It’s odd, the things you assume, with absolutely zero evidence whatsoever.
Take Red Dwarf repeats, for example. Over the years I’ve written countless stupid articles about the show. But one thing I never got round to is a full list of repeats Dwarf has had over the years. So if you want that, you should read Christopher Wickham’s excellent The Red Dwarf BBC Broadcasts Guide.1
Still, one self-confessed omission from that article is anything to do with cable/satellite repeats and the like. I don’t intend to provide a full list of these, because while I might be a moron, I am not an absolute fucking moron. It seems worth asking one question, however: when was the first repeat of Red Dwarf in the UK which was not on the BBC?
Before researching this post, my massively naive guess was: around 1992. UK Gold launched on the 1st November of that year; I’d just assumed that repeats of Red Dwarf had been part of the channel from the very beginning. But then, I never had access to the channel back when it started; the first time I ever experienced the wonders of multichannel television was in the late 90s, when we got NTL analogue cable, and even then we couldn’t afford any of the extra pay channels. Instead, I whiled away my days cheating the receiver into giving me 10 minutes of free Television X. Believe me, when you’re 18, 10 minutes is all you need.
Anyway, there is a very easy way of telling when Red Dwarf was first shown on UK Gold, and it doesn’t involve doing any hard research. Just ask people on Twitter, and get them to do that hard work for you. And here is the answer from Jonathan Dent, cross-referencing the Guardian’s TV listings and this Usenet post. The repeats of Dwarf on UK Gold started with a double-bill of “The End” and “Future Echoes”, and premiered on the Sunday 5th October 1997 at 11:05pm.
That’s a bloody great day of telly, isn’t it? But I digress.
What I find especially interesting about all this is that it coincides with the 1997 resurgence of Red Dwarf, which started with the first broadcast of Series VII 10 months previously, along with the programme’s first Radio Times cover. A resurgence which I look back on with mixed feelings, to say the least – but very much part of the second wave of the show and its fandom. Being someone who got into Red Dwarf during the 1994 BBC2 repeat season, I had no idea that I was already watching the show before it got its very first non-terrestrial UK showing. These repeats are all so much later than the history I had made up entirely by myself in my own head.
Now, would it be too much to hope for that this first broadcast on UK Gold was captured by someone on video? Maybe even with the accompanying – and presumably quite excitable – continuity announcement?
A version of this post was first published on Ganymede & Titan in September 2019.
In fact, you should read his blog Ludicrously Niche regardless. TV edits, gamebook analysis, and Radio Times capsules, who could want anything more from the internet? ↩