Dwarf on Film

I used to have a brilliant little trivia question about Red Dwarf, you know. One that you could ask to really try and trip people up. It’s not perhaps one you’d bring out at polite parties with normal people, but hey, we’re all friends here. And that question is:

“What is the only footage of actual actors shot on film in Red Dwarf?”¹

The answer is perhaps not immediately obvious. Whether studio or location, the live action scenes in the show have always been shot on videotape – or from Back to Earth onwards, digital video, directly to file. There’s no “film outdoors/video indoors” look, like many sitcoms still had, even in 1988.²

Although Red Dwarf did have an equivalent. Because film was used in the show, and for “exteriors” to boot: the model shots. And mostly 35mm film, at that. The difference between the two looks is shown by this brilliant sequence from “Bodyswap” (TX: 5/12/89), which cuts between them with gay abandon.³

The above is context; it doesn’t answer my little trivia question. But model shots are part of that answer. The opening titles to Series 1 and 2 of Red Dwarf start with Lister painting the outside of the ship, and do indeed feature Craig Charles shot on film:

As detailed in the 2007 documentary The Beginning⁴, this shot didn’t go as originally planned. As the Director of Photography for the model shots explains:

PETE TYLER: The original idea was to start on Craig Charles painting the letter ‘F’; we chose the letter ‘F’ because it was a convenient shape and we could fit the rear projection screen in quite easily. The idea was you’d start on a close-up of his paintbrush, pull back to reveal him in his spacesuit…

ED BYE: …and you pull out and pull out and keep pulling out, all one shot, until you’ve got the whole spaceship. […] And it was all going to be one shot. But we couldn’t really get it to work like that.

PETE TYLER: The problem was, mixing from the letter ‘F’ on the Red Dwarf logo which was built about three feet high, we then had to match that to the letter ‘F’ on the main model which was only about two inches high, and the difference was too big. What we needed was an intermediate stage as well.

In fact, you can still see the attempted transition in the broadcast episodes. 18 seconds into the above video, watch out for the dodgy overlapping ‘F’:

As for the shot of Lister himself: it’s special in another way too. As we’ve detailed before, recordings for Series 1 of Red Dwarf were postponed by a full eight months due to an electricians’ strike. But crucially, the model work went ahead as planned around the time of the original recording dates… and that would almost certainly have included that shot of Lister in his spacesuit.

So the opening titles as broadcast feature the very earliest footage of Craig Charles as Lister ever done for the series. Filmed in early 1987, rather than late 1987. Which is the kind of thing which makes me need to go for a nice, long lie-down.

Anyway, there’s your answer. The only shot of any actual actor on film in Red Dwarf is the opening titles of the first two series. Job done.

Except that’s bollocks.

*   *   *

OK then, how about leaping ahead six years, and Series VI? Take a look at these two shots, intended for the first episode of the series, “Psirens” (TX: 7/10/93)

Don’t recognise it? Unless you’ve carefully watched the extras on the DVD release, you won’t; it was never actually used in the episode. reddwarf.co.uk gives some background to this particular shot:

“Despite the short production period, the team initially attempted an unrequested shot that had been much talked about in previous seasons – the crew viewed through Starbug’s window. A reflected rear-projection image of the crew in the Starbug cockpit set was played into the miniature Bug model, and – despite a wobble caused by a faulty projector – the result was quite impressive. (Sadly, the shot did not make it into the finished “Psirens” show – and costume continuity meant that it couldn’t be used in a different episode.)

For me, the two shots are a valiant attempt that doesn’t quite work, but it’s lovely to see them in their own right. And it also gives us a proper chance to see the Starbug cockpit and the crew shot on film, done to match the film of the model. Which is fascinating.

Ah, if only we had the initial shot of the cast on the cockpit set, rather than the final, finished effect…

…oh, we do. God, the Red Dwarf DVDs were something special.

All of which is fascinating, or at least is probably fascinating to anybody reading this site. But it doesn’t count as an answer to my little trivia question. It never transmitted.

*   *   *

No, the real answer is hiding in plain sight. Because there’s another sequence featuring a Red Dwarf cast member shot on film, which is actually in the final show, and completely destroys my trivia question. And it’s something I didn’t notice for years, until it was pointed out to me.⁵

Take a look at Robert Llewellyn as Jim Reaper in “The Last Day” (TX: 19/12/89), and see what’s up with him:

If you don’t spot the difference in the motion or colour grading compared to the surrounding video material, then the grain and film dirt makes it clear: the Jim Reaper sections were shot on film, rather than video. This becomes even more obvious later on in the episode, when Hudzen-10 appears; his section is shot on video, while the Reaper material is still film:

So the question which naturally occurs: why?

To understand this, we have to appreciate how Series III of Red Dwarf was made. This was the last series of the show to be recorded in Manchester, before it moved to Shepperton for Series IV. This meant that the cast rehearsed for a few days in the BBC’s Rehearsal Rooms in Acton, before piling on a coach and recording for two days at New Broadcasting House in Manchester. The first day there was the pre-record, where the team would do some of the more complicated sequences, and the second day was the audience record, where the rest of the show was shot before a studio audience.

So, Robert Llewellyn as Jim Reaper: that surely would have been done on the pre-record day, yes? But here’s where the production would have run into a problem. Because the mask for Kryten took literally hours to apply at this point. Robert’s autobiography The Man in the Rubber Mask states that the first time it went on, it took “something like six hours”; later on, while still discussing Series III, he states having to “sit still for five hours”. This process became shorter and shorter with each series; for IV is “three or four hours”, and for “Terrorform” in Series V, it was “two and a half hours”.

Even if we account for a certain level of exaggeration here, a four-hour experience for Series III seems very likely. And so I think this explains why the Jim Reaper material wasn’t done on the normal pre-record session for “The Last Day”. There simply wasn’t time to record material featuring Robert without his mask, then have everyone wait around for four hours doing nothing while Robert went into make-up to have the mask applied. Far easier to just record the material on a different day.

But when? Each episode of Red Dwarf had two days in the studio, but Robert had to be in his mask for every single one of these days. Doing the Jim Reaper material on another studio day in Manchester doesn’t actually solve the problem. No, this material would have to be shot in London, on a day when Robert wasn’t required to be in his mask.

You may be beginning to add things together by now. There was another part of Red Dwarf being made in London at this point, and more to the point, they were using film: the BBC Visual Effects department, making the model shots. And Mike Tucker, who worked on many series of Red Dwarf as part of the VFX team, has kindly confirmed to me that the Jim Reaper sequences were shot by them – and, indeed, our aforementioned Pete Tyler was cameraman. At that time, BBC Visual Effects was based in Western Avenue in Acton; the material was shot in the control room of the VFX stage there, during a gap in the model filming. Mike also confirmed to me that the material was shot by them due to Robert’s availability.

While Mike couldn’t provide an exact date for the shooting, we can have a rough guess, and also prove that all these parts of the production happened in the right order for this to work. The two record days in Manchester for “The Last Day” were the 10th and 11th October 1989. And while we don’t have exact filming dates for the model shoot for Series III, we can get a rough idea by checking the clapperboards on the raw model footage on the DVD:

The model shoot was roughly 15th September – 5th October 1989. Absolutely time for Robert to pop along to the model unit, record his lines as Jim Reaper, and have it ready for the main Manchester studio record in mid-October. ⁶

And another little piece of Red Dwarf‘s production slips into place. At the expense of my brilliant trivia question. Oh well, simplicity is boring anyway.

1. Excluding stock footage, so things like this don’t count. ↩

2. Indeed, One Foot in the Grave was still doing it in 2000. ↩

3. It strikes me that the gun stuff is something which would probably be thought twice about these days. Especially the gun in the mouth, which is a slightly startling image to present so casually in 2023. But I digress. ↩

4. On the DVD release The Bodysnatcher Collection. ↩

5. Thank you Darrell Maclaine, who should also be thanked for helping me with a million and one other things in this site. And also for convincing me to go with the current Dirty Feed logo, despite its controversial chopped-off T. Blame him entirely, yes, thank you, bye. ↩

6. Seeing as the rehearsal rooms were also in Acton, it is very likely that Robert popped over there on a rehearsal day to do the Jim Reaper filming, although we can’t be sure. ↩

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