Series IV of Red Dwarf in 1991 saw many interesting developments. For a start, the show moved down south from BBC Manchester to Shepperton. For another, Grant Naylor Productions took control of the show. There’s a whole wealth of important things to write about.
So I want to talk about some fish.
You know the ones I mean. These ones, brand new for Series IV, on monitors around the ship:
Our question today: where did this footage come from? Surely it wasn’t shot specifically for Red Dwarf?
To find out, let’s go to an old standby, and check reddwarf.co.uk’s article on stock footage used in the show. And sure enough, we immediately strike gold:
“Back on the wildlife front, you might have noticed Series IV’s bunkroom monitor playing something relaxing. Usually the home of Holly, when the deranged computer wasn’t around the space was filled by a delightful bit of goldfish action. Once again a BBC archive job, the tanked fish were apparently filmed for documentary series Open Space.”
Open Space is the kind of show that the BBC don’t really make any more, at least not in the same way. Produced by the now-defunct Community Programme Unit like its predecessor Open Door, and broadcast on BBC2 between 1983 and 1995, its remit was to help the public – particularly underrepresented groups – get documentaries made and broadcast. The same unit would eventually go on to make the highly lauded Video Diaries strand.
Still, why were these fish shot for Open Space? For a title sequence, or just a one-off for a particular programme? If it’s the former, it makes the whole thing a lot easier to research. If it’s the latter, we might be in trouble.
Let’s take a quick glance at the paperwork for the first episode broadcast of Series IV of Red Dwarf, “Camille”:
Opening titles. Now we’re getting somewhere.
Time to turn to YouTube. How about this episode, from November 1985?
Nope. OK, let’s try this episode, from August 1987:
No luck yet. OK, maybe we need to get closer to the broadcast date of Red Dwarf Series IV. How about this one, from June 1990?
Bingo. They look like our little fishies.1 And it’s clear that Red Dwarf grabbed the raw footage which was used to make those titles, rather than the finished product.
Which means that, if you squint, you can see the basis of the Open Space logo swim behind Kryten and Lister in D.N.A., broadcast on the 21st January 1991.
And if that doesn’t get your blood pumping, I don’t know what will.
It’s actually difficult to nail down a specific date for the debut of these titles; the opening sequence of Open Space appears to be in flux around this time, from what I can gather from looking at the paperwork. But it would have been at some point in 1990, I believe. ↩