf guest starts turned panel show royalty.
Friday 17th January 1997BBC Two
6:00 UFO
6:45 Electric Circus
7:00 Timewatch
7:50 A Week To Remember
8:00 Wilderness Walks
8:30 Gardening From Scratch
9:00 Red Dwarf
9:30 Never Mind The Buzzcocks
10:00 Room 101
10:28 Video Nation Shorts
10:30 Newsnight
11:15 Space: Above and Beyond
12:00 Film: A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon
1:30 Weather
1:35 Close
Jump forward three and a bit years, and the channel looks a very different place all of a sudden. That’s partly because Red Dwarf moved to Fridays for Series VII, when the schedules start to morph into weekend mode, less reliant on the structure of Mondays-Thursdays, but mostly because the landscape of TV can change a lot in three and a bit years. Two rival satellite services – British Satellite Broadcasting and Sky – merged in 1992, and the effective monopoly this created, along with the exclusive rights to Premier League football, movies premiered years ahead of terrestrial, and all sorts of high-profile American imports, saw the number of multi-channel households vastly increase throughout the mid-to-late 90s. By 1997, Sky Digital was only a year away from launching, plus Channel 5 was mere months away from increasing the bare minimum number of channels received by 25%. In short, there was more choice than ever, and the old guard had to adapt.
Not that BBC Two was veering too far from its remit of providing alternatives to the mass-appeal offerings of BBC One and ITV, but you’ll notice the evening’s viewing seems more structured now. My abiding memory of the BBC Two of my secondary school days is they’d always show 45 minute programmes at 6pm – more often than not it would be an American network show sans adverts (or a double bill of half-hour network shows like The Simpsons or Fresh Prince), but in this case it’s a repeat run of UFO, the 1970 live action Gerry Anderson series, originally shown on ITV. We then have 15 minutes of entertainment news from Electric Circus, this week featuring Ian Broudie from The Lightning Seeds and future shooting victim Cliff Richard, before the first of several themed chunks of programming.
History hour starts with a fascinating-sounding edition of long-running documentary strand Timewatch, speaking to kamikaze pilots who survived the process, before archive newsreels from forty years hence in A Week To Remember. This would have been footage from the 1950s. If this programme was made today, it’d be footage from Breakfast Time in 1983. You are old. Then there’s nature-type programmes from 8pm, with Shadow Health Secretary Chris Smith exploring the island of Mull in Wilderness Walks, followed by Gardening from Scratch. There was always gardening programmes on at 8:30pm on Fridays on BBC Two, as anyone who watched the last ten minutes of Gardeners’ World every week for fear of missing any of Red Dwarf‘s 1994 repeat run will tell you.
And then of course it’s the Comedy Zone, a designated 90 minutes of funny stuff every single week. There were in fact two Comedy Zones for much of this period, every Monday and Friday, and they were a real appointment-to-view for young comedy fans at the time; there are so many shows that I watched simply because I always watched comedy on Mondays and Fridays. There were some repeats in the mix, but overall always more original first-run comedy in those two evenings than any single channel would air in a whole week these days. Joining Red Dwarf on this particular Friday was the sixth ever episode of Never Mind The Buzzcocks (current episode count: 297), and a repeat from the second series of Room 101, with Richard Wilson making his case to original host Nick Hancock.
Before the familiar sight of Newsnight, a brief interlude from Video Nation Shorts. This is when the BBC invented vlogging, with slots in the schedules dedicated to members of the public documenting their lives via their own camcorders. These video diaries ran from 1993 to 2011, only falling foul to budget cuts that saw the project deemed unnecessary in the internet age. And then after Newsnight, no boring weather programmes or Open University lectures here, instead the UK debut of short-lived American sci-fi show Space: Above and Beyond, followed by the 1988 coming-of-age movie A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon, starring River Phoenix as someone who really sounds like he should be a snooker player. It’s simple stuff, but most certainly not the kind of programming you’d see this late of an evening just a few years earlier. There’s then a brief look at the weather to calm everyone down before bedtime.
Other programmes are availableTikka To Ride faced competition from The Ruth Rendell Mysteries on ITV, showing the first of a two part story, Bribery and Corruption, while Channel 4 scheduled comedy against Red Dwarf for the first time, in the form of Dressing For Breakfast, a sitcom starring Beatie Edney and Holly Aird. Nope, me neither. Friday was also the designated comedy night on Channel 4, a tradition that they occasionally continue to this day, but which was a staple of the schedules at the time when they were offering the first terrestrial showings of a lot of American sitcoms. Immediately after Red Dwarf/Dressing For Breakfast was Spin City starring Michael J. Fox, then Roseanne starring a horrible racist, followed by a homegrown gem – Captain Butler, starring one Craig Charles.
Friday nights in January 1997 were absolutely owned by Craig, with brand new sitcoms on BBC Two and Channel 4, along with his very late night chat show Funky Bunker airing on ITV at 12:30 in the morning. This temporary ubiquity resulted in Craig being dubbed “Wanker of the Week” by Channel 4’s The Girlie Show, which followed immediately after Captain Butler. This in itself was followed by a repeat of that day’s edition of TFI Friday and Dani Dares, in which glamourous TV presenter Dani Behr tries her hand at stand-up, under the tutelage of Jenny Eclair, providing a solid block of comedy (or close approximations) from 9pm all the way to 1:10am, while BBC One and ITV had no comedies at all.
Look ahead…A week later, BBC Two switched to the original series of Star Trek to provide their 6pm ancient sci-fi quota, which remained there for the rest of the run. Save for the odd alteration due to tennis, ice skating, snooker or athletics action, the BBC Two schedule remained regimented throughout this period, although some of the shows themselves changed, with repeats of Michael Palin’s Pole To Pole replacing Timewatch, Birding with Bill Oddie in the Wilderness Walks spot, and the OG Gardener’s World returning to the pre-Dwarf slot. Craig’s dominance of the listings was lessened after four weeks, which will have pleased The Girlie Show if nobody else – Captain Butler‘s replacement was Here’s Johnny, a chat show vehicle for Johnny Vaughan. Interestingly enough, BBC1 launched the new series of The Mrs Merton Show opposite it on the same night, and also added to their comedy output with repeats of Dad’s Army, Porridge and Only Fools and Horses dotted around the weeks.
But it was all change for Epideme and Nanarchy, as Red Dwarf had exceeded the standard six episodes per British series for the first time. Buzzcocks and Room 101 made way for The Two Fat Ladies’ Comedy Cook-In, in which overweight female chef duo Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright present half an hour of cooking-related comedy clips, followed by a repeat of one of their favourite comedies, in this case Butterflies and Alas Smith and Jones respectively. Meanwhile, ITV replaced like-for-like with Catherine Cookson’s The Moth at 9pm, and Channel 4 had another US import, Caroline in the City, joining Spin City and Roseanne. Also, ITV launched Nick Hancock sitcom Holding The Baby to add to the comedy quotient, as well as continuing Funky Bunker for all but one week that Series VII aired.
Thursday 18th February 1999BBC Two
6:00 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
6:45 Quantum Leap
7:30 First Sight
8:00 Fred Dibnah’s Industrial Age
8:30 Wheeler Dealers
9:00 Red Dwarf
9:30 Horizon
10:20 Tales Of Tools
10:30 Newsnight
11:15 Late Review
12:00 The Phil Silvers Show
12:30 – 6:10* Learning Zone
- Followed by Video Nation Shorts
** Followed by Skiing Forecast
Two years later, a switch back to the more familiar Thursday night slot sees Dwarf once more as the sole prime-time comedy offering on the channel. But while the programmes themselves are less thematically linked than last time, the regimented nature of TV scheduling of the time is evident elsewhere. Virtually everything listed here is the start of a new series, and given that this is the seventh week of the broadcasting year, you can probably figure out why. After Star Trek DS9 provides the first of not one but two American-sci-fi-shows-in-a-45-minute-slot, even the Quantum Leap episode is the pilot, kicking off a fresh repeat run. Then the regional slot is back, with London’s First Sight posing the question “is it racist or just thoughtless to offer bacon sandwiches to Muslim prisoners?” Why not both?
Next up, a brand new series, Fred Dibnah’s Industrial Age, tracing the history of the Bolton, Bury and Manchester canal and all the technological developments it enabled. This was actually the first presenting gig for popular steeplejack Fred, previously semi-famous just for climbing up massive chimneys for a living, kicking off a prolific but tragically short second career until his death in 2004. Then, brand new business-based challenge show Wheeler Dealers, in which two teams of aspiring entrepreneurs are challenged to make their fortune in a trade they know nothing about. Hosted by Adrian Chiles, early in his tragically long career.
After the main event, an edition of Horizon titled Electric Heart looks at early pioneering attempts at creating artificial heart pumps, before ten-minute schedule filler (and another new series) Tales of the Tools tackles the saw. Kirsty Wark, one of The Late Show‘s roster of hip up-and-coming young presenters in 1989, hosts Newsnight, which is followed by a Video Nation Short which is substantial enough to be part of the schedule, but not big enough to be given its own entry in the day’s listings. And speaking of The Late Show, its successor was Late Review (later rebadged as Newsnight Review), this week featuring Mark Lawson, Tom Paulin, Germaine Greer and Ekow Eshun. Brilliant.
Late night comedy is provided by a repeat of The Phil Silvers Show, specifically Bilko and the Flying Saucers, before another too-small-for-the-listings programme, which was essentially weather for posh people. One possible reason for these shorter programmes dropping off the telly pages of newspapers and magazines was a space issue, as BBC Two – and indeed all other terrestrial channels – was now running a 24 hour service. The commercial channels mostly filled the wee hours with repeats, movies and sport, BBC One joined the relatively new News 24 and BBC Two fulfilled its public service remit with the Learning Zone. This incorporated not only the previous Open University shows, but also programmes for schools and colleges, teacher training modules and language classes, and ran as a strand until 2015.
Other programmes are availableNot for the first time, Dwarf was up against some heavy subject matter, with ITV airing the two hour drama The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, telling the story of the racially-motivated killing of a Black teenager in 1993, which continues to have a huge impact on race relations in the UK, with the murderers not brought to justice until 2012. The programme won the BAFTA for Best Single Drama, and spawned a sequel in 2021, covering the family’s long fight for justice. It arguably had a greater impact than Back In The Red (Part One). Meanwhile, Channel 4 offered up The Real Albert Goering, a profile of Hermann’s younger brother, who was apparently not drug-crazed, a Nazi or a transvestite.
But there was also another terrestrial alternative for the first time, Channel 5 having launched just a couple of months after Series VII concluded. The nascent broadcaster was still under the auspices of its original director of programming Dawn Airey, whose philosophy was to offer “films, football and fucking”. It was the former of the three up against Red Dwarf, with the 1995 TV movie Sleep, Baby, Sleep. In stark contrast to Friday nights in 1997, comedy was extremely thin on the ground, with only a repeat of They Think It’s All Over (the panel show with the two most despicable resident comedians in history) on BBC1, and Bring Me The Head of Light Entertainment, C5’s take on the panel show format, hosted by a young Graham Norton. After which on Channel 5, you could see The Inquisitor turn his attention to Eastenders star Michelle Collins, in that evening’s edition of American-style nightly talk show The Jack Docherty Show.
Look ahead…As you might expect, BBC2 remained pretty similar for the bulk of the run, the only variant for the first few weeks being different strands in the regional section, before docusoap Making It, following two young trainer designers, took over the slot nation-wide from the fifth week, when Krytie TV aired. On the same day, a new series of Top Gear started at 8:30; the proudly non-PC and offensively chauvinistic bloke-fest… was preceded by a programme about cars. Live figure skating action was the only other disruption to the pattern, but the other channels were a different story. ITV’s Dwarf opposition for parts two and three of Back In The Red was Infidelity, a documentary about shagging. They followed this with 1994 Sharon Stone movie The Specialist against Cassandra, before three-part drama Every Woman Knows A Secret with Siobhan Redmond.
Meanwhile, Channel 4 started a new series called Ramsay’s Boiling Point against BitR(P2), the very first series to star up-and-coming young chef Gordon Ramsay as he opens his first ever restaurant. Whatever happened to that guy? This ran for the majority of Series VIII’s time on air, until a repeat of Rising Damp aired opposite Pete (Part 2). This was one of several times the sitcom (originally aired on ITV, of course) was used as a schedule filler, as was Whose Line Is It Anyway?, providing the only extra doses of comedy, unless you count The 11 O’Clock Show, which started on the same night Cassandra aired, and launched the careers of Ricky Gervais, Sacha Baron Cohen and, to a much lesser extent, Iain Lee. Channel 5 continued to show old TV movies at 9pm, with the exception of weeks three and five, which instead saw both legs of the UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup quarter final between Chelsea and Valerenga of Norway (agg. score 6-2).
As Red Dwarf once again exceeded the standard six episodes per series, it was all change on BBC 2 when Pete (Part 2) aired on April Fools Day, with new series of Electric Circus, 2 DIY 4 and Vintners’ Tales, plus an episode of The Simpsons for good measure. And then the following Thursday… well, BBC2 were showing The Masters golf tournament that evening, so Red Dwarf found itself unceremoniously dumped from its regular slot for the first and only time, for the very last episode to air on the BBC. Only The Good… was brought forward to Monday 5th April, returning to its original day of the week, and sharing a BBC2 schedule with the likes of Never Mind The Buzzcocks, Food And Drink, an animated version of Moby Dick, and 1997 film Face starring Robert Carlyle. The competition came from the concluding part of Joanna Lumley drama Nancherrow on ITV and movies Roswell on C4 and The Tuskegee Airmen on C5.
But just to really mix things up… you remember several thousand words ago when I said that BBC1 showed the News against 51 of the 52 episodes of Red Dwarf? Well, this particular Monday happened to be Easter Monday, a bank holiday, where all the normal rules of television scheduling go out the window. This means BBC One remains in weekend mode for an extra day, with a much later and shorter news bulletin, away from prime time. Instead, one-off comedy drama The Man, starring Lenny Henry as a travel agent with ambitions of becoming an R&B singer.
Now, we would go on to do the Dave era, but a) it’s not yet old enough to be interesting and b) it represents an era of television that’s unrecognisable even from the latter part of the BBC era. At no point in the twentieth century would a multi-channel broadcaster be able to produce original scripted content that looked and felt on a par with the main terrestrial channels; remember that Sky’s first comedy commission was Rob Grant’s The Strangerers, which didn’t air until 2000, and Sky’s financial weight was, and remains, many times mightier than UKTV’s.
In many ways, Red Dwarf‘s original BBC run is part of a vastly different television era to today. Two key developments in the 2000s changed everything – the launch of Freeview gave everyone access to dozens of digital channels for free, ending the days when the default number of channels could be counted on one hand, and of course the rise of the internet gave us catch-up services, on demand streaming and countless alternative forms of entertainment. There will always be a place for linear television (as evidenced every time England play in a major football tournament, or a monarch dies), it’s just no longer the only option, and so it’s less relevant to chronicle what else is on when Red Dwarf airs. Especially considering that twelve episodes have debuted on demand, and thus outside of the regular schedules anyway.
But despite these huge leaps in the last twenty-odd years, the television industry was not entirely unprepared for the monumental changes that were about to occur, and you can see the old guard adapting and tweaking their approach throughout Red Dwarf‘s original run. In the course of eight series and eleven years, we’ve seen the launch of a new channel, a move to 24 hour broadcasting, more themed blocks of programming and varying levels of adherence to 30/60 minute time slots. Plus, as the pictures next to the listings above show, a much friendlier, more characterful brand identity for BBC Two.
Television in 1988 was not the same as television in 1999, and Red Dwarf rode the wave of those changes. The future was just around the corner; while the name “Dave” was still some years away, its predecessor UK Gold 2 launched in the short gap between the last two episodes of Series VIII. Nobody at the time could possibly have predicted the significance of this event, which just goes to show the importance of keeping television history alive.
“The fascist junta of the potato people”
Back in the distant mists of time, when Ian first dreamt up the idea of getting Danny and I to read through all the Smegazines and record a podcast series about it, no doubt issues like this were front and centre of his mind. Historically significant pieces on ancient DJs? Check. Some hot Wraggy action? Check. Potatits? You bet ya. gestures vaguely at insane original comic strips? Uh-huh.
Needless to say, this was a fun one.
Grab your complementary copy of the mag here.
DwarfCast 162 – The Smegazine Rack – Issue #8 (128MB)
Next up will be our Re-Disc-overy of the Series 3 DVD sets, so I’d advise you start watching those extras in preparation now as it might genuinely be difficult to find a DVD player on which disc 2 will work…
Show notes Danny’s brother on Bad Influence – he’s the one fist-pumping on the right of frame after the pool shot. * Wiffle Lever To Full by Bob Fischer is the book in which Cappsy is carried off on the shoulders of his fellow Red Dwarf fans. * The Angel Hotel in Northampton was somewhat bigger and grander than our initial research suggested. It burnt down in 2012 and is currently being redeveloped. * Clip from Parallel 9 with Robert and Craig. * A good blog about the making of Parallel 9. * The Abso-smegging-lutely Unofficial Red Dwarf Cookbook. * Ian looking discerningly at a bowl of gazpacho soup. * Flap Jack’s comprehensive guide to the edits made in the Omnibus. * G&TV: The Reconstructed Heart. * Brian Harvey vs baked potatoes. * G&T’s 2004 interview with Peter Tyler. * Seb Patrick’s Beyond The Touchline podcast on Roy of the Rovers* and other football comics.
“Could you make Patrick Stewart come in the middle of my television programme, please?”
The second Red Dwarf DVD was released twenty years ago (as of a month and a half ago). Any bets as to whether we can get the next one done before this November?
Back in early 2003 we had barely had chance to watch the first DVD more than two or three thousand times before another release was thrust into our sweaty palms. As is expected, the Series 2 DVD was very closely related to the first so you’d be forgiven for thinking this release might be a little less interesting, but as you will hear Danny, Ian and Cappsy still had plenty to talk about as they continue on their voyage re-disc-overy.
For each edition of Re-Disc-overy, we’re going to be sharing our memories of each DVD release, looking back on the media and fandom landscapes of the time, and of course revisiting and reassessing the many, many special features. This time we’ve selected the Red Dwarf A-Z for the commentary treatment but you can bet we also had plenty of time for the Doug Naylor interview, commentaries and every other special feature contained within these shiny discs.
DwarfCast 161 – Re-Disc-overy: Series 2 (113MB)
This party political broadcast was paid for by the Rt Hon. Horance Terrance Cox.
Show notes* “Very very nearly 20 years ago” is now “slightly over 20 years ago”. “New Years Eve this year” is now “New Years Eve last year.” * 17-year-old Ian’s breakdown of the A-Z * Dalek 63•88 identifying which Daleks were used * James O’Brien reveals all on RHLSTP * Saint and Greavsie meet Donald Trump * Tom Scott talking about sync claps and that * 16-year-old Ian whinging about the Alternate Personalities featurette
“I’ve got a lot of Red Dwarf to give.”
Well then, this is a little bit special. Fresh from the fantastic news that the Red Dwarf legal kerfuffle is officially resolved, we speak exclusively to Rob Grant himself – the co-creator of the programme, who’s now returning to the franchise after an absence of close to 30 years. We found out exactly what the legal resolution means for the future of the show, got clarification on the new status quo for Rob and Doug, discovered what new projects are being pursued, discussed possible collaborations with established cast and crew, and touched upon merchandise, continuity, technology, Marilyn Monroe, and much much more.
This is not one to be missed. We strongly recommend listening immediately to hear all this directly from the man himself, along with our own reactions and post-interview analysis, but if you’re unable to listen right now, there’s a full transcript of the interview portion below.
DwarfCast 160 – Rob Grant Interview (52.1MB)
Show transcriptDownload transcriptIan: So the current state of play – correct me if I’m wrong – is that there are no longer any obstacles to new Red Dwarf being made?
Rob: No, no, there aren’t. I mean, in fact, there are provisions precisely to make new Red Dwarfs all over the place. And it’s very exciting. We reached a resolution whereby Doug and I both have different exclusive exploitation rights. And I don’t want to second guess him by announcing, you know, what they are specifically between us, but we both have a right to a spin off on telly, and there are movie rights, animation rights, theatrical rights. And in addition to that, there are a number of rights that aren’t exclusive to us, but we can exploit, for instance podcasts, novels, radio shows, that kind of thing. And to top it all, then if a different kind of project comes along, we just have to get the other’s approval to get that off the road. So technically, everything’s feasible.
I: It’s insane that we’ve gone from a bottleneck where everything was stopped, and now all of a sudden, anything is possible. Absolutely anything.
R: Yeah, it really is, it’s mind blowing. And very, very exciting. I mean, of course, not all of these things are going to come off because you know… death. We’re not going to be around forever, but we want to be able to exploit what we can while we can.
Cappsy: So this situation is essentially designed to avoid any toe-stepping, presumably?
R: It was a very difficult and delicate negotiation, but yeah, that’s fundamentally what we had to try and do, yeah.
C: That’s good, because that is a concern that we’ve seen some in the community say, like what happens if there is toe stepping? So it’s good that’s there, I guess that would be the first thing to resolve isn’t it?
R: Yeah.
I: Yeah we’re not going to be in a situation where you’re both pitching rival versions of Red Dwarf to the same people, it’s more that you will have your own areas divided up that you can do without clashing with each other.
R: Yeah, I mean, there are lots of versions, for instance, of Star Trek currently on all over the place, and they seem to survive side-by-side without stepping on toes.
C: Well, there’s been multiple continuities of Red Dwarf since 1989, so it’s something we’re used to!
R: So yeah, it’s all good, I think. I mean, I’m very excited to see what Doug comes up with. I love the show and I want more of it. I did see that there’s some people commenting saying, “leave it now, it’s had enough and we don’t want to see a new cast”. And I just think, you know, I’m old enough to remember when we got the new Doctor, Patrick Troughton, from William Hartnell, who’d died, I think, so it wasn’t like there was an option. And the people were saying “oh no, you can’t have another Doctor”. And you can! You can have multiple Doctors.
C: And I think history proved them right in the end!
R: Yeah. And I get it, you know, we love the cast, of course we do. They’re a unique bunch of incredibly talented, funny actors. We really got lucky casting them because I thought they were all idiots. (Laughs) No, I didn’t, I didn’t). But you know, going over those performances, during the quarantine shows, I really began to appreciate just how talented they were. Craig and Chris and Danny, they light up the room, they know what they’re doing. And they were doing things I didn’t notice, you know, when I was shooting it, they’re very clever. But you know, we can’t go on with that forever. That’s got a limited lifespan, and hopefully, Doug will be able to get at least one more series out of them, or a special. I certainly hope so, we’ll have to see.
C: Would it be fair to say then, given what we know about how difficult it is to get the cast all together at the same time, also some health problems that Robert’s had with the mask in the past, that it may be fair to say that Doug will be the one working with the cast, maybe in the short term and anything you’re doing would be sans cast, perhaps?
R: Well, I think Doug certainly will be working with the main cast. I mean, it wouldn’t make sense to break up that kind of continuity now. But you know, there is nothing stopping the cast making appearances in spin-offs. Like, you know, Spock was in bloody every spin-off, wasn’t he? So it’d be nice to have them there. There will be a place for them.
I: And I suppose you’ve already mentioned radio, animation, things like that – there are things that you can do with the original cast that aren’t a TV show.
R: Exactly, I’d expect to get most of them, I hope, in the animation, because then they don’t have to put on the makeup, they don’t even have to leave their home most of the time.
C: Literally phone it in.
R: They do these days! And that would be nice. So yeah, one thing I was actually going to put to the G&T mob is, I’ve seen a lot of people over the past couple of years talking about a Red Dwarf animation. And what are they looking for? I’d like to hear what kind of things they’d like to see. Do they imagine it like a Rick and Morty, or Below Decks, the Star Trek one, or an anime?
Danny: Do you mind if I jump in? So I’ve seen a lot of shows where there’s been a lot of good… Have you seen Love, Death and Robots on Netflix?
R: No.
D: So that’s like a sci-fi anthology show. And I think what could work is an anthology show that might not always be every cast member in every episode, but it could just be like an episode that focuses on a single character.
R: And what would they be, sequential or they’d be completely independent?
D: They could be completely unrelated, they don’t have to have a continuity. They could have a continuity, that could also be a way it would work, but I was thinking it could be almost like stories within the universe of Dwarf, it doesn’t have to have continuation, but you could also have origin stories as well. I’m speaking rather selfishly, but this is the stuff that appeals to me is kind of extending the universe of Red Dwarf and seeing what Titan looks like and seeing what the universe of Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers looks like. Like, that’s the kind of stuff that really appeals to me particularly, but that seems to be where a lot of shows tend to do these anthology shows where there’s a lot of scope and possibilities.
R: Like Tales From The Dwarf basically.
D: Yeah, Tales From The Dwarf basically, yeah!
C: I think as well, one of the things that people really respond well to is kind of a grander realisation of those early ideas and early setups that you had. So for example, we’re going through the Smegazine at the moment…
R: It’s quality stuff that!
C: It’s brilliant! So right at the start, they adapted The End and Future Echoes, and script wise, it’s pretty much word for word but some of the evocative imagery that the artists managed to put in, like the scale. The first scene between Rimmer and Lister and just showing the kind of the huge area that they’re in, that really appeals, I think, to people for animation, like the almost… not the limitless possibilities, but just being able to push that out a little bit.
I: Yeah, there’s definitely things that you can do in animation that you can’t do in live action without having a Hollywood budget. And there are so many ideas in Red Dwarf, like… So we’re going through the Smegazines and spoilers for Danny and Cappsy who haven’t gotten to this stage of their readthrough yet, but there’s spin offs for the Inquisitor, for Ace Rimmer, for Duane Dibbley, for Jake Bullet. There are so many ideas that you and Doug just burnt through in half an hour that haven’t been returned to since.
C: Sometimes two or three in half an hour.
R: Yeah I know, well that’s kind of why we went into the novels because we thought, you know, there’s a little bit more in this.
C: Yeah. And that’s the big thing that everyone says they like about the novels is how they weren’t just novelisations, it was a whole new universe as well. I think that’s something that really interests the Red Dwarf fan group as as a whole is like the idea that we’ve been used to the fact that we’ve got two Red Dwarf continuities, like even thinking that different series would be in different continuities really if you think about it, like III and 2 don’t feel like they’re in the same show, you know, things like that. So like, anything that kind of exploits that and just starts right back from the beginning – could be the same characters, but just retell it slightly differently, like USA did, like the novels did. This is all kind of the points of excitement, I would say.
R: Excellent, this is music to my ears, honestly. I feel like I’m interviewing you guys. Okay, so what can you bring to Red Dwarf?
C: Are you up to speed with Doug Dwarf, as it were?
R: Only in very broad terms. I mean, I have people who are very familiar with it, who would look at my stuff and say, “oh, actually, Doug’s done that.”
I: Yeah, you did Into the Gloop a couple of years ago, a little sort of reintroduction to the world of Red Dwarf. My reading of that, in part, was that you were establishing a multiverse for Red Dwarf, like a point at which Red Dwarf could spin off and say, “well everything that happened after this is still valid, but here’s an alternative version…”
R: That certainly occurred to me. I mean, at the time, it didn’t look like I could ever get it off the ground or anything, but it was kind of a thought experiment, really. I thought the fans did really well in it, didn’t they?
[general agreement]
R: It was a lot of fun. But yeah, that was kind of what I was thinking, Ian. I was kind of thinking “well, you could just split it”, and of course it’s science fiction, you can split off, you know, wherever you want.
C: Yeah, exactly, and also at this point, you know, Red Dwarf isn’t totally too in love with its own continuity, it never has been really, so…
R: I mean, I’m a continuity Nazi. Honestly.
C: Yeah, this is what we’ve heard!
R: And it was Doug who said ”look, if it’s gonna be a better show, stuff it”! And you know, he had a point, we would never have got the look from season three, if you’d gone with me and been compelled to keep things as they were.
C: “The same generation nearly”.
R: Yeah! So yeah, I am a continuity freak, really. It really interests me.
I: What has prompted this return to the Red Dwarf sphere? Because presumably, you could have had a conversation at any point in the last nearly 30 years since you and Doug stopped writing it together. What made you want to return to the show after such a long break?
R: No, I’ve wanted to return for a long time. And I kind of don’t want to rake over the coals of the past really, and I understand why you guys want to know that. But I really don’t want to rock the boat right now. I never left Red Dwarf in my heart. That’s all you need to know.
I: OK. Have you been bubbling away with ideas for 30 years, basically?
R: There was a period where I just had to shut it out and move on and do other stuff, and I kind of expected it to fade and die really, and it kind of did, it went away for a decade. But yes, you then go back and think, yeah, there was so much good about the setup, and so many more ideas to explore. And I’m really quite pumped now, I’ve got a lot of Red Dwarf to give. If only we can get a broadcaster to listen.
C: Well, I guess what we’re all thinking is that there is a particular broadcaster that we would hope would be a perennial kind of partner.
R: Yes, indeed we do. But we’ll see. We’ll see what interest there is. I’d have thought there’s a guaranteed audience out there… but that doesn’t seem to matter these days! Or that it’s funny or you know… you’re kind of in the lap of the gods, really. But something will come off, definitely.
C: So, something we’ve been doing over the last couple of years is we’ve been revisiting all of the Red Dwarf novels, we finished that a while ago now. And so us and the community have had an opportunity to kind of re-evaluate things and we’ve almost surprised ourselves with how much we’ve enjoyed about it. And the community have even started their own reread of your books, the Rob Grant trilogy, and finding a hell of a lot to love about those. So I think if you were to ask anyone what they would be most excited about you doing next, it would probably be a Red Dwarf novel. Whereabouts is that in your mind or your list of priorities?
R: My idea is that we get something off the ground – and again, I can’t be too specific about what we’re going for – but that would become the next novel, sort of in tandem. Which I always find it the best way to do it, because then the novel informs the series and the series informs the novel and you get…
C: Like Quanderhorn.
R: Yes. You get an explosion of ideas really.
C: Fascinating. And would you continue – I mean, I don’t want to get too deep here – but I’m interested what you think about the way you left Backwards, the novel. You left it open ended, almost as if to say like, I could write anything after this. Is that still the intention? Or maybe would you wipe the slate clean?
R: Again, I’d be giving too much away, guys!
C: But you did say you were a continuity Nazi and continuity Nazis don’t throw away continuity, so…
R: No! Oh, I’m giving away too many clues!
C: Ok, point taken!
R: No, I’m bursting to tell you, honestly guys. I hope very soon I will be able to.
C: We’re just excited that there’s ideas bubbling and that, you know, this is even a conversation we could have in 2023, to be honest. I’m still shocked that the show came back in 2009, I haven’t got over that yet…
R: Me too!
C: …let alone what’s going to happen in the future now with both of you working on the show again.
I: “Red Dwarf flying out of our buttskis” I believe was the phrase.
R: I promised it, I promised it!
C: You did, it has become a meme in the two years since you promised it!
I: You mentioned a while back, literally two years ago, that there’d been an approach from an American company. It was shortly after Holly Hop and Into The Gloop, you mentioned yourself on the official website that there’d been an approach from an American company. Did anything come of that? You’re looking like you can’t even remember saying that…
R: No, I can’t even think of what that was. I mean, these things happen all the time, you know? But yeah, America would be a place to exploit. And we are in a position where we can authorise new merchandise. The whole company now is me and Doug, so we don’t have to go to anyone else. I would definitely like to see a Red Dwarf beanie hat.
I: That’s very specific.
C: Do you get a cold head often, Rob?
D: Can I offer a suggestion? Can I offer one with a ‘H’ on it?
R: Oh, that’s not a bad thought, is it?
C: That is a good idea.
I: Now you’re gonna have to sign something that says you waive the rights to that, Danny.
D: Yeah, I’ll happily give you one pound.
R: I’ll give you a copy of the hat!
I: I’m aware asking this that you may not be able to or want to answer in too much detail, but we did notice from the Companies House website that in the shakeup of all of this that Paul Jackson and Noel Gay are no longer involved in Grant Naylor. Is that going to help streamline things for you now? Is that an extra obstacle removed type thing?
R: Well, it depends where you’re coming from really, it is a much cleaner way of doing things, just Doug and I have to agree on stuff. Hopefully not too much stuff. And Grant Naylor really is now, it’s not a production company any more. We go off to our own separate production companies and Grant Naylor basically administers the rights. That’s all it does.
I: That makes a lot of sense. And so that wouldn’t preclude you presumably from working with Paul on projects in the future?
R: Of course not. Absolutely not, I’d love to! And we actually, Paul and I, had a ridiculous lunch with Ed…
C: I can imagine…
R: Oh, you can’t! They had to pull us out of the restaurant, honestly. But we talked about our projects, and we’re all giddy with excitement and working, and Ed is available. He said he would definitely love to direct it, so…
I: That would be a dream come true, it really would.
R: It’d be squaring the circle. It’d be lovely.
I: Again, through the Quarantine Commentaries, and everything there, we as a fan group have come to appreciate just how much Ed brought to the party. How advanced his techniques were, and how far he was pushing the limits of what he could do back in the late 80s. And yeah, I’d love to see the 21st Century equivalent of that.
R: The thing about Ed is when I went into telly, the first director I worked with was Geoff Posner on Carrott’s Lib, and he never said “I can’t do that”. Never once in his life have I heard Geoff Posner say that. And I thought that’s how all directors were, and then I worked on Spitting Image, and I found out most directors are the exact opposite, they just rip up the script and say that’s impossible to shoot. And Ed was from the Geoff Posner school, he never said “no, you can’t run tape backwards through one of these, you morons!” He just did it. He found a way to do it. The confidence of ignorance!
C: Also in those early series, working with technology that was already out of date…
R: Yeah, yeah!
C: …in the eighties, the one inch tape and everything. He was like “yeah, sure, I’ll do pioneering split screen on a sitcom. What else do you want?”
R: It would be great to hook up with him again. I think he’s gotten even better since then.
C: Well, the fan community definitely loves you guys as a trio, like, obviously, you know this, that the commentaries went down very well indeed. It was very heartwarming to kind of see you revisit old work and see those passions. I just love listening to Ed talk about how brilliant he is. He’s so good at it!
D: And how difficult it all was.
R: Yeah no, I enjoyed them tremendously. We were all a bit adrift, weren’t we, in that period. It gave a focus to the week.
C: Yeah, it was so important for a lot of people.
I: It was, yeah. You did a really good thing there. As Red Dwarf fans, it was good content, but also at that particular time, like you say, having some structure, something to look forward to each week, something to gather round as a community when we couldn’t see people, we couldn’t see our own families or friends. Thank you for that.
R: No, thank you guys as well because we got the same from it. We got the same, it was this fantastic sense of community, the great feedback. We used to send all those comments up to all the guests and everything. And rekindled some old old friendships. I mean, it was lovely the episode with Howard, wasn’t it? I mean, what a genius. And David Ross and…
I: Lee Cornes dressed as Hitler.
R: Why not!
C: I’d be more surprised if Lee Cornes wasn’t dressed as Hitler. Very Nazi heavy, isn’t it, this interview?
R: I blame Gary Lineker.
I: Well Hitler is one of the most recurring guest characters in Red Dwarf, he’s been in it so many times.
D: He’s almost the sixth Dwarfer.
R: We also had Marilyn on a couple of times.
D: Can you explain what that was about? Like, why was Marilyn Monroe so prevalent in Red Dwarf?
R: It was iconic figures really. And you know, in Red Dwarf there’s a lot of film reference, and so I guess that’s what it was. These people were icons. And Einstein, these were icons in our childhood, I guess.
C: So I guess you were trying to go for things that would likely still be iconic 200 years later?
R: Yes, yes, exactly.
C: Berni Inn didn’t quite make the cut for that one, but…
R: Cliff Richard didn’t make it either and he’s still here!
I: Norweb doesn’t even exist. And why was Lister sending a photo to be developed anyway? What’s going on there? Why didn’t he just take it on his phone?
C: It’s almost like he was living in the 80s.
R: Okay, we didn’t get everything!
C: We have kind of a group headcanon that the internet doesn’t exist in Red Dwarf.
I: In the Red Dwarf universe they never invented the internet, and that explains why you have 80s technology basically in the far future.
R: Ah, yeah.
C: And it is a theme that’s continued as well to this day, you never really see anything internetty happening at all.
D: It all comes through mail, it all comes through snail mail to the ship.
C: 80s retro-futurism.
R: Actual postmen, it’s snail mail in space! The Internet did change everything. I kind of remember when I first came across it, and I thought right then “oh, this is going to change everything”. I got a modem and bought an ISP space. And I was chatting to people in Australia and I was thinking, “oh my God, this is free, this is just brilliant”. This was in ‘93, and the internet went down one day, and it turned out that the guy I was buying it off was just a kid with an Amiga 64 in the attic, and he’d been hit by lightning, and he was waiting for his dad to get him a new computer.
D: That is amazing.
C: Wonderful. It’s still not massively more stable than that now, to be honest, as someone who works as a web developer.
I: Well, we don’t want to get too bogged down in continuity and nerdy stuff because we can save that for a future interview, Rob.
R: Get me for that when I commit the crimes, all right?
I: But we do have one final question, a very important question. It’s something that has been divisive, controversial, something that has been splitting the Red Dwarf fan community in two, and we’re hoping you might be able to provide some clarification. Is Rastabilly Skank an artist or a genre?
R: It’s a genre.
C: Wow.
D: Categorical. There you are, ladies and gentlemen, there’s your answer.
C: That is seismic. You have no idea the effect that’s going to have.
R: It was Craig who came up with it.
D: Oh, that’s so cool.
C: So it’s like rockabilly then?
R: Yeah!
D: So it’s a Jamaican rockabilly.
R: With a bit of skank thrown in, yeah.
I: Well, even if nothing actually comes of any of these fantastic ideas you’re putting out in the universe, then at least we’ve got the answer to that. This was all worthwhile
R: OK! (laughs) Thanks guys, lovely talking to you and I hope I’ll be back with some definite news soon.
C: Can’t wait.
A huge, huge thank you to Rob for being so accommodating and generous with his time. All of a sudden, after such a terrible couple of years, this is a very exciting time to be a Red Dwarf fan. Watch this space.
Show notes* William Hartnell wasn’t dead by the time Patrick Troughton took over as The Doctor, but we’re too cowardly to correct the actual co-creator of Red Dwarf to his face. * Rob’s now-forgotten mention of an American approach * Rob soliciting for fan feedback on Twitter * Doug’s Radio Times interview * Two and a half hours on whether or not The Lion King is a rip off.
“Let wideons be wideons”
Ian Symes, Jonathan Capps and Daniel Stephenson are delighted to announce that the ongoing DwarfCast hiatus has been resolved.
Moving onwards and upwards, Ian, Cappsy and Danny hope to launch many iterations of DwarfCasts covering various media, working again with Jimmy Nail and other valued partners, and wish each other the very best.
Smoke a kipper, DwarfCasts will eat all your kippers!!
(yay, the Smegazine Rack is back! You know the drill…)
Grab your complementary copy of the mag here.
DwarfCast 159 – The Smegazine Rack – Issue #7 (130MB)
For those of you paying attention, there are a few subtle clues that date this recording. As always we’re trying to strike a balance between not having ridiculous gaps between releases, but also avoiding any sort of burnout and it turns out thinking about and planning for a live-stream can really take up a lot of time and energy. Having said that, in the near future you can look forward to Re-Discovery for the series 2 DVDs and maybe, just maybe, something else.
Show notes A collection of 1970s tumble dryers. * We couldn’t find the clip from You Bet!* of the German man identifying stamps purely from the taste of the glue, but trust us, it’s phenomenal.
Just a few short weeks ago, we had all but given up hope that this day would come. And yet here we are – following the promising yet inconclusive joint anniversary message from Rob and Doug, we have a brand new statement from the pair, and it’s exactly what we wanted to hear.
Rob Grant and Doug Naylor are delighted to announce that the ongoing dispute over the Red Dwarf rights has been resolved.
Moving onwards and upwards Rob and Doug hope to launch separate iterations of Red Dwarf across various media, working again with the cast and other valued partners, and wish each other the very best.
Smoke a kipper, Red Dwarf will be back for breakfast!!
Well then. The dark times are over. After more than two years of silence and speculation, the impasse has been broken. We still don’t know the details of exactly what they were disputing, and what compromises had to be made to get to this point. Perhaps we never will know, and perhaps that’s for the best. We’re just glad that it’s seemingly all behind us, and all we can say is that we hope it wasn’t as painful for the guys as it looked from the outside.
A brief search of Companies House reveals a few more details. Firstly, Doug has been reinstated as a director of the company, which restores some sense of order to this chaotic new world. In all the kerfuffle, Paul Jackson and Lesley Armitage (widow of Charles) are no longer directors, leaving Rob and Doug as the only two “persons with significant control” of the company. Based on these documents, it seems like it’s now a 50-50 split between the two of them, but much more excitingly, that’s also the case for the franchise itself.
Ever since the mid-90s, it’s seemed like there was very little chance of ever getting Rob & Doug Dwarf again, and whatever slim possibility there was has been completely evaporated by this whole process. This legal battle stopped us getting any Dwarf for three long years, but we’ve come out the other side with the absolute best case scenario. Not Rob & Doug Dwarf, but Rob Dwarf AND Doug Dwarf. Many, many people have been clamouring for Rob to return to the fold for decades, but we were never comfortable with the idea that his involvement would be at the expense of Doug’s. Now it doesn’t have to be – they’re both going to pursue their own versions simultaneously. There’ll be two Red Dwarfs. One the week and one for Sunday best.
It feels like everything’s still up in the air, but our best guess for what happens next is that Doug continues to make Dwarf for the telly (presumably the “valued partners” mentioned in the statement include UKTV and Baby Cow), carrying on the “prime” Red Dwarf universe that runs from The End to The Promised Land and hopefully beyond. Which leaves Rob in charge of… well, anything else, really. Whatever his buttski can produce first. A new novel would be lovely. We wouldn’t say no to audios or animations. Comics? Games? Spin-offs? A whole new alternative Series VII, taking place in the Into The Gloop universe? It’s our fond hope that both Rob and Doug have spent the last three years stockpiling ideas, and are just bursting to get them out there.
But we’re realistic. We’re Red Dwarf fans. It’s never been a smooth experience; even before all this kerfuffle, production has always been beset by delays and disasters of all kinds. Just because they can make new Dwarf now, doesn’t mean they’re in a position to do so immediately. Or indeed ever. But hey, we’ve just spent two years firmly believing that our favourite show was dead and buried, destroyed forever by a dispute between the two geniuses who created it in the first place. Let us dream. Star Trek has got multiple new series on the go. Star Wars and Marvel are relentlessly making new stuff in various mediums. Doctor Who is set to follow their lead and expand its universe in all of the directions it can whizz. Why not Red Dwarf? Let us dream.
That was a heck of a night. To celebrate Red Dwarf‘s 35th anniversary, fans from around the world (well, some of them) gathered together around a cosy YouTube window, marking the occasion with Ganymede & Titan’s first ever live video DwarfCast. The main topic of conversation was the Coral Canvass, with lots of analysis and in-depth stats about the latest definitive ranking of episodes. Next up was Clochebusters, a brand new and wholly original Red Dwarf game show, before the evening was rounded off by a lovely batch of live waffles. But there was so much more to discuss, as a very intriguing statement was released just as we went live, changing the agenda significantly. All this plus some vintage Dwarfy adverts, the rarely-seen visuals that accompany one of our best DwarfCast stings, and a series of catastrophic yet hilarious technical failures. And it’s all available to catch up with whenever you like on demand:
We’d recommend watching on YouTube itself so that you can see the chat replay in real time. It’s particularly fun to watch the explosion of activity when the breaking news breaks! There’s also chapters embedded if you want to skip to certain sections. A huge thank you once more to everyone who came along, for however long, especially those who joined the chat and gave us a lovely warm fuzzy feeling inside. And an extra special thanks to Jason Smedley, Niki Hutchinson and Quinn for bearing with us and being thoroughly brilliant Clochebusters contestants. One heck of a night.
Some breaking news for you – a message has been released by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor. Yes, both of them. Together.
To fans, cast and crew and everything in between, a very smeggy 35th birthday. Fingers crossed for more. Much love Rob and Doug
There is certainly a lot to discuss, so head on over to our Coral Canvass Livestream Spectacular right now, for all the reaction to this and today’s poll results, plus a lovely game of the wholly original Red Dwarf quiz Clochebusters!
Ladies and gentlemen, on the occasion of Red Dwarf‘s thirty-fifth anniversary, we invite you to join us, if you dare, in a journey through the Top 74 episodes of all time, as voted for by YOU. Once every five years, the various factions of the fan community come together to rate each and every episode, and we then collate the results and analyse them in far too much detail. 2013 was the Silver Survey, 2018 was the Pearl Poll, and now for 2023, Ganymede & Titan are proud to present The Coral Canvass.
We changed the methodology this year; we’d always previously asked participants to rank every episode in order of preference, but this was a big ask of people’s time, and didn’t take into account that not everyone taking part would be equally familiar with all the episodes. So we simplified things and asked you instead to rate each episode out of 10, with the option of leaving blank any episodes that you didn’t feel like scoring. The result was by far the biggest response we’ve ever received, with a total of 692 participants submitting at least one vote, more than double the sample size five years ago. A huge thank you to everyone who took part and helped spread the word.
It’s also resulted in a much more diverse range of fan opinions; only 187 of the people who took part identified as G&T regulars, with 197 saying that they weren’t (and a much larger pool of 308 people taking the fifth). We attracted fans from all over the world, from as far afield as Portugal, New Zealand, Argentina, Malaysia, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and the Isle of Man. That said, a whopping 83.5% of those who answered the question came from the UK, with the US, Australia, Canada and Ireland the next most common answers, in that order. The youngest person to reveal their age was 14, the eldest was 74, and the average age was just under 37 and a half. Funnily enough, that’s round about five years older than the average age last time. None of us are getting any younger.
We also asked people when they became a fan, with the largest proportion (34.35%) having found the series during the show’s heyday between 1988 and 1993. Just under a fifth of correspondents (19.08%) came on board during the gap between VI and VII, while 52 people (13.23%) claim to have been there from day one, 35 years ago today. Although we did notice that one of the people who says they were watching in 1988 also said they were 32, so take that with a pinch of salt. Rounding things out were those that discovered the show during the wilderness years between the Dave and BBC eras (12.98%), and an equal number (10.18%) who each joined in during Series VII-VIII, or since the show returned in 2009.
But enough of all this chitter chatter. There’ll be more fascinating statistics as we go, but what really matters is your votes. We’ve added together the total scores gathered for each episode, divided by the number of people who voted for it (which of course varies from episode to episode), and sorted the results in ascending order to produce a Top 74. As we count down, we’ll try to analyse why the numbers landed the way they did, for better or worse, and we’ll be providing some commentary catered to your more casual observer who’s keen to know just what’s so special about this Red Dwarf thing they’ve heard so much about.
What surprises await? What received opinions will be shattered? Which preferences will be vindicated and which will be challenged? Set your faces to stunned as we reveal that the least popular Red Dwarf episode of all time is…
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TimewaveDown 4. Avg score: 4.323 (467 votes) Worst Series XII episodeDo not adjust your set. For the first time ever in a Ganymede & Titan poll, Pete (Part Two) is no longer the worst episode ever. Whoever said the Dave era couldn’t make an impact? Timewave has very quickly established itself as the new butt-monkey of the Red Dwarf oeuvre, and it’s not hard to see where it went wrong. While the script itself is merely mediocre for the most part, a series of unfathomably bizarre choices in design, costume and performance combine to convert a very mildly satirical message about the merits of constructive criticism into an overtly offensive one, that accidentally makes the case that deviating from traditional gender stereotypes deserves to be punished. It’s careless rather than callous, but the same can’t be said for Cat’s misogynistic outburst, which somehow isn’t even the worst line of the episode thanks to the “spit on her wrist” sort-of-pun later on. There’s one theory that Doug deliberately made a terrible episode about criticism as some sort of ironic meta-commentary on the state of popular culture in the online age. Let’s hope that’s the case, because otherwise all that Timewave represents is Doug finally doing something worse than his previous low-point some eighteen years earlier.
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Pete (Part Two)Non-mover. Avg score: 4.611 (522 votes) Worst Series VIII episodeOne of the many things that’s funnier than Pete (Part Two) is that despite no longer being the worst episode, its position in the chart hasn’t actually budged a smegging inch. Thanks to the presence of a solitary new entry later on, it’s still only the 73rd best episode. It’s like a football team winning the last game of the season but still getting relegated on goal difference. Pete (Part Two) is a fever dream of an episode, only less well-structured. A series of disconnected images that mostly revolve around a big dinosaur having a poo, but also take in poorly choreographed slapstick, the phrase “see ya in ten minutes” being repeated on a loop for what feels like around ten minutes, a cartoon egg-on-legs made flesh, Captain Hollister being driven catatonically insane and Kryten’s artificial penis rampaging around the ship. That last part was cut out of a previous episode and forcibly inserted into this one just to pad out the running time, which is indicative of the problems faced by the series as a whole, whereby five stories had to stretch across eight episodes. Never is the material spread so thinly as it is in Pete (Part Two), which, at the end of the day, is mostly just a big dinosaur having a poo.
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Pete (Part One)Non-mover. Avg score: 4.758 (521 votes)Once again, Part One of this tale is inextricably weighed down by its dorky younger sibling, unable to shake off the stench. For my money, there are worse episodes of Series VIII than Pete (Part One), which at least has some laugh-out-loud moments dotted around its meandering story. I say “story”, it’s more a collection of live action Beano strips in which a pair of cheeky schoolboys attempt to get one over their mean old teacher Mr Ackerman and the goofy headmaster Fatty Hollister. The lads are getting thrashed by the teachers in a basketball match, but they spike their drinks with Viagra! Then they try and use a special potion to peel potatoes, but they end up losing all their clothes instead! And worst of all, one of the boys goes on a rant about how the headteacher is a fat bastard, only to discover he was standing behind him the whole time!!! While the style and subject matter of Red Dwarf varied wildly over the years, the jokes are almost always derived from smart sci-fi concepts and/or robust characterisation. Whatever the formula for Red Dwarf is, it sure as shit isn’t this.
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Krytie TVDown 4. Avg score: 5.066 (529 votes)A drop of four places for Krytie TV, which was consistently considered one of the better episodes of the much-maligned Series VIII in previous polls, but now finds itself much closer to the bottom of the pile. It’s the most notable culprit of the one concept in Red Dwarf history that has aged worse than absolutely anything else. The idea of Kryten being classified as a woman because he doesn’t have a penis gets worse the more you think about it, and while it will have raised a few eyebrows in 1999, it’s now completely out of step with the way the majority of people view gender identity. While that aspect of the episode is perhaps the victim of changing societal attitudes (or “insane wokery” as some would describe it), something that has always been dodgy as fuck is Kryten filming naked women without their knowledge or consent, and the show playing it for laughs. The overall tone is grim and seedy, and it represents the ultimate low point in the show’s treatment of women.
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Back in the Red (Part Three)Up 1. Avg score: 5.335 (522 votes)As we’ll see a LOT in the very lowest reaches of the table, Red Dwarf has never fared particularly well with multi-part stories. It’s mostly because none of them were ever really planned to be the length they ended up; in Back In The Red‘s case, an entire studio day at the very end of the Series VIII shoot was dedicated to odds and sods of material to bulk out an hour long special into three half-hours. The majority of the very obvious filler ended up in Part Three, but was somehow not quite as bad as the big set-piece that was always supposed to be there – the dreaded Blue Midget dance. Nevertheless, this episode is our first climber of the day, moving from third-worst episode ever to only the fifth-worst episode ever. Hurrah!
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Back To Earth (Part Two)Down 3. Avg score: 5.429 (510 votes) Worst Back To Earth episodeThe lesson here is if you’re going to do a three-parter, don’t start the title with the word “Back”. Poor old Back To Earth, the catalyst of the Dave era and the entire reason this is a Top 74 instead of a Top 52, continues to slip down the pecking order. As per the Pearl Poll, Part Two is considered the weakest of the three; the fourth-wall-destroying meta elements of the special continue to be the most divisive, and this is the episode where they come to the fore. That said, it does contain some of the strongest moments of the story, such as Mike Mellington’s deconstruction of the show’s tropes, Not Mark Benton’s memorable turn as Noddy, and the genuinely touching bus scene with two young kids who are now well into their twenties. But it also contains Rimmer (seemingly) deliberately murdering a fellow hologram, so swings and roundabouts.
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Back To Earth (Part Three)Down 6. Avg score: 5.445 (510 votes)And Part Three of that same story is our biggest faller so far, now only marginally ahead of Part Two – and to think it was considered the best part in both 2013’s Silver Survey and 2018’s Pearl Poll, despite the methodology of those polls putting it at a disadvantage due to a sizeable proportion of voters grouping the three episodes together in order. The appeal or otherwise of this particular chunk relates to the two big crossovers with two very different properties; the Coronation Street section providing most of the comedy and the iconography of Blade Runner providing most of the drama. The surprise appearance of Chloe Annett, combined with Craig’s finest “proper acting” performance as Lister to date can still pack a punch, but even Back To Earth‘s staunchest defenders (myself included) must concede that it doesn’t feel like an episode of Red Dwarf, more a drama about Red Dwarf.
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Back in the Red (Part Two)Up 2. Avg score: 5.492 (522 votes)We interrupt this discussion of Series IX (deal with it) to go back to the previous Back. Like its concluding part, the middle bit of this trilogy is another climber, benefiting from the continuing decline in popularity of Back To Earth and the big dip in Krytie TV‘s stock. But like the latter, it’s also got its problematic elements, namely the sexual magnetism virus and its application as what is essentially a very effective date-rape drug. When you consider that the only other things this episode offers are extremely long salutes, the Data Doctor and the Dibbley Family, it’s important to remember that we’re still very much in the lower echelons of Red Dwarf‘s achievements.
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Back To Earth (Part One)Down 3. Avg score: 5.536 (511 votes) Best Back To Earth episodeFive back-to-back Backs! Five! Despite being unable to buck the trend of Back To Earth‘s consistent drop in popularity every five years, Part One itself has actually improved its relative position within the trilogy with every poll – worst of the three in 2013, in the middle in 2018 and now the highest-placed part of BTE in 2023. It’s easily the most Dwarfy and thus the most accessible section of the story. The four guys on board the ship, coming across a weird GELFy threat and meeting a new guest character – this is the bare bones of any episode in the Dave era, and a fair chunk of the BBC era too. Shame it’s not actually very funny, but you can’t have everything.
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Only The Good…Up 3. Avg score: 5.573 (522 votes)Ten entries in, and six of the ten worst episodes ever come from Series VIII. This is actually one fewer than the previous Bottom 10, and it’s been spared the ignominy of the relentless block of orange we’ve grown accustomed to seeing at the very foot of the table, but it’s still by no means a popular series. To think that Only The Good… looked set to be the final ever episode for the best part of a decade, ending as it does on a cliffhanger so bad, the resolution was just a caption saying “nine years later”. As with a lot of this series, you can chalk many of the episode’s faults up to bigger plans falling through and necessitating last-minute rewrites. But similarly, as with a lot of this series, the supposed laughs mostly come through childish pranks, contrived shenanigans, people behaving out of character for the sake of the gag, and pointing out that Mac McDonald is overweight.
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Beyond a JokeUp 1. Avg score: 5.595 (538 votes) Worst Series VII episodeAh, there you are, Series VII, I was wondering when you’d turn up. A marginal climb of one place since last time is enough to ensure there are no longer any VII episodes in the Bottom 10, but not enough for Beyond A Joke to shake off its position as the worst of the run. Kryten blowing up the Bennett sisters with a big tank, quickly followed by his head exploding, provides a memorable and attention-grabbing first act, but then the episode rapidly descends into tedium. Slow-paced and neither particularly funny or dramatic, it’s one of the few bits of Red Dwarf that, regardless of quality, commits the cardinal sin of being boring.
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Can of WormsDown 6. Avg score: 5.642 (466 votes) Worst Series XI episodeThe positioning of recent but not absolutely brand new episodes are always amongst the most interesting. Recency bias means that historically, new entries always gets a boost in polls like this, so you do expect a drop off the second time around. A tumble of six places for the lowest-ranked episode of Series XI is the joint biggest fall so far, putting it below almost all of Series VII. The problem with Can of Worms is that it promised us something we’d wanted to see for ages – the Cat getting centre stage for once and finally meeting a fellow felis sapiens – and it ended up being a red herring to disguise something that nobody was really clamouring for – a third Polymorph episode, and one that’s significantly less accomplished than the previous two.
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Duct SoupDown 2. Avg score: 5.696 (549 votes)Sometimes when Red Dwarf is forced to go back to basics with a bottle episode, we see some of the most interesting and thoughtful character pieces in the show’s history. At other times, you get Duct Soup, which puts each of its characters under the microscope and ends up making them worse. Cat gets off relatively lightly, with only an obsession with watching a woman’s pants getting washed to blot his copybook, and it’s not necessarily the fault of Kochanski herself that she exists merely as a vessel for tired clichés such as women not understanding the offside rule. But Kryten is at his absolute nadir, his insane jealousy leading him to directly and deliberately endanger the crew, and it’s all served with a soupçon of gay panic from Lister.
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NanarchyNon-mover. Avg score: 5.795 (533 votes)Nanarchy doesn’t move in the overall placings, but finds itself now only the third worst episode of its series, so that’s something. The first of what is now three big returns for Norman Lovett is probably the highlight of an episode that attempts to do interesting things with Red Dwarf‘s lore, but ends up raising more questions than it answers. The only episode that’s credited to a whopping three writers, it underwent monumental changes between drafts, leaving it barely recognisable from the original version. The result is a disjointed tale that begins with Lister coming to terms with his newfound disability, which then gets abandoned in favour of an attempt to very quickly wrap up the loose arc of the last two series and set up something completely new. A few choice Holly quotes aside, it’s also largely devoid of humour.
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Back in the Red (Part One)Up 4. Avg score: 5.880 (525 votes)Say what you like about Series VIII, but a minimum of half of its episodes have gone up the table since last time. Is this the long-awaited resurgence of Red Dwarf‘s most-maligned series? Well no, we’ve already seen seven eighths of it on the list and we’re not even into the 50s. The first part of what was originally designed to be an hour long special was relatively well received on broadcast, with the returns of Rimmer, the studio audience and a multi-camera setup most welcome after Series VII had messed with the magic formula. With further fan-pleasing back-references and cameos from Series 1 characters, plus scenes that set out to further explore and analyse our favourite characters, it has a lot going for it, but ultimately it goes for spectacle over substance and sets the tone for Series VIII’s gradual erosion of all the elements that made us love Red Dwarf in the first place.
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Dear DaveNon-mover. Avg score: 5.931 (481 votes) Worst Series X episodeSeries X is the last of the Dave series to make an appearance, and in the exact same position as last time. The very definition of a troubled production, Dear Dave was hastily added to the slate when two planned episodes were dropped due to chronic budget failure, and only a shell of a script was written in time for the audience recording. Whole extra scenes and storylines had to be added later, recorded on green-screen after the rest of the series had already wrapped, with limited success in hiding the fact. While some scenes have plenty of laughs, and the concept of dedicating an episode to the more mundane aspects of life on board ship is a solid one, this is Red Dwarf as a sketch show, with multiple meandering plot threads that rarely come together in anywhere near a satisfying way. A middle-aged Lister mounting a vending machine is a strangely depressing sight, and his disappointing use of a misogynistic slur as the punchline to the episode was ill-judged to say the least.
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EpidemeNon-mover. Avg score: 6.035 (538 votes)And that’s another non-mover – a very rare event in previous polls, but much more frequent now that there’s only one new entry to incorporate, despite the difference in methodology. The crux of one’s reaction to Epideme is how you find the central performance of Gary Martin as the eponymous virus; it’s hard to think of another example of a single guest star dominating the tone of an episode quite so much. Whether you find Epideme himself amusing or annoying, it’s certainly at odds with the rather serious and somewhat dark plot which places Lister in greater direct peril than ever before, our main protagonist driven to within seconds of committing suicide at one stage. The juxtaposition of that with the villain being a quirky, larger than life parody of an American local disc jockey makes for an episode that’s not necessarily terrible, but certainly a very strange watch.
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EntangledDown 1. Avg score: 6.137 (481 votes)If Entangled had finished at around the 20 minute mark, it would be much higher in this list. The central quantum entanglement idea is a quintessentially Dwarfy concept, and is performed so well by Danny and Robert. There’s solid characte-based laughs throughout, and the use of the power of coincidence as plot-driving energy is a very interesting one, albeit with some confusing execution. Maybe if Doug’s original plan for a Sgt Bilko inspired monkey-based finale hadn’t been scuppered by pesky rules about not over-working ape impersonators to death, it would have been fine. Maybe if the replacement wasn’t a woman turning up, being ogled at, being inhumanly stupid for a bit and then being summarily thrown out of an airlock, it could still have been rescued.
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SiliconiaDown 4. Avg score: 6.160 (463 votes)A noteworthy slip down the table for The One Where Everyone’s Kryten, as it should have been titled. As with the last entry, it’s another example of a Dave era episode having a really solid central concept and a promising start, but falling apart towards the end. The highlight is Robo-Rimmer’s realisation that he’s happier with a menial role, unencumbered by the weight of expectation and unfulfilled ambition, which nails something fundamental about Rimmer’s character in a way that solo Doug Dwarf has sometimes struggled with. At this stage of the episode, we’re on the cusp of something really special, but that train of thought is abandoned in favour of a Gladiator parody with mops, and we’re left with an episode far more shallow and forgettable than we initially hoped for.
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OuroborosNon-mover. Avg score: 6.287 (550 votes)And so it comes to pass that once again, the four Series VII episodes with Chris Barrie in them are more popular than all four of the ones without him; while the positions within those groupings vary, it’s been the case with every poll we’ve done. However the brief cameo from a pre-accident Rimmer here does little to rescue Ouroboros overall, which very much struggles with the unwanted new status quo that Chris’s departure forces it to create. The introduction of Kochanski is disastrous for the character dynamics; she herself is neither particularly good or bad, but her presence changes everyone else for the worse. Not least Kryten, with the interminable “you’re lying” scene in this episode a notorious low point for the character. On the plus side, the “obscene phone call” is one of the biggest laughs from this era of the show, and while the concept of Lister being his own father doesn’t quite make sense if you think about it for more than a few seconds, it’s an interesting idea which provides a seed that the show would later come back to reap.
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BlueNon-mover. Avg score: 6.373 (542 votes)There comes a point in any episode ranking that marks the transition between tracking which bad episodes are the worst, and which good episodes are merely the least good. Your mileage will of course vary, but for me it’s probably somewhere around here. Blue has all the problems that the post-Rimmer portion of Series VII has, but it deals with them by putting them front and centre, and exploring the fallout of Lister losing his constant companion. It plays with narrative in a way that Red Dwarf usually shies away from, with each of Chris’s appearances coming outside of a linear timeline. Two flashback scenes are followed by the dream sequence that launched a thousand Tumblrs, and of course The Rimmer Experience, which shows us the effect of an unreliable narrator before giving us the show’s second most iconic song and dance routine.
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KrysisDown 3. Avg score: 6.435 (471 votes)What a very strange episode. “Divisive” doesn’t begin to cover it – this is either one of the best of the Dave era or one of the worst, depending on who you ask. I’m in the former camp, believing Dominic Coleman as Butler to be one of the finest guest performances we’ve ever had, his well-meaning smugness driving Kryten to the pit of despair in the funniest way possible, alongside the brilliant Starbug scenes with his GELF mates. But the episode’s detractors will point to the philosophical problems of depicting “The Universe” as a sentient being, and its portrayal as a deity via the medium of a Morgan Freeman impression, plus the dubious mathematics behind the central concept of Kryten being at the midway point of his life, at odds with all previously established continuity. Either way, this episode gifted Red Dwarf fandom the word “cloche”, so you’ve got to give it a break for that if nothing else.
We now reach a minor checkpoint, as there are only 52 episodes remaining – the same number of episodes as the original BBC era of the show. Of the 22 Dave era episodes, 13 of them have made it past that milestone – a clear majority, which means that we can officially judge the Dave era to have been worth doing. Hurrah!
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Waiting For GodDown 4. Avg score: 6.507 (604 votes) Worst Series 1 episodeOh ho ho, what’s this? Here we are entering the bubble-of-52, and immediately we hit our first episode from the bubble-of-36! What are you doing down here? For the third poll in a row, Waiting For God has once more been deemed the worst of the show’s golden age, but after a drop of four places there are now more post-1993 episodes ahead of it than ever before. Does it deserve its unwanted mantle as the worst of the best? There’s a lot to love in Waiting For God, particularly in Rimmer’s single-minded obsession with the Quagaars, and the juxtaposition of this blind faith against that of organised religion. The satire is heavy-handed, but there’s a real charm to the material with the Cat religion, particularly Noel Coleman’s guest performance. The people have spoken – repeatedly – but it’s tough to argue that this is a worse episode than some of the ones higher up on the list. Such as…
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SamsaraNon-mover. Avg score: 6.512 (471 votes)Another non-mover, but other recent entries have dropped below to ensure Samsara is no longer in the bottom third of Series X-XII episodes. It’s an episode that does a lot of things right, but in a way that can also rub people up the wrong way. It does that rare thing of playing with narrative structure, with the backstory of the eponymous ship revealed to the audience with flashbacks. Huge swathes of action that don’t involve our crew at all – and so their success or failure depends on your reaction to these other characters. A neat sci-fi concept wrapped up in an unravelling mystery – but one that’s derivative of an earlier episode and not executed nearly as well. Some tight and smart plotting – and then one of Series XI’s trademark abrupt endings. A long gag-filled dialogue scene with Lister and the Cat, one of the rarer combinations of characters for a big conversation – where most of the gags are so generic they feel like they could be delivered by absolutely any two characters ever. Though luckily Lister has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the inventors of writing implements.
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CassandraUp 3. Avg score: 6.630 (527 votes) Best Series VIII episodeIt’s a mystery that’s plagued Red Dwarf fans since 1999 – is Cassandra actually any good, or does it just seem good because it’s surrounded by Series VIII episodes? Its poll performance has fluctuated over the years as people have struggled with this dilemma, but it’s on the rise again now, scraping into the Top 50 once more. It’s certainly the Series VIII episode that could fit most comfortably within any other series of the show, with the prison setting ostensibly scrapped for a brief return to the old searching-through-derelicts formula, like when the Time Lords used to let Jon Pertwee’s Doctor go on the odd trip as a little treat. It has some interesting debates about pre-determinism and a memorable guest performance from Geraldine McEwan, along with the rare spectacle of Kochanski being given some funny lines. It also has Max Branning smacking his head off a diving bell. Something for everyone.
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MechocracyDown 6. Avg score: 6.667 (469 votes)Ooof, a surprisingly large second-survey-syndrome comedown for Mechocracy – the second half of Series XII is widely considered the best “byte” of the Dave era by far, so it’s unexpected for one of its episodes to drop below one from the first half. An episode poking fun at the circus around elections, written and recorded before Brexit and Trump but released afterwards, into a much-changed political climate. It’s hardly The Thick Of It levels of satire, but the spoof campaign ads and subsequent candidates’ debate are a lot of fun, drawing comedy both from the tropes and techniques employed by real politicians, and the personalities and histories of Rimmer and Kryten – the first tentative foray into the modern show leaning increasingly heavily on its own past, which would escalate with each subsequent episode to date. Plus of course, this feeds in to the episode’s other selling point – the return of David Ross as Talkie Toaster after an absence of 26 years.
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CuredUp 1. Avg score: 6.721 (469 votes)The first of the former new entries to buck the trend and improve its position since the last poll, the Series XII opener contains some extremely memorable set pieces, many of which centre around a spectacular guest performance from Ryan Gage, the latest actor to play Red Dwarf‘s most prolific recurring character. Our beloved protagonist jamming with the leader of the Third Reich is certainly one of the more surreal images the show has to offer, though we can’t help but imagine how much better that scene would be had the plan to use Toto’s Africa not been scuppered by clearance issues. We also get the great selfie gag, the various comedic torture scenarios and the lovely business with the lighter, before the denouement in which the story becomes extremely complicated and more than a little confusing on first watch.
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TwenticaDown 1. Avg score: 6.766 (475 votes)To mix two Dwarfy metaphors, all the ingredients of Twentica are right, but it somehow ends up less than the sum of its parts. Kevin Eldon is perhaps the most accomplished comedy actor ever to grace the show, and fellow guests Lucie Pohl and the returning Rebecca Blackstone also put in brilliant performances. The sets are stunning (the odd shot of a ceiling on a supposedly outdoor street aside), and the crash sequence is the best use of miniatures since the BBC VFX glory days. Somehow it doesn’t quite tie together in a satisfactory way, and leaves too many questions open about the consequences of this timeline-altering jaunt into history. Give us half an hour of Harmony de Gauthier making science jokes in the style of a 1920s flapper girl though, and watch it fly up the charts.
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M-CorpDown 8. Avg score: 6.84355 (473 votes)Wow. In a poll where we’ve already seen Pete (Part Two) escape from the bottom spot, this is the biggest shock so far. M-Corp was considered the fourth best Dave-era episode in the Pearl Poll, very narrowly missing out the coveted Top 36 bubble. Now it’s only the ninth best modern episode, and a drop of eight places overall is the biggest fall in the entire poll – this is far beyond the standard levelling-out you expect for an episode’s second poll. But why is this? After all, Lister’s struggles with invisible props and furniture are among the funniest scenes in 21st Century Dwarf, and his isolation builds a compellingly unsettling atmosphere only previously seen in Red Dwarf in novel form. But in hindsight, that’s a fairly small portion of the episode, and while the stuff in the M-Corp facility itself is perfectly decent, it never hits those heights again. The deliberately convenient resolution to the plot is pleasing to some but grating for others, and the same can be said for the final scene, with Lister reverting back to his pre-accident personality and recreating the opening of The End.
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Fathers & SunsUp 2. Avg score: 6.84362 (486 votes)There are very fine margins at play in this poll – look closely at the scores throughout this section of the table, and you’ll see they’re extremely close at times. None more so than the gap between M-Corp and Fathers & Suns, two episodes that could only be separated by adding an extra couple of decimal places. A handful of further votes could have changed everything, but as things stand Fathers & Suns is celebrating a wee climb up the list. It’s not surprising that its position is so volatile, as it’s one of the hardest episodes ever to get a handle on, due to the three plot elements competing for screen time. You’ve got all the business with Lister being his own dad, culminating in the Double-Lister scene that’s written and acted with so much style. You’ve got Pree, a superb performance by Rebecca Blackstone giving us a morally grey sort-of-villain who constantly keeps you guessing. But you’ve also got the Chinese Whispers thread, featuring one of the worst performances in Red Dwarf history from Kerry Shale, a white man putting on a comedy Asian accent and in the process completely destroying any semblance of a point that the material was trying to make. Remove this element from the episode and the other two bits would have more space to breathe, and Fathers & Suns would be troubling the Top 40.
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Officer RimmerNon-mover. Avg score: 6.858 (473 votes)As we’ve said for the majority of Dave episodes, one of Officer Rimmer‘s main distinguishing features is a brilliant guest character – Captain Herring is a hilarious concept, brought to life superbly by both the visual effects team and the sadly departed Stephen Critchlow. His appearance is a prelude to a storyline that undoubtedly covers similar ground to past episodes – a lift so blatant that it’s even referenced in the dialogue – but does so with a unique style, notable for the sheer number of Rimmers on screen at once, providing a plethora of classic Chris Barrie faces. It’s a shame though that just as the plot builds to a crescendo with a sudden tilt towards monster-fighting action, it notoriously exemplifies a recurring theme of Series XI, in that it just
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Balance of PowerDown 2. Avg score: 6.910 (600 votes)Unsurprisingly, the second “bubble” episode to appear on the list is also from Series 1, an episode often lumped in with Waiting For God as standing out due to its slower pace and minimal sci-fi elements. Perfectly on brand for the style of sitcom that Rob and Doug initially set out to make, but out of place compared to pretty much everything that followed. And much like Waiting For God, Balance of Power is by no means a bad episode, and features such iconic scenes as the white card/black card conversation, the melancholy flashback to pre-accident Dwarf, and the Cat’s trout a la créme binge. In the denouement, Clare Grogan’s performance as Rimmer-in-Kochanksi’s-body doesn’t always hit the mark, and overall it suffers from a cast and production team that are still finding their feet and learning how to turn a promising premise into a comedy heavyweight.
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Give & TakeDown 3. Avg score: 6.966 (466 votes) Best Series XI episodeBy and large, it’s becoming apparent that this area of the chart is the natural home for the Dave era – not quite up there with the heights of Series 1-VI, but mostly significantly better than the lesser-loved Series VII and VIII. That certainly seems right for Give & Take, which attempts some extremely ambitious time-travelly, parodoxy storytelling, but probably requires repeated viewings and a notepad to fully make sense of, along with a generous interpretation of some of the more ambiguous plot points. Nevertheless, the comedy element can rarely be faulted, and it gave us not one but two iconic new robots – the possibly-evil-possibly-insane Asclepius, and the adorably retro and charismatic Snacky. By rights, Snacky should have stayed on to be a new regular character throughout the rest of the run, but he’s probably rusting away somewhere in the depths of Red Dwarf. Bastards.
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TrojanUp 1. Avg score: 6.992 (494 votes)Trojan was perhaps the most significant victim of second-survey-syndrome last time round, having made the Top 30 in the Silver Survey when it was brand new. It’s levelled out now and even made a slight climb, and it stands up as a great statement of intent as the opening episode of a whole new dawn for the show. It ticks all the Dave era boxes – a fantastic guest appearance in the form of Mark Dexter’s Howard, playing with established character backstories in a way that delights some and annoys others, and cramming in slightly too many elements for it to comfortably accommodate, with the call centre running gag ultimately taking screen time away from more interesting plot points. But it’s at its best when discussing mooses and giving the crew new identities to impress Howard – jokes that are derived purely from the unique eccentricities of our beloved characters, and the well-defined dynamic between them.
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Confidence & ParanoiaDown 3. Avg score: 7.064 (614 votes)Once again, a Series 1 episode slips down the table, with Confidence & Paranoia just barely clinging on to its place in the Top 40. It does however mark the first time that the average score clears seven out of ten, indicating that each and every episode from this point on is of a standard that would put most sitcoms to shame. Despite decades having elapsed between their productions, there are similarities with Trojan, in that it takes a surprisingly long time for the big headline guest stars to turn up, and for the plot to really get going. But get going it does, with Craig Ferguson and Lee Cornes both stealing every scene they’re in. The space walk sequence is a showcase for so many elements that made this show stand out, from visual effects to set design to Howard Goodall’s beautiful Blue Danube variation on the theme tune. But we’ve now seen half of the first series appear in the chart before anything from the rest of the classic bubble, with plenty of episodes from VII and the Dave era still to go.
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Stoke Me A ClipperUp 6. Avg score: 7.107 (561 votes)By far the biggest climber so far, the second best episode of Series VII seems to be enjoying a resurgence of popularity, and is now a clear fifteen places ahead of Blue, the third best from the series. There are undoubtedly faults that have to be overlooked – the emotional impact of thousands of ex-Aces being undermined by the godawful CGI, for one – but it’s a decent return for a popular alter ego that builds upon his original appearance, and it handles the unenviable task of writing out one of the best characters in sitcom history well. It’s probably best remembered for the pre-titles sequence, an all-action comedy blockbuster that was probably the most ambitiously staged few minutes the show ever produced.
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Tikka To RideDown 4. Avg score: 7.207 (555 votes) Best Series VII episodeWhile it’s been a good showing for VII overall, with two of its eight episodes climbing the charts and four at least holding steady as non-movers, it’s a big drop for Tikka To Ride, falling out of the Top 36 bubble for the first time and challenging the notion that it holds its own against the first six series. Despite the difference in shooting style, it has the unique advantage within Series VII of retaining the classic combination of characters and not having to change the show’s formula to accommodate the shifting dynamics. The bulk of the episode does everything right, the guilt-free Kryten adding a comedic edge to an intricate and exciting story of the Dwarfers accidentally changing history, and doing their level best to put it right. Such a shame that this is bookended with a piss-weak resolution to Out of Time‘s cliffhanger, which uses paradox logic that the JFK plot completely contradicts, and the pitiful punchline of Lister being brutally beaten by his crewmates.
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The BeginningDown 4. Avg score: 7.214 (481 votes)Oh, that’s a shame for The Beginning – juuust missing out on keeping its place within the bubble. Last time there were four post-1993 episodes in that bracket, now there’s only three. The Beginning has always been one of the most popular episodes of the Dave era, climbing as high as #26 in The Silver Survey and remaining the best episode of Series X in the Pearl Poll despite a second-survey-syndrome drop, but even that title has now been lost. Perhaps its reappraisal is a result of comparisons to what followed; at the time The Beginning was the best example of the revived show tackling deep character lore, showcasing impressive special effects and providing extra comedic vignettes to keep things interesting and pacey. But all those things have been more frequent features of Series XI onwards, resulting in The Beginning losing some of the edge it had within the era. Nevertheless, the flashback to Rimmer’s schooldays, the appearance of Hogey the Roguey and the cutaways to the Dominators are all superb – it’s just perhaps a bit too apparent that these elements were jammed together in a rush, with Doug forced to cannibalise his Movie script for parts for another last-minute replacement episode.
So here we are at our next major milestone, and still no sign of that solitary new entry. We have however burned through the whole of Series VII, VIII and XI, and all but one episode each from X and XII. Time for one of our delicious pie charts to show the state of the fabled bubble as of 2023…
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LemonsDown 1. Avg score: 7.279 (494 votes) Best Series X episodeHere’s that final bastion of Series X – dropping down a place compared to last time, but not sinking as low as The Beginning, meaning Lemons is now officially the best episode of the series. It’s perhaps the only one of the six to take a single storyline and run with it, dedicating its entire runtime to exploring the setting and themes that it introduces. James Baxter’s turn as Geordie Jesus can split opinion, but it has an undeniable energy that carries the pace along nicely. The compact storytelling is matched by some tight comedic flourishes, with lots of laughs wrung from the crew’s initial meeting with the supposed messiah, Rimmer’s pride in manhandling the Holy Lamb’s todger, and every scene that involves the fantastic Indira Joshi as Erin. The reveal that the Jesus we’ve not been following is not the actual king of kings (spoilers) might rob some of those earlier scenes of some of their impact, but it’s nevertheless a solid, gag-packed episode of Red Dwarf that wouldn’t be out of place in the middle section of the BBC era.
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Parallel UniverseUp 1. Avg score: 7.322 (596 votes) Worst Series 2 episodeSeries 2 makes its first appearance on the list with an episode that’s always flirting with the edge of the bubble, but just about has enough going for it to consistently keep its head above the water. It’s been the subject of a fair amount of criticism over the years, not least from the writers themselves, but while the gender politics may seem a little trite and clichéd after three and a half decades, it remains an effective social satire of the way things stood in the late 80s. The guest cast are all fantastic, and the episode marks a very special debut appearance for Hattie Hayridge. Both Holly and Hilly are on fine form throughout, and their unfolding on-and-off-screen romance is perhaps the highlight of the episode. Well, that and Tongue Tied, and no matter your opinion on the song itself and/or what the hell it’s doing in a sci-fi sitcom in the first place, it’s an undeniably iconic part of Red Dwarf history, even going as far as #17 in the UK singles charts in 1993 and appearing on Top of the Pops.
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MeltdownDown 5. Avg score: 7.364 (579 votes) Worst Series IV episodeWe welcome Series IV along to the party with an episode that’s always been viewed as one of the weakest of the original run, even finishing bottom of the pile in the first mass poll conducted by Fan Club magazine Better Than Life in 1994. It’s a format breaker that’s definitely one of the more unusual spectacles that Grant and Naylor penned together, although it more than stands its ground compared to the vast majority of episodes written after Rob left. There’s much to commend it – Tony Hawks makes the finest of his many appearances, Rimmer gets lots of great moments, such as the Risk story and the inspection parade, the action sequences are great, and Lister’s anti-war sentiments are a rare and notable foray into serious messaging. However, Rimmer’s descent into insane war lust goes too far for some, and there is a serious issue with the episode’s most heavily featured waxdroid, which could certainly taint a modern day rewatch. One of only eight episodes to drop five places or more, it might struggle to mount a comeback next time.
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Emohawk: Polymorph IIUp 7. Avg score: 7.366 (585 votes) Worst Series VI episodeThe infamous triple sequel has never been part of the bubble in either of our previous polls, but it’s arrived in style after a huge climb of seven places – the biggest improvement of any episode this time around. It’s still considered the runt of the Series VI litter, but by a much smaller margin. While its biggest fault is the attempt to pack far too many returning concepts into just one episode, it benefits from only being the second appearance of these beloved characters, made before anyone had the chance to become sick of them. And it does them all justice – the sequences of the Emohawk baffling the crew with its shape-shifting are very funny, and both Ace and Duane get a plethora of good lines, even if some of them are drowned out by excessive whooping and hollering from the audience. Or maybe its boost in popularity is because a load of us have recently re-read Last Human, and so we realise that the honeymoon scene between Lister and the GELF could have been much much worse.
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The Promised LandNew entry. Avg score: 7.378 (492 votes)Here we are! The solitary new entry in this poll finishes in a very respectable 32nd place – some distance above all but one other episode from the Dave era, and safely within the comfort of the bubble, thus ranking among the upper echelons of what Red Dwarf has achieved over the last 35 years. Part of its success comes from its duration – the first time an attempt to make a longer episode of the show has actually resulted in a longer episode of the show, and thus it has three times more material to judge it on than any other entry on this list. It’s a story that justifies its running time – the long-awaited answer to a question posed back in Series 1, finally reuniting Cat with the rest of his species, and addressing Lister’s role in their society. The main criticism is that the Cat himself was surprisingly glossed over most of the time, but what it did do was executed very well indeed. Norman Lovett’s third return to the show – seemingly intended to be permanently this time – is great, as is Rimmer’s dalliances with superheroism and Lister’s struggles with whether or not to come clean to his worshippers. But the unexpected standout moment is the beautiful moonlight scene between Rimmer and Lister – after all these years, and all these iterations of the show, it all boils down to the ever-evolving relationship between these two former enemies turned begrudging best friends. It really felt like this format could lay the foundation for Red Dwarf‘s future – the occasional feature length special to wring out the last few untold stories of the crew before everyone gets too old to do any more. Instead, it’s looking increasingly like one last hurrah, but if it is to be the final ever episode, then at least it went out on a high.
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SkipperNon-mover. Avg score: 7.395 (476 votes) Best Series XII episodeFor a huge chunk of the time that the voting was open, The Promised Land was above Skipper more often than not, but in the end the Series XII finale holds on to its crown as the best Dave episode, and stays in the exact same position as its debut poll appearance. It’s an episode of two halves, both of which are really good – every last drip of humour is wrung from the opposite-decisions concept, before Rimmer embarks on his dimension-skipping mission. What follows is a series of inventive skits, which are extremely enjoyable in and of themselves once you get past how weird it is that in a quest to find a universe where Rimmer is successful, nobody even mentions Ace. Other than that it’s pure fan service: cameos for Holly (again) and Hollister, recreations of the original sets and uniforms from the first series, and a fascinating alternative history of how the timeline would have turned out had the crew not been wiped out. And there’s also Mr Rat, undoubtedly one of the most bizarre yet hilarious moments in the whole of the revival; an era which, according to the results, finished with the best two episodes of the 21st Century.
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BodyswapDown 4. Avg score: 7.408 (600 votes) Worst Series III episodeInto the Top 30 now, and here comes Series III – only Series V yet to make an appearance now. A bit of a tumble down the table for Bodyswap, which is now the lowest ranked episode from its series, but there can be no doubt that there’s no such thing as a bad episode from this point on. A prime example of Rob and Doug pushing the boundaries of what could be achieved within the confines of a low-budget sitcom, it was shot without a studio audience so that Chris and Craig could later ADR their lines over their counterpart’s mouth movements. The result can be a little unusual at times, not least when Chris is having to speak twice as fast as usual due to the pace at which Craig belts out lines, but it’s a gimmick that works overall. The initial drama with the self-destruct system has a great punchline, Rimmer is at his most duplicitous, and the chase sequence is one of the best visual effects set pieces in the show’s history. Plus, Lister sets a world record for the most smegs per second.
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CamilleUp 1. Avg score: 7.418 (589 votes)Up a solitary place and, thanks to Meltdown‘s comedown, no longer the worst episode of its series is Camille, the show that gave us “smee heee” and referring to a banana as a female aardvark, and that’s just the first scene. The iconic hits keep on coming – E5 A9 08 B7, Cat’s self high-five, “droid meets droid” – in an episode of exceptional quality, all wrapped up in a homage to Casablanca that somehow avoids getting in the way of what is quite a touching love story between Kryten and the eponymous Camille. All the better for the ready-made chemistry provided by Robert Llewellyn’s real life partner Judy Pascoe; one of my favourite Red Dwarf stories is that Robert’s mum had a framed photo of Kryten and Camille on her wall, proudly telling guests that her son and his partner were robots.
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RimmerworldUp 4. Avg score: 7.548 (588 votes)The second Series VI episode on the list, and the second to have made a big leap up the table since last time. It perhaps doesn’t stand out as much as the rest of its run, without an attention-grabbing hook to latch on to – it even has the rare sight in this era of the Cat reusing an outfit. It’s nevertheless consistently funny and well thought through, serving as a little “what happened next” following an earlier adventure, and playing out at a slightly more sedate pace than the rest of the Series VI with its quickfire gag formula. The jokes that are there make a huge impact – there’s the Chinese worry balls, the accidental time travel to the crew’s very recent past and future, and of course the superlative teleporter joke that provides this episode with its crowning glory.
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TerrorformDown 2. Avg score: 7.657 (578 votes) Worst Series V episodeAll series present and correct, and once again it’s Series V that has the honour of the highest-placed “worst” episode. Funnily enough, the low point for the peerless fifth series was also at #27 last time, although it’s now a different episode – Terrorform has dropped a couple of places, and once again it’s probably a case of this episode’s hilarious and iconic moments just being marginally less hilarious and iconic as the rest of a particularly hilarious and iconic series. This is the second entry in a row for episodes about a celestial body being moulded in Rimmer’s image, but while Rimmerworld was played for laughs, the psy-moon is pure horror. While the middle act focusses on drama more than comedy at times, any episode that opens with Kryten’s distress call and the “taranshula” sequence, and ends with the four-way-hug situation, has got to be worth its salt. We later learned that this was the episode that led to new director Juliet May being relieved of her duties, and was apparently rescued by a frantic re-edit with Doug at the helm. Whatever the problems it faced behind the scenes, not a bit of it shows.
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The Last DayUp 2. Avg score: 7.669 (590 votes)The former worst episode of Series III is up a couple of places, and it’s another all time classic with so many standout moments. Gordon Kennedy makes such an impression that you forget he’s only in it for a few minutes at the end, save for a brick-breaking teaser video shortly before. Written and recorded last, Rob and Doug were able to write Kryten with Robert Llewellyn’s performance in mind for the first time, and it’s only here that he’s really established as an integral member of the crew, going from cheerily accepting his imminent demise in his role as a talking appliance, before building a genuine friendship with his masters via a drunken bonding session. This rip-roaring party scene is full of comedy before entering the melancholy stage and giving us real pathos, revealing for the first time that Lister was abandoned under a pool table as a baby. Lemming Sunday, Rimmer’s pervy Uncle Frank and the concept of Silicon Heaven are all classic Red Dwarf masterpieces originating in just one episode – and it’s not even in the Top 25.
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Stasis LeakDown 6. Avg score: 7.670 (594 votes)Stasis Leak comes crashing out of the Top 20, the formerly firm fan favourite tumbling a whopping six places, the joint-second biggest drop. It received a bit of an unexpected kicking in our forum’s recent rewatch of the whole run, with questions raised over messy time travel logic, dated pop culture references, the odd dodgy effect and of course why Rimmer and Lister didn’t try to prevent the accident happening in the first place, rather than just saving one person each. Not that any of this really matters on the first hundred or so watches of an extremely funny episode that has a lot of fun messing around with its only recently established lore. Everything that happens in the Ganymede Holiday Inn is great (that man Tony Hawks again providing a highlight), as are all of Rimmer’s interactions with his past self. It all culminates in a deliberately ridiculous escalation of the number of versions of the crew in one place, director Ed Bye performing miracles with analogue TV technology, as he did so often in those first two series in particular.
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TimeslidesDown 3. Avg score: 7.673 (596 votes)Just 0.003 points separate the average scores for Stasis Leak and Timeslides, which drops three places but could so easily have been one worse. The two episodes share a lot in common – they both deal with audacious attempts by Lister to reality-alter his way out of his predicament, they both invent an interesting form of heavily-limited time travel, and are both showcases for Ed Bye doing things that look simple on screen but required an extraordinary amount of skill and invention to pull off in the late 80s. They do also share a slight wonkiness in the logic at times – just why was someone taking a photo of a dorm room full of sleeping young boys? – but again there’s more than enough exemplary comedy to counteract any niggles. Junior Angler, the Tension Sheet, banana and crisp sandwiches, the Om Song and the under-rated gem of a guest character that is Gilbert are just some of the classic items of Red Dwarf iconography contained within.
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DNADown 1. Avg score: 7.675 (585 votes)Very little to choose between these few entries; this is the fifth of six episodes with scores that came out as 7.6-something, so DNA‘s slip of just one place is nothing to write home about. It remains a popular episode; following on from The Last Day and Camille, its a third consecutive opportunity for Robert Llewellyn to shine, and the most successful of the three according to the data. As well as portraying human Kryten, with his iconic double polaroid and attempts to shove a recharge cable into the nearest available orifice, he also gives us his Spare Heads and Hand, in a superb scene where it’s easy to forget that you’re watching the same actor four times. It suddenly turns into a monster story right at the end, which perhaps detracts a little from the more subtle musings on the nature of humanity that take up the bulk of the episode, but it’s nevertheless one of the great “the one where” episodes that the Grant Naylor era provided in spades.
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The EndUp 2. Avg score: 7.678 (631 votes)This episode received more individual votes than any other, thanks to a number of well-intentioned people who attempted to start their rankings and then gave up after the first one. It’s fascinating to track The End‘s popularity, because as good as it is, by its very nature it’s fundamentally different to every other episode. Some sitcoms open in media res, dropping you in to an established status quo without any fuss, whereas The End is one of those pilots that sets up the situation before your very eyes, building its premise on screen. And yet it’s consistently within the high-twenties in the rankings, and has gained a couple of places this time round; I wonder if there are people out there who’d have rather seen a workplace sitcom about two low-ranking technicians forced to share a bunkroom. I jest – the events of The End are such a great hook for the forthcoming series that it’s bound to hold a special place in fans’ hearts, especially for those lucky enough to have witnessed it thirty-five years ago today. It’s also funny in its own right, particularly Lister’s exchange with Hollister and of course the oft-quoted Everybody’s Dead Dave scene.
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Demons & AngelsUp 6. Avg score: 7.753 (580 votes)A huge and perhaps surprising leap up the table for Demons & Angels – the lowest ranked episode of Series V last time, but six whole places above Terrorform this time, and just one step away from making a quarter of the Top 20 turn turquoise. The criticism in recent years has been that the vast number of alter egos on screen are only given enough time to be painted in broad strokes; they’re all largely playing the same generic tropes as Highs and Lows, rather than each one being tailored to the individual traits of each character. But hey – rather than lamenting what could have been had the episode developed a different way, the voting public are clearly more than happy with what we did get, which is an episode packed with both peril and laughs. It’s great fun to explore the two alternative versions of the ship, and the episode really starts to shine when Lister is captured by the Lows and forced to do their bidding, with a rare yet successful foray into slapstick to round off a varied and lightning-paced adventure.
Right then, Top 20 time! For both the Silver Survey and the Pearl Poll, we ended up with the exact same twenty episodes at the top each time. Not so now, with Stasis Leak‘s capitulation shifting the balance of delicious pie chart number two.
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KrytenNon-mover. Avg score: 7.788 (604 votes)Kryten is categorically the twentieth best episode of Red Dwarf – it’s been in that position for three polls in a row. Astonishingly not even in the top half of Series 2, this is the episode where, according to the cast at least, Red Dwarf really clicked. Specifically, the big reveal of the Nova 5 skellingtons is cited as an example of the studio audience being totally in tune with the humour of the show, and that carries across to those watching at home. The show gets two huge laughs out of its bony guest stars, first when we see them for the first time, then when the characters do, in a scene absolutely dripping with classic dialogue. We wouldn’t want to imagine Series III onwards without Robert Llewellyn, but David Ross’s performance here is so strong that the alternative dimension in which he was available in 1989 is a fascinating prospect. A very different take on the character to the one we’d become accustomed to, but it laid the vital foundations, and it’s not hard to see why Rob and Doug decided to expand the regular cast to adopt this irresistible new character. And we’ve not even mentioned Hol Rock, frogs in bidets or dogs’ milk – all gags from the first five minutes of this extraordinary episode.
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Me²Down 1. Avg score: 7.816 (602 votes)Often dubbed Series 1.5, Me² was written long after the rest of the series, as a replacement for the infamous Bodysnatcher episode which wouldn’t surface until nearly 20 years later. As such, Rob and Doug benefitted from having seen their characters brought to life, and began tailoring their writing to the abilities of their actors. The most blatant example is Danny John-Jules roller-skating about, but fundamentally this was a huge leap forward for the characterisation and dynamics that would launch Red Dwarf to new heights. The show’s success was cemented by the gradual softening of Rimmer into a much more sympathetic and relatable figure, and it all started here, in what’s unsurprisingly considered one of the best episodes of the initial run. The luxuriously long Gazpacho Soup scene is the crowning glory of a Chris Barrie masterclass; a comedy actor of the finest calibre learning how best to play his career-defining role before our eyes. That Me² is not higher in the list is testament to the quality that followed, which it played a huge part in paving the way for.
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PsirensUp 5. Avg score: 7.964 (585 votes)Here’s that newcomer to the Top 20 party we were waiting for, Psirens making a big leap up the chart to be comfortably nestled within the crème de la crème of Red Dwarf episodes. It plays an unusual role in the evolution of the series, serving as both the first example of a new formula for the show, but also opening with what is essentially a comedic recap of the previous setup, at the BBC’s behest. It does it with style, and wastes no time in establishing the high gag rate that Rob and Doug brought home from their ill-fated American adventure. While it’s by no means the first time our crew have been befuddled by shape-shifting GELFs, it never feels like it’s treading old ground; the Psirens’ illusions are more elaborate and pervasive than a Polymorph’s, and they force the crew into interesting scenarios like having to figure out which Lister is real, and Kryten having no choice but to obey a Psiren taking on the form of his creator, even though he knows it isn’t really his creator. It’s never been an episode to particularly stand out against some of its more headline-grabbing peers, but it’s solid, consistent and deserves the reputation it’s acquired from this escapade.
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HoloshipDown 4. Avg score: 8.010 (586 votes)Conversely, here’s an episode that appears to be on the opposite trajectory. Holoship has had a troubled history when it comes to fan opinion; the Smegazine absolutely hated it when it first aired, and their readers ranked it 29th out of 30 in the first ever mass Red Dwarf poll. It’s absolutely baffling to many modern viewers to understand why the reaction was so negative. It’s an episode with real heart, its most complex character going on a journey that sees him glimpse everything he’s ever dreamed of, do whatever morally dubious things it takes to secure it, and then give it all up for the sake of a woman he loved, even though they’d never see each other again. But it’s also incredibly funny, from Don Warrington’s appearance as Commander Binks, to the post-coital scene between Rimmer and Nirvanah Crane (the brilliant Jane Horrocks on fine form), to the mind-patched Rimmer’s verbal and mathematical gymnastics. And it’s the source of an extraordinary amount of iconic lines – “quick let’s get out of here before they bring him back”, “such a big one it was worth mentioning twice” and “people I… met” have no right all being uttered within the same half hour. While a drop of four places sees Holoship drift further away from the very top of the charts, it’s the first episode to reach an average score of at least eight out of ten, keeping it firmly among the elite.
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Future EchoesDown 5. Avg score: 8.027 (620 votes) Best Series 1 episodeAnother big drop sees another fan favourite appear much lower down the table than many might have expected. Future Echoes reached as high as #7 in 2013’s Silver Survey, before dropping out of the Top 10 in the Pearl Poll. Now it’s way down in sixteenth place, setting a new low for a highest-placed episode from a Grant Naylor era series; five of the six episodes from Series 1 have suffered a drop for this poll, indicating that no matter how much affection the original run commands, it just can’t compete with what followed. But Future Echoes itself remains a fine episode, with its huge sci-fi concept at the centre setting the template for what the show would evolve into. It’s a smart and unforgettable conceit, with the Double Rimmer scene widely considered one of Red Dwarf‘s all time greatest moments, in only the second ever episode. It contributes so much to the show’s nascent lore, from hints at Lister’s unusual childhood, to his fandom of Jim Bexley Speed, which in turn leads us to the mystery of his twin sons, a setup which wouldn’t pay off until ten episodes later. It’s not directly signposted on screen, but it must be the promise of pre-destined developments that stops Lister going through with his plan of returning to stasis for the trip home, thus giving the series a reason to keep going. It had the same effect on viewers too – after an episode of this quality in only the second week, you have no choice but to stick around for the long haul.
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BackwardsUp 2. Avg score: 8.150 (615 votes)As per the template set down by Future Echoes, it’s not uncommon for an episode to be centred entirely around one central sci-fi concept, but the conceit of Backwards has been seen as somewhat of a gimmick over the years. No doubt technically impressive for 1989, modern viewers would be forgiven for failing to be impressed by what are now seen as common editing techniques, but at its heart Backwards offers so much more than video trickery. Yes, the logic is completely doolally when you consider the sequence of events as they unfolded within the reverse universe, but it’s a hell of a fun ride along the way. Showing us the consequences of the adventure first provides an unfolding mystery as to how Lister’s injuries came about, with hilarious anti-Bulgarian slander, a woman stuffing an entire eclair into her mouth, and an incandescent yet incomprehensible Arthur Smith building up to the majestic barroom tidy. And that’s not taking into account the fact that it opens with one of the most recognisable and oft-quoted vignettes in the show’s history, and ends with the indelible image of the Cat’s reaction to his own faeces being forcibly inserted back into his rectum. Backwards richly deserves its little bump up the table.
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JusticeUp 1. Avg score: 8.160 (593 votes)Another small rise in the wake of Future Echoes and Holoship‘s misfortunes for a deeply philosophical episode that touches on the nature of guilt, the ethics of punishment, the flaws in various legal systems and the karmic balance of the universe, whilst also opening with scenes of Lister with a prosthetic pair of tits on his head. Justice features stunning location work at Sunbury Pumphouse (although admittedly some of the studio scenes have such little budget that they take place in front of black curtains rather than actual sets), and at least three all-time classic scenes – Rimmer’s diesel deck slideshow, the fight between Lister and the Simulant, and of course the highlight of the episode, Rimmer’s trial. It’s always a rich source of comedy to put Rimmer’s neuroses and motivations under the microscope, and his character is thoroughly dismantled by Kryten in hilarious fashion. And speaking of hilarious fashion, those escort boots are pretty funny too. When I was a kid, we used to play “Justice” in the school playground, miming extreme acts of violence against each other and then acting out the consequences on ourselves. Not many sitcoms can do that.
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Out of TimeUp 1. Avg score: 8.173 (579 votes)Here’s an episode that we at G&T have always been huge advocates of, going as far as putting it in second place back in 2008, in a staff-only poll that’s now considered non-canonical. It seems the fandom at large doesn’t rate it quite as highly as we do, but it nevertheless climbs a place here to creep that little bit closer to the Top 10. It’s mainly remembered for one thing – the stunning action sequence culminating in the show’s most famous cliffhanger, which remains one of the most dramatic and heart-racing moments Red Dwarf ever produced. But there’s so much more than that; even before the time-travel shenanigans and the encounter with the future crew, the unreality bubbles are a fantastic idea, used so sparingly for maximum comedy effect over a riotous and unforgettabubble five minutes or so. There’s also Rimmer’s morale meeting, the jaunt back to 15th Century deep space and the one thing that for my money stands tall over even the famous cliffhanger – Future Kryten’s wig and eyebrows. A guaranteed laugh in every individual frame.
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Thanks For The MemoryDown 5. Avg score: 8.196 (601 votes)Ouch! Another episode that G&T have always championed, Thanks For The Memory takes a huge hit in popularity and tumbles down the table. This is beginning to feel personal. Considered the best episode of Series 2 and 5th best overall in the Silver Survey, ten years later it drops out of the top ten altogether, and is now only the third best of its run. Quite astonishing considering just how remarkable this episode is. It’s the first time that a show growing in confidence really plays with its narrative structure; the audience skips three days in the same way the characters do, and have to fill in the blanks alongside them. All of the different mysteries – Lister and Cat’s broken legs, torn diary pages and surfboard-sized footprints – end up falling into place as perfectly as the pieces of Lister’s jigsaw. Along the way, both Chris and Craig are on fine form, their characters’ relationship beginning to thaw as they learn more about each other, thanks to a misguided but well-intentioned act of kindness from Lister to Rimmer. It’s unusual, compelling and now seemingly returning to its previous categorisation as an under-rated gem. Interestingly, this one seems to be a prime example of how the collective opinion of one section of fandom doesn’t necessarily match the wider picture; correspondents who identified as G&T regulars put this safely in ninth place, but the non-regulars had it down in 15th.
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Better Than LifeUp 1. Avg score: 8.253 (608 votes)Having seen its neighbouring episode come careering down the table, Better Than Life is one of the entries to take advantage, rising one place in its wake to come within smelling distance of the Top Ten. Despite being somewhat overshadowed by the way its concept was expanded upon so comprehensively in the first two novels, this is nevertheless an iconic piece of Red Dwarf history, fondly remembered by hardcore fans and casual viewers alike. As with so many of the show’s early successes, it all revolves around Rimmer, with his reaction to his father’s death and the revelation of his horrendous childhood rounding his character out to be unrecognisable from the single-faceted antagonist from just a few episodes earlier. And that’s before we get to – surprisingly late in the episode – the crew entering the game itself and unveiling all the delights that a windswept Rhyl and a run-down hotel dining room have to offer. All the jokes that can be had from the guys’ outlandish fantasies play out before Rimmer’s mind rebels and the whole thing falls apart in a hugely enjoyable way. While perhaps a little lightweight compared to some of the episodes later on the list, and certainly compared to its novelisations, it’s a fun and pacey romp that lives long in the memory.
All of which means that the overall balance of our Top Ten has changed, with now only one representative from Series 2, whereas last time round the pie was equally divided between Series 2-V.
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The InquisitorUp 2. Avg score: 8.297 (585 votes)We didn’t have to wait long to see which episode would replace Thanks For The Memory in the Top 10, with The Inquisitor expanding Series V’s stranglehold on the very top of the table. Two places gained for an episode whose reputation as continually grown over the years, appreciated now as one of the darker and grittier tales Red Dwarf ever told, but nevertheless another story that mines the majority of its humour from the idiosyncrasies of the characters at the show’s core. The self-judgement scene is a masterful showcase of the whole ensemble, each reacting uniquely and fittingly to their metaphysical inquisitions. The quality of the comedy is matched by the menacing nature of the villain; a threat that the episode takes very seriously, played so brilliantly by Jack Docherty, never veering into spoof territory. With a plot to rival any non-comedic sci-fi show you care to mention, The Inquisitor is a stunning example of Grant Naylor coming up with a concept that could easily form the basis of an entire series, but instead channelling it into just thirty minutes of exquisite comedy.
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Dimension JumpUp 1. Avg score: 8.413 (588 votes)The original appearance of Red Dwarf‘s most frequently recurring alter ego (if you don’t count Can’t Smeg Won’t Smeg or the Dibbleyfier app), and still categorically the best. Dimension Jump jumps up one place to consolidate its position of one of the show’s finest half-hours. As with so many of the higher ranking character-based episodes, it’s another Rimmer-centric one, his backstory having been sufficiently fleshed out by now to base a story around the what-if scenario of his childhood playing out differently. Chris Barrie clearly has a fantastic time as Ace, both him and Howard Goodall inspired by Top Gun in their work here. After some all too brief glimpses of tantalising alternative versions of the rest of the crew, Ace comes crashing into our universe and gives Chris the opposite brief as our Arnold, becoming increasingly twisted and jealous over his new counterpart. Ace’s universe would be examined in much more detail in the novel Backwards, with mixed results, but nothing can match the impact made by this episode, inspiring multiple sequels as well as one of the most iconic t-shirts of the early-to-mid-90s.
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White HoleDown 2. Avg score: 8.430 (593 votes) Best Series IV episodeMeanwhile, the closest we ever get to a Hattie’s-Holly-centric episode, White Hole drops a couple of places but still holds the title of the best from Series IV. From start to finish, it’s awash with all-time-great scenes, from the glorious return of the Toaster, now regenerated into David Ross, to the famous “what is it?” scene, to the exemplary playing pool with planets. It’s the middle of those that’s undoubtedly the standout moment, of the episode and probably the entirety of Series IV. Rivalling Future Echoes‘s double Rimmer scene for the cleverness of the dialogue, enhanced by having the full ensemble take part. The episode is a rare example of an idea that originated in the novels being adapted into the TV series rather than the other way round, and an even rarer feat of the filmed version easily surpassing the prose version in terms of depth and quality. Ideas that sprawl across various sections of the Better Than Life novel are condensed and polished into a tight half hour of exceptional finesse. No longer quite up there with the very very best, but one of those that would probably be the best of any other sitcom that managed to match it.
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PolymorphUp 2. Avg score: 8.529 (607 votes)Leapfrogging White Hole in the table is Polymorph, the show’s first foray into what would later be dubbed the “monster of the week” formula – often used in a pejorative way when discussing the show’s development, but clearly a winning strategy when it produces episodes like this. Part Alien parody, part excuse to let the cast loose on alternative versions of their characters, it’s a fine balance of the show’s trademark character comedy combined with blockbuster action. The various methods used by the eponymousmorph to pick off each of its victims are great fun, and the resultant alterations caused by removing an emotion from each are inventive and hilarious, as well as providing an element of psychological musing on the role that so-called “negative” emotions can have in keeping the human psyche balanced. Plus of course, it contains the scene which would no doubt top a poll to find Red Dwarf‘s best moment as opposed to best episode – the shrinking boxers have become legendary for the tales of how long Chris Barrie had to stand there looking shocked while the audience calmed down, and of keeping Doug Naylor chuckling all the way out of the edit suite, into the pizza shop and back again.
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LegionUp 2. Avg score: 8.569 (591 votes)If there’s a single line that’s synonymous with Red Dwarf – our equivalent of “don’t tell him Pike” or “small, far away” – it’s the lightbulb gag from Legion. Rob Grant once cited the first ten minutes of this episode as his favourite bit of Red Dwarf ever, and it’s easy to see why; it’s the most snappy, gag-packed, relentless onslaught of one-liners that the show ever produced, with both writers and cast really hitting their stride in bringing Series VI’s new ethos to life. And while the foot is taken off the gas for a more sedate second and third acts, there’s still no shortage of comedy, from Rimmer trying to buy Legion’s light switch, to the crew’s attempts at using anti-matter chopsticks, to the escape plan of Kryten knocking everyone the fuck out one-by-one. Once again, the episode has at its heart a sci-fi concept that’s used to shed new light on our characters’ personalities and motivations, and it’s an encounter that irrevocably changes one of them, with Rimmer gaining a hard light drive and no longer having intangibility as a defining characteristic. Legion himself perhaps surprisingly made it all the way to the final of the Guest Character World Cup we ran a few years back, and is another impressive string to this episode’s bow. Always bubbling under in previous polls, a leap of two places sees it come so close to breaking the Top 5, coming within 0.007 average points of pulling it off.
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QueegNon-mover. Avg score: 8.576 (623 votes) Best Series 2 episodeBut it couldn’t quite dislodge Queeg, the now thoroughly undisputed highlight of the second series, and the crowning glory of both Holly as a character, and of any of Norman Lovett’s stints on the show. With a status quo of characters only just having been established, Rob and Doug threaten to change things up a couple of episodes early, and it’s a measure of how much the audience values Holly at this stage that the prospect of the character being removed is a genuine affront – we know now that Red Dwarf can very much be a success without Norman and Holly, but it must have been unimaginable in 1988, after the role got much more prominent and much funnier throughout Series 2. Holly could have carried this episode on his own, but it just so happens to be graced by one of the best guest performances the show has ever had, the peerless Charles Augins making a lasting impression, with Queeg’s bureaucratic version of villainy creating all manner of unpleasant but hilarious situations for the characters. Of course, it turns out that Holly was carrying the episode all along, with an ending that on paper is a hackneyed cop-out, but somehow totally works, even though it was the result of Rob and Doug writing themselves into a corner and having no idea how to get out of it. Sometimes Red Dwarf is planned meticulously at every stage, at other times it’s made up on the fly, but both approaches are equally capable of producing stunning results.
As you’ll no doubt have noticed, Queeg is a non-mover, having popped into the Top 5 for the Pearl Poll and stayed there once more. So for the third poll in a row, the top four episodes are exactly the same. The Silver Survey and The Pearl Poll even had them in the exact same order – Quarantine, then Gunmen, then Marooned, then Back To Reality on top. Even with a brand new polling method, and after some interesting and unexpected changes elsewhere in the chart, are we in for another huge anti-climax?
- MaroonedDown 2. Avg score: 8.809 (601 votes) Best Series III episodeHell no. This one is a total shock – it was no surprise whatsoever that it held on to its runners up spot last time, and now here it is without even a podium finish. And yet it’s clearly one of the best half hours of comedy this country has ever produced. A (mostly) two-hander of exceptional quality, performed by two actors who had grown to fully inhabit their roles, from the pens of two writers at the peak of their powers. It’s often been noted that Marooned would make an excellent stage play, because aside from the trappings of deep space and flaming asteroids, it’s just two characters, stuck together, chatting away to pass the time. It’s Red Dwarf at its rawest, eschewing the concept-driven formula that the show mostly stuck to between Series III and VII, in favour of a deep dive into the psyches of its two central characters. It gives us Rimmer being Alexander the Great’s chief eunuch, the tales of how the pair lost their virginities, Lister’s duplicity in secretly burning Rimmer’s trunk instead of his guitar, and his subsequent guilt when Rimmer responds with warmth and admiration. Plus a comedy set piece in which a character eats dog food, plus it gave rise to the word “awooga”, which due to a complicated sequence of events ended up becoming a catchphrase for the 1990s’ most popular Saturday night game show.
It’s hard to see where it’s gone wrong in this poll, other than simply not doing as well as some of the other candidates for best ever episode – you can see from the average scores that there’s a distinct leap in quality between fifth and fourth, with these remaining episodes simply on a whole other level of brilliance compared to the rest.
- QuarantineUp 1. Avg score: 8.958 (595 votes)And it’s ANOTHER change in position towards the top. Yes, the top four are a league apart, but within that mini-bubble it’s more competitive than ever. Quarantine takes the bronze medal for the first time, following a period in our lifetimes where its setting felt more relatable than we would ever have expected it to. What we wouldn’t have given for a crochet magazine and a wallpapering video in 2020, or even the excitement of a member of our household going insane and threatening us all with a psychotic penguin. The visual icons of Quarantine have always been a high watermark in the show’s history, with Mr Flibble becoming a much more popular and recognisable figure than a glove puppet that appears on screen for all of five minutes has any right to be, along with the classic gingham dress and army boots that padded out many a Dimension Jump fancy dress competition in the days before cosplay was taken more seriously.
Then there’s the luck virus, functioning as both a plot device and a comedy goldmine, the brief but unforgettable appearance of Maggie Steed as Professor Lanstrom, and Kryten getting a medium-sized fireaxe buried in his spiral column. It’s an unrelenting display of sheer quality, backed up by yet another virtuoso performance by Chris Barrie, along with the rest of the ensemble firing on all cylinders. With the show in perhaps the finest run of form it ever managed, it’s easy to overlook Quarantine when it stands in the shadow of the episode that came along two weeks later, but at any other point in the show’s history, this would have been extremely tough to beat.
Just two episodes to reveal. You’ve already figured out which ones they are. Back To Reality and Gunmen of the Apocalypse. The only episodes ever to have won polls on this scale, whether conducted by the Smegazine, Better Than Life or Ganymede & Titan. Back To Reality has never before failed to win a G&T poll, but then again Pete (Part Two) has never before failed to come bottom. Everything is topsy-turvy. The perpetual runner-up is down in fourth. The usual fourth-best ep is up in third. Is this it? Is this the moment that we finally, against all odds, see the crown wrestled from Back To Reality for the first time since 1997?
- Gunmen of the ApocalypseUp 1. Avg score: 9.109 (603 votes) Best Series VI episodeNo, but it was a lot of fun finding out. Honestly, the top two were so close during the voting process. There were a good few days at the start where the positions would swap around with practically every vote we received. Eventually it settled down and Back To Reality stayed on top, but the margins remained incredibly fine. There were only two episodes to achieve a final average ranking above 9, and in the end they were separated by exactly 0.01 points. This would have been unthinkable at one stage, and while Gunmen ultimately only rose one place, that is no mean feat at this stage in proceedings, and represents a huge leap in reputation over the last five years. And considering it’s Red Dwarf‘s most decorated episode within the industry itself, winning both a British Comedy Award for Best BBC Comedy and an International Emmy for Best Popular Arts, its standing was already pretty bloody high.
Undoubtedly a format-breaker, Gunmen delights in presenting us with multiple Artificial Reality alternatives to the mundanity of deep space, opening with a film noir before transporting us to Laredo, the show making use of an existing Wild West replica town in the heart of Kent to produce an episode that BBC2 Head of Entertainment Janet Street-Porter criticised as unfilmable based on the script, only to be informed that they’d already recorded it. Each of the cast clearly has a whale of a time as their cowboy counterparts, and it’s perhaps Danny’s Riviera Kid that grabs most of the headlines, not least with the trick shot that keeps Sheriff Kryten in town in the most exquisite slapstick fashion. Ultimately, it’s a tale of this band of brothers sticking together to fight a common enemy, working as a team to overcome the odds, demonstrating the unique bond that more casual viewers of the show tend to miss amongst all the bickering and insults. That’s why the gimmick of Gunmen hasn’t grown old in the last thirty years – despite the attention-grabbing trappings, it’s a story of friendship at heart.
And so, before we complete the formality of reiterating Back To Reality‘s dominance, let’s pause for a deeper dive into some of the more interesting titbits from our big spreadsheet of voting data…
We usually like to start by taking a look at how many people picked each episode as either their favourite or least favourite of the lot. With the new voting method, we can’t do that this time, but we can see how many times each episode was given the maximum or minimum score…
Most 10/10 Ratings
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- Back to Reality (355)
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- Gunmen of the Apocalypse (334)
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- Quarantine (269)
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- Marooned (257)
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- Queeg (218)
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- Polymorph (180)
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- Dimension Jump (164)
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- White Hole (157)
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- Legion (155)
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- Thanks For The Memory (136) Most 1/10 Ratings
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- Timewave (113)
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- Pete (Part Two) (91)
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- Krytie TV (83)
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- Pete (Part One) (63)
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- Back To Earth (Part Three) (43)
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- Back In The Red (Part Three) (40)
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- Back To Earth (Part Two) (39)
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- Back To Earth (Part One) (36)
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- Back In The Red (Part Two) (32)
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- Only The Good… (29) Well, the top five is identical to the main table, so we’ll skip past that to note that it starts varying wildly from then on, with Legion dropping to ninth, the two Series IV episodes swapping round, and Thanks For The Memory sneaking back into the Top 10 at the expense of The Inquisitor. Down at the other end of the scale, my main takeaway is wishing that most of the least popular episodes of Red Dwarf didn’t start with the word “Back”. We can see that Krytie TV got far more minimum scores than Pete (Part One), despite being above it in the main table, and that the order of those various Back episodes is completely higgledy-piggledy. It’s clear to see from both charts which episodes provoke the most extreme reactions, and which are in their positions despite being nobody’s absolute most or least favourite.
Our next interesting alternative tables are provided by comparing the results of those who told us they were G&T regulars, and those who told us they weren’t…
G&T Regulars Top 10
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- Back to Reality (9.332)
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- Marooned (9.158)
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- Gunmen of the Apocalypse (9.109)
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- Quarantine (8.929)
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- Queeg (8.863)
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- Legion (8.754)
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- White Hole (8.634)
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- Out of Time (8.536)
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- Thanks For The Memory (8.475)
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- Dimension Jump (8.435) Normal People Top 10
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- Gunmen of the Apocalypse (9.369)
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- Back To Reality (9.211)
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- Quarantine (9.027)
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- Marooned (8.762)
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- Polymorph (8.670)
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- Legion (8.640)
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- Dimension Jump (8.538)
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- Better Than Life (8.481)
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- Queeg (8.440)
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- Backwards (8.387) Not that G&Ters are stuck in their ways or anything, but our Top 5 is identical to that of the Pearl Poll. So while the consensus round these parts hasn’t changed much in the last five years, it’s the wider community that have had a real impact on the Coral Canvass scores, even going as far as to put Gunmen at number one. The regulars here love Out of Time and Thanks For The Memory way more than average, while the normies would have Better Than Life and Backwards in the Top 10 if they had their way. Polymorph is fifth for non-regulars and way down in thirteenth for regulars, whereas it’s White Hole that would miss out on the Top 10 if not for the G&Ters’ vote. One thing that we can all agree on is that Legion is categorically the sixth best episode, the only entry to be in the same place in both of these tables and the main one.
Meanwhile, at the bottom of the pile…
G&T Regulars Bottom 10
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- Duct Soup (4.778)
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- Beyond A Joke (4.777)
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- Can of Worms (4.711)
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- Only The Good… (4.279)
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- Back In The Red (Part Two) (4.211)
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- Back In The Red (Part Three) (3.878)
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- Krytie TV (3.669)
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- Pete (Part One) (3.333)
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- Pete (Part Two) (2.983)
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- Timewave (2.698) Normal People Bottom 10
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- Back In The Red (Part Three) (6.192)
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- Beyond A Joke (6.159)
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- Can of Worms (6.138)
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- Krytie TV (5.803)
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- Back To Earth (Part One) (5.698)
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- Back To Earth (Part Two) (5.673)
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- Pete (Part One) (5.645)
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- Pete (Part Two) (5.576)
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- Back To Earth (Part Three) (5.541)
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- Timewave (5.440) Ah, everyone hates Timewave, that’s reassuring. But note that G&Ters are much harsher with their scoring than non-regulars – even the very worst episode gets more than half marks from the wider fandom, whereas us lot barely give it a quarter. On the flipside, G&T regulars’ highest scores are generally slightly bigger than the others’, so I guess we just attract those with the strongest opinions either way. The biggest difference between the two tables above is that you won’t find a single part of Back To Earth on the G&T side, whereas the normies put Part Three below even the dreaded Petes. It’s the …in the Reds that we can’t stand, along with Only The Good… and Duct Soup taking Series IX’s place in the regulars’ bottom ten.
But the real story of any poll is how it compares to the previous one. Let’s look at which episodes made the biggest gains in league position, and which dropped the furthest down the table.
Biggest Gains in Position
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- Emohawk: Polymorph II (up 7)
- 2= Demons & Angels (up 6)
- 2= Stoke Me A Clipper (up 6)
- 4= Better Than Life (up 5)
- 4= Psirens (up 5)
- 6= Rimmerworld (up 4)
- 6= Back In The Red (Part One) (up 4)
- 8= Cassandra (up 3)
- 8= Only The Good… (up 3)
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10= (eight episodes) (up 2) Biggest Falls in Position
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- M-Corp (down 8)
- 2= Stasis Leak (down 6)
- 2= Back To Earth (Part Three) (down 6)
- 2= Can of Worms (down 6)
- 2= Mechocracy (down 6)
- 6= Future Echoes (down 5)
- 6= Thanks For The Memory (down 5)
- 6= Meltdown (down 5)
- 9= (eight episodes) (down 4) We can also see how each individual series fared compared to the Pearl Poll:
Total positions gained/lost by each series
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- Series VI (+20)
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- Series VIII (+9)
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- Series V (+3)
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- Series VII (+1)
- 5= Series III (-3)
- 5= Series X (-3)
- 7= Series 2 (-5)
- 7= Series VII (-5)
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- Back To Earth (-12)
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- Series 1 (-13)
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- Series XI (-16)
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- Series XII (-18) That’s a really impressive performance from Series VI, the only series to see each and every episode improve its position on the Pearl Poll. Series VIII was also a big winner, and that’s not something we’ve said all that often over the years. Marginal differences poll-on-poll for the majority of series, though only four of the twelve made gains overall, the exceptional performance of Series VI leaving others losing places in its wake. Poor old Back To Earth and Series 1 both took substantial hits though, their standing in the oeuvre seeming to drop regularly every five years. And it’s no real surprise that Second Survey Syndrome is definitely a thing, with Series XI and XII suffering the heaviest losses now that they’re no longer our brand new bundles of pride and joy. But which episodes were hit the hardest, and which managed to buck the trend?
Total positions gained/lost by Series XI & XII episodes
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- Cured (1)
- 2= Samsara (0)
- 2= Officer Rimmer (0)
- 2= Skipper (0)
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- Twentica (-1)
- 6= Give & Take (-3)
- 6= Krysis (-3)
- 8= Siliconia (-4)
- 8= Timewave (-4)
- 10= Can of Worms (-6)
- 10= Mechocracy (-6)
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- M-Corp (-8) It comes to something when the second best outcome you can hope for is merely to stay in the exact same place you were in last time. But still, congratulations to Cured on being the only episode from the two most recent full series to actually improve its standing the second time around, by a whole one place. On the flip side, it’s M-Corp that suffers the most – the biggest drop for any episode from any era. We’re really going to have to re-examine the reputations of some of these episodes, because hardly any of them have fared remotely well.
However, we’ve established that it was a fantastic poll for Series VI, but what does that mean for the Constructors Championship, ie how the series rank against each other? Will Series V fight off the competition to remain on top, and will Series VIII’s renaissance lift it off the bottom? The average points per episode per series is as follows:
Average points per episode per series
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- Series V (8.412)
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- Series VI (8.122)
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- Series III (8.040)
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- Series 2 (7.968)
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- Series IV (7.910)
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- The Promised Land (7.378)
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- Series 1 (7.334)
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- Series X (6.733)
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- Series XI (6.530)
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- Series XII (6.352)
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- Series VII (6.262)
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- Back To Earth (5.470)
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- Series VIII (5.418) There’s just no shaking Series V from the top of the pile, but that is indeed an extraordinary turnaround for Series VI – it was only the fifth best series according to the Pearl Poll, but it’s right up in second place now. Not much has changed elsewhere in the last five years, other than the Dave era series now being neatly aligned in chronological order – XI had the edge over X last time. But while it’s not exactly a like-for-like comparison, look how well The Promised Land does by this metric – easily beating the rest of the Dave era and even ranked higher than Series 1!
Similarly, as part of the survey we also asked participants what their favourite series overall was – will their responses match the statistics?
Favourite Series Results
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- Series V (125 votes)
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- Series VI (80)
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- Series III (58)
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- Series IV (45)
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- Series 2 (41)
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- Series 1 (20)
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- Series VII (6)
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- Series X (3)
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- Series XI (3)
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- Series XII (2)
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- Back To Earth (1)
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- Series VIII (0) Fair play. We didn’t include The Promised Land as an option here for obvious reasons, but other than that the two tables are almost identical. Only two differences to note – Series 2 and IV are swapped round, but their points/votes are very close in both cases. More dramatically, Series VII leapfrogs the entire Dave era, and we wouldn’t have been surprised if the two charts were even more different to each other, given that a particular series isn’t necessarily equal to the sum of its parts. Variations in tone, visual quality, set design, character combinations and any other number of factors can contribute towards someone’s preferences, even if their individual episode ratings tell another story. Poor old Series VIII though. Even Back To Earth got one vote.
And finally, just for fun, let’s take a look at how the results of The Coral Canvass look in a big line graph, so that we can see how the quality of Red Dwarf rose, fell and rose again over the years.
And for anyone with any lingering doubts about how the new methodology may or may not have skewed the results, check out how the general trend matches up across the last three polls:
So anyway, that was all a lot of fun, but we’re just delaying the inevitable. The big throne already has this episode’s arse groove thoroughly established, the crown fits perfectly, and it will probably reign as king for longer than the UK’s new monarch. Once again, the fans’ favourite episode of Red Dwarf of all time is…
- Back To RealityNon-mover. Avg score: 9.119 (599 votes) Best Series V episodeWhat more can be said about Back To Reality at this stage? After just shy of 600 votes, an average score of 9.119 is nothing short of phenomenal. More than half the people who rated this episode gave it a ten out of ten – 355 maximum scores, more than any other episode. There’s barely a single Red Dwarf fan who doesn’t absolutely adore this episode, with the richly detailed dystopia it creates absolutely dripping with potential, which unsurprisingly inspired more Smegazine comic strips than any other single source. The four alter egos it gives us are all striking and memorable in their own way, with the slow piecing together of the crew’s “real” personas in the recuperation lounge one of the show’s finest ever scenes. Guest actors of incredible pedigree in the form of Lenny Von Dohlen and Timothy Spall. An imaginary car chase, acted out on crates but played completely straight. A dark turn towards the end, with the crew seconds away from ending their own lives. Duane Dibbley’s teeth. Jake Bullet’s mid-digit. Billy Doyle’s eau de yak urine. Sebastian Doyle’s ponytail. Comedy. Peril. Drama. Existential crises. Metafiction. This episode has everything.
But best of all, and most of all, it’s all about those four characters. The Despair Squid is a very clever opponent; it doesn’t make it obvious to its victims that they’re in an hallucination by making their lives unbearable immediately, instead it takes its time to chip away at the fundamentals of each character’s sense of self-worth, inducing a deeply personalised attack of despair by making them believe they’re someone they’re not. But it’s not The Despair Squid that’s doing this in real life – it’s Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, the twin genuises behind the show who created such a fantastic set of characters, built a whole universe around them, and then took great delight in deconstructing it all for our entertainment.
With the current status and future of Red Dwarf so uncertain, it’s worth reflecting on what makes it the masterpiece it is. It isn’t a vastly detailed sci-fi universe like Star Trek or Star Wars. It doesn’t play with all of time and space like Doctor Who, it doesn’t combine the fantastical with the everyday like Harry Potter or the MCU, and it’s not an epic fantasy like the works of Tolkien, Martin or Pratchett. It’s something much more fundamental than that – it’s about the people. Regardless of what century they’re from or what crazy adventures they find themselves in, or even what species they are, these are ordinary people just trying to make it through the day and get on with their lives. That’s why it has such a special place in the hearts of its most devoted fans; it’s about us.
From The End to The Promised Land, this is a programme all about Dave Lister and Arnold Rimmer – two complicated, flawed but well-meaning individuals, trapped together by fate, learning to get along. There’s more to it than that, and of course Cat, Kryten and (at times) Holly are huge factors in its success too, but all the very best episodes have one thing in common – regardless of the plot, regardless of the setting, regardless of the big sci-fi concept or monster of the week, it’s fundamentally a character comedy. And it may have had its ups and downs over the years, its peaks and troughs in quality and consistency, but the appeal of this particular set of characters has not diminished one iota in thirty-five years.
Regardless of what the future brings (if anything), Red Dwarf will never die. The communities, friendships and relationships that it’s inspired will outlive us all. Happy anniversary, everyone – and a toast to all the talented, hard-working people who brought this extraordinary programme to life. Thank you.
The Coral Canvass was brought to you by Ganymede & Titan. Article written by Ian Symes. Development and design by Jonathan Capps. Graphics by Danny Stephenson. Images powered by The Smega-Drive. Special thanks to every single one of you who took part. Don’t miss further analysis in our Coral Canvass Livestream Spectacular, tonight from 9pm!
My dearest friends, I hereby declare that voting for the Coral Canvass, our mega 35th anniversary poll, is now OVER. A huge thank you to everyone who took part and indeed helped us spread the word. Submission numbers were way beyond our expectations – more than double the amount of responses we got for the Pearl Poll five years ago. And let me tell you, the results are very interesting indeed. You think certain episodes’ positions are set in stone? Think again. All will be revealed at 9am on Wednesday 15th February, right here on ganymede.tv.
But that’s not all! For the previous two milestone anniversaries, we’ve accompanied the results with a little anniversary party in the form of a Live DwarfCast. This year is no exception, other than the small detail that it will be a Live Video DwarfCast instead! That’s right, not only will you have to put up with irritating voices, you also have to see our repugnant faces too. So make a note in your diary to be online at 9pm on Wednesday 15th February over on our Youtube channel (though the video will be embedded here too). We’ll be discussing the poll results in full, as well as dealing with your live waffles and also playing a little game…
Yes, because doing our first ever live video stream wasn’t ambitious enough, part of the entertainment will be CLOCHEBUSTERS, a Red Dwarf-themed game show. And for that we’ll need contestants! Three of them, to be specific. To apply, you’ll need the following…
- Availability from 9pm-11pm GMT on Wednesday 15th February
- A reliable and half-decent internet connection
- A webcam and microphone (which can be the built in ones on your device, we don’t need anything fancy)
- Access to Discord, which is what we’ll be using for the video call
There are absolutely no prizes to be won, so what are you waiting for? If you’re interested, just email admin@ganymede.tv with the subject line “Clochebusters” and we’ll take it from there. (Note for foreigners and young people, this is what we’re ~~ripping off~~ lovingly homaging.) See you in two weeks. And you’ll see us too…
We must admit, all our efforts are currently focused on preparing for our epic 35th anniversary spectacular, details of which will be revealed when the Coral Canvass closes on 1st February. (Have you voted yet? Go and vote!) So it’s time to dust off an old favourite strand in order to ensure there’s at least one update in January. What do you mean it’s been nearly a year since the last G&TV? Can’t be, it says here it’s a regular look at Red Dwarf related archival treats. Ahem.
Anyway, this “month’s” curiosity is a programme that I’ve only recently become aware of, but would no doubt have been one of my all time favourites had it aired ten or fifteen years earlier. Running for just thirteen episodes in 2007, Chute! was a CBBC show set in a rubbish tip at Television Centre, in which presenter Ross Lee is trapped with only thousands of discarded video tapes for company. Although despite Ross being apparently unable to escape, he’s frequently joined by other characters and personalities from the CBBC stable, including on one occasion Lenny Bicknall from MI High, as played by one Daniel Jonathan-Julians.
So – set in BBC Television Centre, packed to the rafters with interesting clips from the archives, and featuring fourth-wall-bending cameos from characters from other shows? Yeah, I would have bloody loved this show when I was a kid; it seems precision engineered to appeal to and encourage any fledgling telly nerds who are starting to think more about how television is made and becoming interested in its history as a medium.
Of course, the presenter might not be exactly to the tastes of a present day fully grown telly nerd, combining as he does the aesthetic and mannerisms of contemporary Russell Brand with the voice of Jimmy Savile. On a semi-related side-note, it’s a retrospectively unfortunate choice in the opening titles to have the “star” appearing in front of a load of kids wearing only a dressing gown be a white-haired, bearded, bespectacled painter.
Still, Danny is very good in this, clearly in his element as a veteran of kids’ shows Maid Marian and The Storymakers, as well as MI High. The conceit is that he’s come to the dump to recover a tape containing top secret evil plans for world domination, but is hindered by both the stupidity of Ross and the machinations of a third character, which seems to be either the camera person or the viewer themselves. The fourth wall has been well and truly knocked through into an open plan shared living space.
The meat of the show is in the archive clips, which range from classic comedy moments (the YouTube uploader notes that clips from Little Britain and The Goodies had to be removed due to Content ID), to out-takes/things going wrong on live telly, to repurposed footage with new voiceovers, to spoof news items. It clearly shares at least some DNA with the legendary Christmas Tapes of old; extremely naughty compilations put together by broadcasters’ in-house VT teams to be played at Christmas parties, and most definitely not intended for public consumption.
Chute! is an exercise in taking that same anarchic spirit and filtering it until it’s suitable for kids’ TV. And that’s not a criticism – it still taps in to the sense that there’s something excitingly naughty about peeking behind the curtain of how television is made, which is very appealing to those of a certain mindset. I very much hope that it captured the imagination of its impressionable viewers of 15-odd years ago, and that many of them are now among the new generation of television obsessives like me.
Hello everyone…
Much of my time at the moment is taken up with travelling all over the internet to promote The Coral Canvass, and quite frankly, I am really enjoying it. It’s great to see everyone voting, and it marks our first poll where you rate each episode out of ten instead of listing them all in order. I very much look forward to seeing more votes come in over the coming month.
Away from the happy, positive world of anniversary polls, you may have noticed that, as far as the ‘Red Dwarf’ picture is concerned, the legal battle for GNP continues to bore, while our incompetent (by design) production company is as usual hellbent on suing each other instead of making new episodes. This situation looks set to continue as the Grantists now have their man in place, a person utterly and totally suited to pushing on with the new world order’s so called ‘buttski’ programme to enslave humanity under never-ending spin-offs. Look, I know many of you must be thinking ‘Blimey, G&T has lost it big time!’, but believe me, once you can see it, you can’t unsee it! All rather worrying frankly…
Right, enough of that! But we must admit that things for Red Dwarf are looking as bleak as Chris Barrie’s YouTube history. It’s been a year of bugger all news. The only things we’ve covered have been tangentially related, such as The Nether Regions airing, Rob Paul and Ed doing a YouTube thing, and Grant Naylor’s early sitcom Wrinkles being repeated for the first time. It’s at this point that we’d normally turn to TOS to link to all of their news that we failed to cover, but, well…
Yeah, the biggest news story of the year was that after 21 years and 4 months, the weekly updates on reddwarf.co.uk ended on 25th February, and the site went offline soon afterwards. The good news is it returned in June, albeit as a static archive with no plans for regular updates. It’s been back for half a year, and while we’re grateful that the majority of its content is preserved, it’s a little frustrating that none of the many broken bits have been fixed in the last six months. Poor old Geek Chase, it deserved better than this. It’s a sad state of affairs, not least for what it indicates about the state of the property. The whole thing’s in mothballs, at least until the legal kerfuffle is over, and nobody knows how long that will take – there have been no updates on that since February 2021.
Still, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you? Or at the very least delve deeper and deeper into rabbit hole of Red Dwarf miscellany in an attempt to fill the void with interesting things to talk about. That’s what we’ve been largely concerning ourselves with in 2022, with our DwarfCasts continuing apace. Fewer this year than the last couple of lockdown-flavoured years, but still way more than we averaged before we started using them as group therapy sessions. This year saw the launch of two particularly nostalgic strands – The Smegazine Rack and Re-Disc-Overy – and they both have a loooong way to go before they’re complete.
In the wider world of internet culture, one of the biggest trends of the year was daily puzzle games that hook you in with streaks to beat and encourage you to share your results on social media. We capitalised on this trend with the launch of Smegle, a very fun and satisfying game, loosely based on the popular game show Catch Phrase, whereby Red Dwarf screenshots are revealed bit by bit until you identify the episode. Well, it was fun and satisfying until a couple of days ago when I lost my 146 day streak to a picture of Lister that I’d narrowed down to one of two episodes with only one guess left. Bastards.
In terms of our written features, it was an unusual year in that the best ones weren’t written by us, but provided by lovely members of our community – Dave with an analysis of class in Red Dwarf, and Flap Jack on the differences between versions of the novels and their abridged audiobooks. These were brilliant, and we welcome the development of our loyal readers slash listeners doing our work for us, so do get in touch if you have anything to get off your chest and we don’t hate you.
We did do a few bits ourselves, mind – a history of Red Dwarf on Mastermind, an hilarious April Fools about Big Finish doing Dwarf audios, and a back-slapping celebration of ourselves for our mind-boggling 20th anniversary. And in between updates, there was plenty of laughs to be had on our Forum which had another bumper year, with highlights including the meme thread, the daily Smegle chronicles, weekly threads for refreshing one’s memory ahead of the poll, and the ongoing drama over Chris Barrie’s website, incorporating a quest for sexy details.
Finally, as always seems to be the case these days, there was some very sad news to report too, as the world lost Philip J Reed, prolific writer, blogger, ALF archivist and former G&T team member. For someone that I never met, I’m only just realising what a big presence he was in my life, and I miss him terribly. I also miss Seb Patrick of course, and one of the highlights of my year personally was finally getting up to Liverpool for a celebration of his life, and to capture bits of it for posterity in DwarfCast form.
And so we look to the future, and in particular Red Dwarf‘s 35th anniversary. You have until the end of January to get your votes in for the Coral Canvass – we’ve already had more submissions than we got for the Silver Survey ten years ago, with a full month still to go. And make sure you keep Wednesday 15th February free – not only will we be publishing the results of the poll in the morning, but we’ll be going live in the evening for our quinquennial anniversary DwarfCast, which will be bigger and more ambitious than ever before.
We didn’t get as much done as we wanted to in 2022, but we’ll be doing our damnedest to catch up in 2023. Even after 20 years, pissing about with G&T is still my absolute favourite pastime, and I’d like to take this opportunity to once again thank Danny and Cappsy for being my brothers in bollocks, and to our wonderful community for making it such an utter joy. Happy New Year to you all, and here’s to another twelve months of wringing every last drop of entertainment from Red Dwarf‘s still-twitching corpse. Hurrah!
It will hardly have escaped anyone’s attention that 2023 is Red Dwarf‘s 35th anniversary year. And as tradition dictates, every five years we gather as many fans as possible, from every corner of the internet, to construct the ultimate ranking of each and every episode, and determine once and for all that the winner is Back To Reality again. 2013 was the Silver Survey. 2018 was the Pearl Poll. And now, 2023 is the year of the Coral Canvass.
But hold your horses, G&T regulars, because we’re doing things a little differently this time. We’ve previously always asked people for a big list of episodes ordered from best to worst, but we ran into a problem last time round, in that for whatever reason, not everybody included the most recent series in their rankings. This resulted in several submissions that had Twentica to Skipper as the bottom twelve, in broadcast order, which we don’t think affected the overall rankings, but certainly skewed the scores. Also, while putting together and tinkering with a huge list is an ideal way to spend an afternoon for the likes of us, it’s no doubt too daunting a task for many fans.
And so, we’re simplifying the process this year – we just want you to give every episode a mark out of ten. If you haven’t seen an episode enough times to make a judgement on it, just leave it blank. We’ll take an average of all the scores submitted for each ep, and then we’ll have our golden figure. Bear in mind that you’re judging these episodes against each other, rather than against other comedies or television in general. So even though Dwarf is your favourite programme, not every episode will be a 10 out of 10 – save that for your all time besties, and don’t be afraid to give your all time worsties a 1 or a 2.
We think this is a good solution that will make the poll as inclusive as possible for all Red Dwarf fans, but also give a fairer evaluation for the Dave era. And if we don’t like the way it works out, we’ll switch back for the 40th anniversary. Who celebrates a 35th anniversary anyway? It’s rubbish.
So go and vote vote vote! It’s fairly straightforward. Just select your rating for each episode from the dropdown. Any you don’t want to score, leave blank. If for some reason you need a reminder of which episode is which, tap or click on it for a synopsis, a Smega-Drive powered random image and a link to the pertinent Refresh For The Memory forum thread. Your entries will be automatically saved, and you won’t even need to submit – you can tweak your ratings up to the last minute should you wish, and it’ll automatically lock them in when the vote closes.
We’ll need an email address to help prevent spam and duplicate submissions; we won’t use your data in any way whatsoever, other than to send you a link that will allow you to transfer your progress to a different device if needed. There are optional demographic type questions to answer too, for use in the big write-up.
If there are any technical issues you come across, please let us know in the comments or via email. The Coral Canvass closes at one minute past midnight on Wednesday 1st February 2023, and the results will be out two weeks later on Wednesday 15th February 2023, appropriately enough. VOTE.
This is a most unusual DwarfCast following a most unusual weekend for your intrepid G&T team. The three of us gathered together in the same place for this first and only time this year, and that place was Liverpool. The reason? Seb Patrick's 40th birthday, and we weren't going to let the small detail that he himself has passed on stop us from celebrating.
We wanted to share the festivities with some of the people who knew Seb, be they friends, family or just those who knew him through his work, in the Red Dwarf community and beyond. So join us for a somewhat experimental travelogue, taking in Danny's first ever football experience, a trip to a certain Liverpudlian pub, a game of pool on a very important table and our first visit to Seb's memorial bench at Crosby Beach. We promised to record a DwarfCast there if the petition was successful, and thanks to your help, it was.… Read More
Previously on G&T: Regular reader Flap Jack put us all to shame with his incredibly detailed examination of the changes between hardback, paperback,Omnibus and unabridged audiobook versions of the fourRed Dwarf novels. Now he's back to finish the job, with an examination of the abridged audiobooks.
Imagine: it’s 1993, and you’re excitedly rushing home after picking up a copy of the newly released Red Dwarf Series 1 VHS. You heat yourself up a bowl of alphabetti spaghetti, grab a Leopard Lager from the fridge, and start up the tape to watch The End. But part way through, you start to realise something’s wrong. What happened to the subplot about Rimmer’s exam? Wasn’t there a scene where you see Lister with Frankenstein before he gets in trouble with the Captain? What’s going on? You double check the VHS sleeve, and realise to your horror that it doesn’t say “Series I Byte One” but “Series I Abridged”! You try to scream, but discover your mouth is sealed shut. You run to the door, but behind it is just a brick wall. You look back at the alphabetti spaghetti: all ampersands.… Read More
I bring very exciting news. You know Wrinkles? The radio sitcom written by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, which ran for two series in 1980 and 1981? The one that starred Ballard Berkeley from Fawlty Towers and David Ross from Kryten, White Holeand Mechocracy? The one that is missing from the archives and has never been repeated in the four decades since it was originally broadcast?
Well, it's being repeated on BBC Radio 4 Extra on Thursdays at 10:30pm.… Read More
The first Red Dwarf DVD was released twenty years ago today. Yes, we regret to inform you that you're old. The fourth of November 2002 is a date indelibly printed on the brains of fans who spent months being teased and tantalised into a frenzy. Kids today with your YouTubes and your Netflixes and your Ministry of Sound may not appreciate just how big of a deal it was for Dwarf to join the digital revolution in such a wholehearted way, so gather round and listen to your Uncles Cappsy, Danny and Ian as we kick off a new series of DwarfCast retrospectives.
For each edition of Re-Disc-overy, we're going to be sharing our memories of each DVD release, looking back on the media and fandom landscapes of the time, and of course revisiting and reassessing the many, many special features. Plus, we've picked out one extra per series to receive the commentary treatment, and this time it could only be Launching Red Dwarf. So get that lovely red box off your shelf, remove the dust from your ageing DVD player and join us as we discuss Red Dwarf's greatest unsung hero, unicycling jugglers, embarrassing Dimension Jump memories, the glory of Woolworths and much much more.… Read More
Hello hello and welcome back onto the rack. In a shock twist that even we didn't expect, we've actually come good on our promise to start up our regular DwarfCasting routine again. This time Cappsy, Danny and Ian are going page by page through Issue 6 of the Smegazine, which gives them plenty of opportunity to be all smug and self regarding about those early 90s idiots and their casual ableism and homophobia. Hurrah!… Read More
In the latest example of our readers being better than us at writing articles these days, we're proud to present an extremely niche but very important missive from Flap Jack. Ever since recording the Book Club, we've wanted to catalogue all the changes made within the various releases of the Red Dwarf novels. In a beautiful piece of synchronicity, old Flappo Jacko got in touch a few weeks ago having done exactly that. This is the first of two articles investigating the amendments to those sacred texts. Red Dwarf is no stranger to having its episodes tweaked with over time. From smaller changes like the word “week’s” being omitted from the opening of Polymorph on VHS, to the huge reworks made for the controversial Red Dwarf Remastered project, you can never be absolutely sure that your favourite moments will be unaltered whenever the show is released onto a new format.
But there’s one corner of the Dwarf canon where this phenomenon has so far only experienced surface-level scrutiny: the novels. If you’ve ever read Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers on paperback and then later re-experienced it on audiobook - or in the Omnibus edition with its sequel, Better Than Life - you’ll probably have noticed that a few things here and there aren’t quite the same. How many details were changed from version to version, exactly, and what were they? Today, let’s find the answers, piece by piece.… Read More
In my own personal and humble opinion, Red Dwarf fans are very lucky to have something like the US pilots. The mystery and excitement of them during the 90s and the black market in increasingly terrible copies are a defining part of many of our fandoms. Despite the fact we've still been unable to source a decent quality copy of either pilots, the time has come for Ian, Danny and Cappsy to commentate on these pilots 30 years after they were ill-conceived.… Read More
- Tony Blair is Prime Minister. The Fellowship of the Ring wins four Oscars. Atomic Kitten's cover of The Tide Is High is Britain's best selling single. And on a free web-hosting provider, a brand new website starts. A website that features Red Dwarf, but is regularly updated. A website full of opinions, but with no justifications. A website that has already been started and abandoned three times by its teenage creator, and then almost scuppered by a part time job, but which finally hits the internet on the 14th September 2002, the date on which pedantry goes beyond the final frontier. The website is Ganymede & Titan, and tonight we salute the inexplicably still active site and its tedious crew.… Read More
Surprise! We didn't plan to have a summer break, but a summer break we indeed have had in order to recharge our batteries and hide from the dreaded Burnout Monster. We've got a bit of editing catchup to do, though, so we're breaking with tradition and giving you another Smegazine Rack today while editing on the Red Dwarf USA episode is finished (well, started).
Grab your complementary copy of the mag here.… Read More
I’m sorry everyone, but this is a bad one. Over the last week we have lost Phil Reed, our friend and former writer on Noise to Signal, Observation Dome and here on G&T. In Memory Of Philip J Reed, Writer And Nintendo Life Contributor https://t.co/Eztp9BNe1y #News #SiteNews #InMemoriam pic.twitter.com/eZVFkAqRRH — Nintendo Life (@nintendolife) August 10,… Read More
It's a rare, nay freak occurrence for us to publish guest articles, but when Dave Wallace got in touch with this effort, we made an exception for three reasons. 1) Dave is a long-standing and very funny member of the community, and it's the community that continues to make G&T worth visiting; 2) We're in one of our shit phases for written content at the moment; 3) It's really bloody good. Enjoy Dave's musings on one ofRed Dwarf's most important but lesser documented themes. Red Dwarf is a sitcom about a lot of things – space, science, weird cosmic phenomena, and the consequences of having a three-million-year old bum, a creature evolved from a cat and a hologram simulation of a long-dead jobsworth as the only sentient beings left in existence.
But strip away its sci-fi trappings, and at the heart of the show is a concept that’s as universal as it is timeless: class.… Read More
GOOD NEWS! TOS is back online!
BAD NEWS! After 20 years, the weekly updates are being fucked off.… Read More
It seems a lot has happened since our last episode of The Smegazine Rack. We've launched and re-launched our incredibly original game Smegle and... well, that's about all that has happened, hasn't it? Yes, yes, definitely. Anyway please join your incompetent (by design) hosts, Ian, Danny and Cappsy as they climb up into the cab, fire up the slumbering beast and crack on... with the job of reading through every episode of the Smegazine.… Read More
If you're reading this then there's a decent chance that at some point in your childhood or early adulthood you sat down on a Friday night and enjoyed the feast of mechanical violence that was Robot Wars. For older Millennials and young Gen Xers watching this show went hand in hand with being a Red Dwarf fan, not least because the host was, from series 2 onwards, Craig Charles himself. And it's for that reason Robot Wars qualifies for our series of 'Dwarf-adjacent' commentaries as we seize with both hands the opportunity to talk at length about a show very dear to our hearts for... quite a long time.… Read More
Well, since we’re all in the mood for rebirths, Smegle’s having a little bit of relaunch today. The original version was all well and good but it was guilty of being a tad on the easy side, and so we’ve had our finest minds working hard to firstly work out how to make guessing harder… Read More
Ain't no joke, it's plain to see. Smegle's here for you and me.
When we launched The Smega-Drive it was obvious that having such a huge archive of categorised screenshots from the show would end up being useful in many other ways, we just weren't exactly sure what they were. Well, since then some lucky bastard invented Wordle, which ended up being the next big thing in the world of online word games. Since then everyone and their mum (especially your mum) have been clamouring to copy its format (which is easy) and its success (which is not easy).
So, why shouldn't we be any different? Well, we have no clear monetisation strategy but one out of two ain't bad...… Read More
Rob Grant's buttski has finally borne fruit. It was announced this morning via a long-awaited TOS update and a tweet from Big Finish themselves that a deal has been struck for the company famed for their audio revivals of Doctor Who, Torchwood, Blake's 7, The Avengers and more to add Red Dwarf to their stable. They will produce three full-cast audio dramas per month on both CD and download, featuring dynamic sound design, original music and specially commissioned artwork.
Due to the ongoing legal situation currently engulfing the show, the rights to produce original new material featuring the characters of Rimmer, Lister, Cat and Kryten are not available to Big Finish, so instead they'll be focussing on stories from Red Dwarf's expanded universe, building new worlds and concepts based on those in the background of the show itself.… Read More
Come, rest your tired ears on our giant rack. As sure as 2 follows 1, so it is that 3 follows 2 and Ian, Danny and Cappsy have a good read of the third Smegazine issue. Also featured: Badge talk! The End end! Danny vs Cappsy quiz! Caption competition results! Letters! Slander!… Read More
In a small break from our regularly scheduled programming (and while we figure out what commentary we want to do next) we've put together another tottering stack of waffles for you you cram into your eager maws. Just how much of this episode is devoted to talking about cats? Who will Danny impersonate this time? Will Cappsy be hearing from the RSPCA's lawyers? Find out!… Read More
Name? Ganymede & Titan.
Occupation? Tedious Red Dwarf fansite.
And your specialist subject? Occasions on which Red Dwarf has been a specialist subject on the long-running BBC quiz show Mastermind.
Jason Smegley (admin of the only decent Red Dwarf Facebook group, and of the well-worth-following On This Day in Red Dwarf Twitter account) recently uploaded a lovely couple of videos to YouTube, of the two most recent times that questions about our favourite show have been directed towards someone in a big black chair. They in turn reminded us of two previous times Red Dwarf featured as a specialist subject, so with a sense of approaching menace, let's run through them all in chronological order...… Read More
It's time to get back on the rack (get used to that one, because we might have to use it every episode) as Ian, Cappsy and Danny continue trawling through the sticky pages of the Smegazine and, as tradition dictates, Issue #2 follows Issue #1... so here we are.
Before you press play, be sure to have the issue in front of you in your PDF viewer of choice so you at least have a slight chance of knowing what the actual balls we're talking about.… Read More
Carrotists assemble, for it is time to travel back to the time of violent revolution, flamboyant trousers, Le Pimpernel Scarlet and very suspicious sausages as DwarfCasts continue its series of 'Dwarf adjacent commentaries' with the classic episode of Blackadder the Third, Nob and Nobility. We also take the opportunity to talk at length about our love for the show while answering your Bladder specific waffles.… Read More
Just a quick one to inform you that everyone’s favourite trio of loquacious lockdown live-streamers are back at it tonight. Rob Grant, Paul Jackson and Ed Bye are taking part in a live Red Dwarf themed Q&A and quiz on YouTube at 7pm GMT tonight. Hosted by Kevin Durham, the event is in aid of Richard’s… Read More
Ok everyone, put on your baseball caps on backwards, wear clashing colours, like Morrissey, ‘pop’ an ‘e’, sing Barcelona, be surprised at Denmark winning the Euros, experience the same dates on the same days as you will in 2020 and correctly believe Sonic to be superior to Mario because we’re going back to 1992! In the first of what will be… checks… a lot of fucking DwarfCasts we’re going through every issue of the Smegazine one by one, until we be done. Ian’s read them all exhaustively over the years, and for whatever reason Danny and Cappsy… haven’t. What’s going to happen??
First up, it’s issue 1! Cast your mind back to a time before Flibble and Dibbley and grab the issue here, to peruse before or while you listen.
DwarfCast 147 – The Smegazine Rack – Issue #1 (99.7MB)
As mentioned we also require your valued input for the next episode. First of all, we ask you to remain in your 1992 mindset and pretend the following image is entirely new to you. In this state of confusion and rage, please submit to us your best caption in the comments.
Not only that, but each episode we’ll be taking your reader letters so please dust off your green pens and mail them to PO BOX The Comments Below.
Show notes * SMEGAZINE. GET YOUR SMEGAZINE HERE. * Chris Barrie did not in fact return to Spitting Image after the 1991 series. * Kevin Keegan has been to space. * The asbestos Millennium Falcon buried at Elstree Studios is seemingly just a rumour, sadly.
In a blaze of absolutely bugger all publicity, we’re excited to note that the first full series of The Nether Regions starts tonight at 11pm on BBC Radio 4. Written by Rob Grant and Andrew Marshall of Quanderhorn fame (and I believe they may have had some involvement in other sitcoms too), it’s a sketch show in the form of a Twilight Zone spoof, which is not only penned by everyone’s favourite relatively-new-comedy-writing-partnership-comprised-of-people-previously-associated-with-other-writing-partnerships, but stars them too, alongside Helen Cripps, Edward Rowett and Holly Morgan. And as per Quanderhorn, it’s produced by Hudzen 10 himself, the brilliant Gordon Kennedy.
If you missed the pilot way back in 2019, or need a refresher given that it’s been approximately eighteen years since the heady days of 2019, it’s been archived here. And don’t worry if you’re not awake and in the vicinity of a wireless during the prime time transmission slot tonight, as it will be available on BBC Sounds or the show’s BBC programmes page immediately after broadcast. And when you’ve listened, let us know what you reckon on this very thread, which will serve as your Let’s Talk About for the whole four-episode series.
This time last year, we were cautiously optimistic that 2021 might just be a bit better than 2020 for the world at large, but reflected on what was a bumper year for Red Dwarf content. As it transpired, it didn’t feel like a particularly vintage year in the end, and in Dwarf terms it was something of annus horribilis for the small rouge one. There were however some highlights along the way, and also a hell of a lot of G&T content to hopefully provide a small distraction from the continuing downfall of humanity, and so let us take our customary look back on the last twelve months, once again sorted topic-by-topic.
And unfortunately we have to start with the biggest news story of the year, which was the shambolic, worrying and at times downright embarrassing legal kerfuffle that engulfed Grant Naylor Productions. We learned in February that Doug Naylor is pursuing a high court claim against the directors of GNP over his removal from the company’s board, along with over £160K’s worth of unpaid invoices. A few days later, two of those directors, Rob Grant and Paul Jackson, issued a response disputing some of the claims in the report, and reassuring fans that everyone involved wants the show to continue, and that Doug’s involvement is guaranteed.
It was all a big old confusing mess, and that confusion remains in place. There’s been no sign of the proposed court action, and all parties have maintained radio silence on the matter for the last ten and a bit months. We’re not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing – we could all do with any further dirty laundry remaining private, but we also all want the matter to be resolved. Red Dwarf currently exists in limbo, with any future projects presumably unable to move forward while all this remains in the air. We kind of want to know what’s going on now, either way.
On the plus side, Rob and Paul’s statement came during one of the big highlights of the year: Holly Hop, TORDFC’s interim online convention. With a huge timetable of events for the ridiculously cheap price of £9 for both days, the slick and relentless stream of entertainment was a huge success, so much so that we really hope the Fan Club consider staging future online events regardless of whether or not anyone’s allowed to leave their house. There were Q&As aplenty, features on cosplay, Lego and artwork, a big old quiz, and the final (to date) instalment of Quarantine Commentaries from Rob, Paul and Ed Bye – the one aspect of 2020 that we’re disappointed hasn’t remained part of our lives, although it’s understandable considering they’ve now covered every episode that all three of them worked on.
But the main feature was undoubtedly Into The Gloop, a brand new, original Red Dwarf script written by Rob Grant, which still feels weird and exciting to type. With a cast of fans reading it through, we were presented with an alternative conclusion to Out of Time‘s cliffhanger, which embraced the characters’ somewhat different appearances, killed them all off for good, but established a multiverse theory which cheekily leaves the door open for further Rob Dwarf without diminishing Doug Dwarf. Well, one can dream. The script is available to read on TOS, and we have a DwarfCast covering our opinions on it and, well, everything we’ve recapped so far, as it happens.
While it’s true that almost everything of note in the Red Dwarf world this year happened by the middle of February, there were a handful of rumblings regarding potential new projects, each of which was mentioned once and then never again. Holly Hop introduced us to the concept of Rob Grant’s buttski, from which he intends to fire out numerous yet-to-be-specified spin-offs and specials. He even mentioned a possible new American version at one point, although we can’t be sure he didn’t just drop that one in to mess with us.
Meanwhile, Doug used a video message at Dimension Jump (more of which imminently) to tease all manner of new content including, ordered from least to most surprising: a new Red Dwarf special, the oft-discussed stage show finally happening, a new Doug-penned sci-fi comedy drama, and a 90-minute film called Out of the Red, starring the Dwarf cast as themselves getting involved in a worldwide conspiracy. It seems Doug’s buttski is just as jam-packed as Rob’s at this stage, and bookmakers are currently taking bets on how many of these ideas will ever actually come to fruition. The smart money’s on zero.
But still, Dimension Jump XXI happened, at long last, and it was a much needed tonic for the lucky attendees following the extended gap between conventions, and indeed the reason behind it. As well as the chance to spend time with fellow fans and, you know, just get out of the house for a bit, the most memorable moments involved special not-very-secret guest Johnny Vegas completely taking over the Friday night, Lee Cornes making a long-awaited return and being his usual amiable and amusing self, an extraordinarily high standard in the costume competition, and Rob and Paul giving an annotated guide to 80s comedy. Our traditional Sunday night DwarfCast covers all this and more, plus we tweeted lots of pictures and quotes and stuff.
On to the miscellaneous bits of news now, and May saw the Red Dwarf community coming together once more to help out two worthy causes, with a fundraiser for artist Colin Howard to get a swanky new wheelchair and a petition for Seb Patrick to get a memorial bench overlooking his favourite spot both concluding in success. Very sadly, we lost Officer Rimmer guest star Stephen Critchlow this year, at a tragically young age. Our thoughts remain with his friends and family.
In terms of things that we were too incompetent or lazy to cover, here’s a quick round-up: a new series of Rob Grant and Andrew Marshall’s radio sketch show The Nether Regions was recorded to air in 2022; he and Paul’s Lockdown Theatre put on two events, one football themed and one Strictly themed; Craig hosted new quiz show Moneybags on Channel 4, which at one point featured a Dwarfy question; Cliché was repeated on BBC Radio 4 Extra; and sadly, Laredo, the cowboy town that provided the location for Gunmen of the Apocalypse, burned down. There’s a fundraiser to restore it that’s still open. Oh, and Craig mentioned in an interview that more Red Dwarf is on its way, but considering an incredibly similar quote appeared roughly this time last year, we’ve long since stopped bothering to catalogue those.
But never mind that tot, let’s talk about ourselves, and all the brilliant stuff we’ve done this year. Joking aside, we are actually pretty proud of our big new service The Smega-Drive, which launched in November. We’ve always thought there ought to be a dedicated Red Dwarf quote/meme/gif generator online, and the fact that we were the ones to get off our arses and do it came as a surprise even to me, given that Cappsy and Danny went off and developed it in secret before casually presenting me with a working beta one evening. What we love most about this is seeing it being used out in the wild, and naturally the creativity and hilarity of our G&T regulars has been the big highlight. It’s come in handy for memes, quote randomising, and of course the all time number one – slagging off Series VIII. We even built a Twitter bot to fire out random stills, often with amusing results.
Aside from that, the bulk of our creativity has been ploughed into a great number of DwarfCasts, which has been dangerously close to having a regular and reliable schedule at times, although we did tail off a little towards the end of the year. But fear not, as talking to my two favourite cunts in the entire world for a few hours every other weekend has been what kept me sane during the last two abysmal years, so we’ll be right back on it in 2022, regardless of whether anyone is actually listening.
This year saw us reach the end of two mammoth projects, one lasting around fifteen months, the other around fifteen years. The DwarfCast Book Club covered two very different solo-written novels, eliciting very different responses from podcasters and listeners-slash-readers alike, in Last Human and Backwards. And, remarkably, we finally finished our series of episode commentaries for all ~~52~~ ~~55~~ ~~61~~ ~~67~~ ~~73~~ 74 episodes of the show, with Series XII and The Promised Land completing the set.
But as those strands came to an end, more came up to take their place, like those skellingtons from Jason and the Argonauts. There were a couple of Wafflemen specials, the latter of which marking the first time the three of us were all in the same room since 2018. We also trialled the first of our “Dwarf adjacent” commentaries on an episode of The Young Ones, with more to follow in the new year, plus of course the launch of the Smegazine Rack, doing for the mid-90s magazine what Book Club did for the novels.
Another somewhat unpredicted development was our foray into crossword setting. The first was very difficult, the second somewhat easier, and we have a massive pile of clues from across the difficulty spectrum lined up for future grids. And finally, our old faithful G&TV feature spluttered on, with Dwarf-flavoured archival treats from All Star Squares, We Need Answers, Up Yer Festival (which achieved the dubious honour of being the first G&TV video to be expunged from YouTube), GamesMaster and Big Break. But the highlight was finally uncovering Norman Lovett’s appearance in character as Holly on Tomorrow’s World from 1999, a curious Red Dwarf rarity that hadn’t previously made it into the online era.
And so with another year over, we look to the future, and in Red Dwarf terms, that’s a massive unknowable conundrum. As we said, our firm hope is that we get some news about the legal situation, preferably that news being that everything’s fine now and we enter a new golden era of everyone’s buttski spewing forth with gay abandon. Or if it really is all over for good, we’d rather just know that for sure rather than having to hope and speculate from now until the end of time.
Either way, G&T will be here for what is unbelievably our 20th anniversary year. I expect we’ll be marking that in some way, and we’ve got absolutely tonnes of ideas for exciting content, if only we can find the time to actually do them. As such we’re not going to make any promises, but we can drop some hints. Whatever you want, we’ve got it covered, so book some time in for us to guide you through 2022.
A huge thank you to all those who have made this place all the better with your comments this year – we’ve said it before, but our community is the best it’s ever been at the moment – and a very Happy New Year to all our listeners-slash-readers.
It’s that special time of year again, and what could be more Christmassy than a snooker themed game show hosted by a racist? Yes, it’s Big Break, a cracking Saturday night format with a banger of a theme tune (written by Mike Batt and performed by Captain Sensible), memorable catchphrases and engaging gameplay, but unfortunately difficult to enjoy these days if you’re not a young 1990s child, blissfully ignorant of the many, many flaws of its presenter. Luckily, the 1994 celebrity special has a little something extra to hold the modern day Red Dwarf fan’s interest – Craig “Cinzano Bianco” Charles.
Annoyingly, the YouTube video has embedding disabled, but you can click on this attractive picture of Tweedledee, Tweedledum and Tweedletwat:
That, incidentally, is the closest Jim Davidson has ever stood to a Black person.
The main comedy value in the episode, unsurprisingly, comes from the attempts to play snooker in amusing oversized costumes, and the Alice in Wonderland theme epitomises the inherent weirdness that permeates so much 1990s light entertainment in retrospect. It’s full of jokes that fall completely flat, incongruous set pieces and, somewhat unfortunately, repeated uses of a Rolf Harris song. But damn it, I stand by the assertion that this was a top notch game show format, and I’ve always enjoyed John Virgo’s deadpan style and shameless cheating. Plus, John Parrott’s cat costume was later worn by Mark Heap; it was evidently available to any BBC shows titled Big XXXXX.
One further oddity to note: at one point, Craig plugs his forthcoming book The Craig Charles Almanac of Total Knowledge 2. Now, the original masterpiece was released a year earlier in 1993, so this must have been a planned sequel which didn’t materialise – its spiritual successor, The Log, was eventually published in 1997. Plus, it’s confusing to note that this special aired in December 1994, after Craig had been arrested and remanded in July 1994, but before he was acquitted of all charges in March 1995. It seems inconceivable that a major broadcaster would put out a prime time programme featuring someone in that situation nowadays, but I guess 27 years ago was somehow a very different time.
On a more festive note, we’d like to take this opportunity to wish all our listeners slash readers a very Merry Christmas. We’ll be back with our customary review of the last twelve months on New Years Eve.
A few weeks ago we put out an experimental crossword to see how it would go down, and we were delighted with the response. 241 people gave it their best shot and 66 of them completed it which, given some of the clues drew some ire, are pretty good numbers. So, we’re back with another quick crossword in a similar style with a UK inspired layout and non-cryptic clues more in the style of the New York Times. Have fun, and don’t forget to let us know your final time and scores as we predict a few more people will be able to complete this one.
The G&T Quick Crossword #2
Once in every lifetime,
Comes a ‘Cast like this,
Oh, we need you and you need us,
Oh my darlings can’t you watch The Young Ones along with us after the pips and then stick around afterwards for a suitably themed Waffle Men?
DwarfCast 146 – The Young Ones: Interesting – Commentary (86.2MB)
We hope you enjoy this little diversion away from mainline Dwarf content as we certainly enjoyed recording it and we’ll hopefully be continuing the trend with other Dwarf-adjacent commentaries, at least for a little bit. And on that note, out next commentary is recording this weekend and will be for an episode of Blackadder The Third, namely Nob and Nobility. As always we will require your waffles on the episode and on Blackadder as a whole so you have our express permission to use the comments thread on this post for that purpose.
Show notes * Adam Buxton’s ramble chat with Charlie Brooker * Alexei Sayle’s Imaginary Sandwich Bar * Man ejaculated out of anus and urinated faeces for two years. More at 10. * The Two Ninnies * CORRECTION: Smith and Jones were in the first series proper of Not The Nine O’Clock News; Ian was thinking of the aborted attempt at a series that was scuppered by a general election being called, which featured only Rowan Atkinson of the later-established cast. * Neil’s Heavy Concept Album on Spotify * Oh, No! Not THEM! title sequence
A few years ago an enthusiastic young fan of the site called Seb Patrick laid a challenge at our door. “Why”, he scoused, “doesn’t Red Dwarf have a meme generator website similar to the brilliant Frinkiac and Morbotron?”. That was definitely exactly what he said. And, I’m sad to say, we immediately dismissed the idea as essentially impossible. The thought of the logistics of the image processing, the indexing, the matching up with subtitles and the website build itself made us feel immensely sleepy. But, as the old quote goes… we may not be fast but we get there in the end.
So, 1,625,543 frames and 32,498 subtitles have been smashed together into what might be the most important website on the entire Internet and we are now incredibly proud to present to you, and the world…
The Smega-Drive Want to know more? Then read on.
So, it works like this. We’ve based the indexing and the search system on the subtitles from the DVDs / Blu-Rays, so you can search for a quote (or a small part of a quote) and with any luck you will find the subtitle screen you need, along with previews of frames that that subtitle covers. Select one of the frames to enter its ‘Meme Lab’, where in you can either edit the caption and download your meme, select a more suitable frame from the timeline, or use the arrow buttons to refine the timeline and convert it into an animated GIF. In addition to the subtitle search there are two random buttons, of which we strongly encourage the use.
It’s worth pointing out at this point that the refinement of this system is an ongoing process. For example, the subtitles themselves contain some abridgements (not to the mention the genuinely shameful state of the subtitles for the later series. God help you if you actually need them to enjoy the episode) and the process we’ve used to extract them also comes with some errors, so we’re currently manually combing through these until they are complete and pristine, at which point we’ll probably put up the completed subtitle files for download. We’ll also be building on and improving the search system to help you find the scenes you need as easily as possible, as it is a tad on the crude side at the moment. If all else fails, then you can click on an episode title to view all of its subtitles, or use the episode browser link in the footer.
So, go forth and meme! Give us a shout at smegadrive@ganymede.tv if you spot any bugs or particularly egregious subtitle errors, or if you just have any general feedback for us to improve the system in the future. While you’re at it, giving @RedDwarfShuffle on Twitter a follow will almost certainly enrich your day.
Over the last 18 months of fuckery a lot of people have turned to puzzles to occupy their minds, as evidenced by the high popularity of YouTube channels like Cracking the Cryptic. So, we thought why not have a stab at creating our own Red Dwarf crosswords and pit you all against each other?
My personal preference is for kinder puzzles such as the Guardian Quick and the New York Times crosswords, and so our first attempt at constructing has been very much in their vision. Laid out in the UK style, but with clues more inspired by the NYT, I think what we’ve ended up is something that is quite tough but should also be fair. You can play after the jump and see how you do and let us know your times (although be careful not to spoil any answers).
I should warn you all now that Ian and Danny are more immersed in the murky, scary underworld of the Cryptic Crossword so consider that a warning for the future!
The G&T Quick Crossword #1