For obvious reasons, ephemera surrounding the first series of Red Dwarf is like gold dust. Of course material is going to survive once the show had an established fanbase; things from when the show was just a slightly odd new sitcom on BBC2 are a whole other thing.
One of these pieces of ephemera has become widely known about and distributed: an off-air trail for the first episode “The End” made it onto the Series 1 Red Dwarf DVD release in 2002. That trail was uploaded to YouTube in 2015, including the surrounding content which couldn’t be cleared for DVD; this variant was broadcast on the 13th February 1988, just two days before the episode aired.1
The mistake from presentation at exactly 2 minutes in intensely amuses me. I wish I had a BBC Micro as a source on my mixer panel at work. (Though I can also hear the screams that particular outage caused from here, decades down the line.)
Anyway, we’ve all known about this trail for years. But unless I’m mistaken – and please correct me in the comments if I’m wrong – I think this is the only trail for that original transmission of Series 1 which was generally available. It always seemed likely there were others broadcast at the time, of course, but I’d never seen any.
That is, until a few days ago, when archive uploader extraordinaire Neil Miles uploaded the following. Broadcast on the 21st March 1988, it’s a trail for “Me²”, the final episode of Series 1, from the evening of transmission. And in all my decades of being a Red Dwarf fan, I’d never seen it before!
And I love this for many reasons. I love it because this trail – not this exact transmission, sure, but the same trail – was the very first time any of “Me²” was broadcast on BBC2. When you know a show as well as I know Red Dwarf, it does slightly odd things to your mind to find out a particular exchange between Rimmer and Lister was seen by the Mediocre British Public well before the rest of the episode.
I love it because it’s easy to pigeonhole Series 1 of Red Dwarf as “the vaguely unsuccessful one at the time, and can you believe it got a second series?” Which in some respects might be true, and in other respects… well, the final episode of the series was still having custom trails made for it, so BBC2 wasn’t actually hiding it away as a complete disaster, were they? Much like 2point4 children, it’s a little easy to slip into the cliches.
I love it with my TV channel director hat on, when you realise that every single element of that junction – slide, trail, slide, symbol – had a live voiceover. The continuity announcer certainly earned their money for that bit of output.2
But most of all, I love that we can still discover “new” things about Red Dwarf in 2023. That we can find things from 1988, which haven’t really been seen since 1988. That in Red Dwarf‘s 35th anniversary year, a little bit more information about the show’s very first series can be teased out.
There’s always something original out there. You just need to put the effort in to find it.
With thanks to Will Tudor for kicking the link to the trail my way.
There’s also this version of the trail, broadcast on the 8th February, the week before the episode aired. That’s the earliest transmission of a variant of this trail I know of. ↩
Here’s a fun fact for you. I’m sure most people reading this site won’t be surprised to hear that the BBC still have live continuity announcers. Nor would you be surprised that various sports or BBC Sounds menus are voiced live. But I think some of you might be surprised that some of the iPlayer trails on BBC One and Two are also voiced live. Next time you see one, pay attention, and see if it’s the same voice which introduces the next programme… ↩
8 comments
Andrew Wiseman on 27 March 2023 @ 5pm
Why is the black mark on the TWO ident high up on the left edge in one junction, but lower down on the right edge in the other? Ummmm?
Stephen on 28 March 2023 @ 9am
Who else saw this and wanted to watch ‘Dig’?
Corrector on 28 March 2023 @ 12pm
TrailER not trail
A trail is a path through a forest
John J. Hoare on 28 March 2023 @ 7pm
The BBC term is trail, and has been for decades. I’ve been saying it over network talkback myself for years!
Tounge Tied on 29 March 2023 @ 9am
I worked in West Africa many years ago and BBC Worldwide was my only refuge. One weekend, I had friends over and Red Dwarf was on. These guys being Africian had zero exposure to RD – much like anyone watching these trails in 1988. “Dude, what is this low budget sh*t?” they complained and my lounge I as full of confused faces. British humour is an acquired taste, let alone 4,000 miles from home and 3 million years into deep space! The next week when we hung out the first thing they asked was “Please can we watch that cheap show with the Robot?” – and they have been fans ever since! ;)
Gareth Randall on 3 April 2023 @ 12am
To answer Andrew’s question about the TWO symbols, the black mark on the left side of the screen lets the network director know that the symbol is parked at the start of the animation, and if it’s triggered it will fade away to white. The black mark on the right side of the frame indicates that the symbol has completed its animation after fading *up* from white, so if it’s triggered it will play again from the beginning by hard-cutting to white and then fading up again – obviously not what you’d want to see happen.
The 1979-1986 symbol used similar marks as visual aids for the network director, so they’d know if the symbol was parked on the black screen before the =2= animated *on*, or if it was on the black screen left after the =2= animated *off*. If the =2= was already on the screen, they also needed to know if it was the final frame of the drawing-on animation, or the first frame of the drawing-off animation.
Daveyt on 4 April 2023 @ 5pm
John – what was the BBC micro used for in that context? I understand its a source you could have mixed to when needed, but why would you have it? I am very fond of the BBC micros and I guess I never really thought about them being used at the beeb, in production. I guess I knew that Ceefax used the BBC micro – and it amused me that I could recreate it on mine, MODE7 for the double height lettering was always a delight. Any good resources on this?
John J. Hoare on 5 April 2023 @ 11am
So, I suspect putting Pages from Ceefax to air was the big reason. I can’t image why they’d use anything other than a BBC Micro to do that in 1988. (I haven’t investigated it and proved it for sure, though!)
But they also used to do Children’s BBC idents live using a BBC Micro, rather than recording to tape – this kind of thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuavwP7kAPE
That’s from 1986. I *think* by 1988, the time of this clip, they’d stopped using that one, probably leaving Pages from Ceefax as its only use.
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