The Captain’s Office

Hello everyone. Last time in the crazy world of Red Dwarf set analysis, we took a look at the history of three wall sections used at BBC Manchester in 1988. (You need to have read that to have a hope of following this piece.) How could I possibly top that majestic piece of writing?

Answer: with one of Series 1’s most famous oddities. Yes, it’s the disappearing and reappearing Captain’s Office. This article was intended to be a more general look at the Drive Room set, but believe it or not I have found enough to say about this single topic to make a full standalone piece. I am not dumbing down my material. It’s always been this stupid.

As before, we need to take this one in recording order, rather than broadcast order.

S1E1: The End (Original Shoot)

RX: 26th/27th September 1987 • TX: 15th February 1988

The recording of Series 1 kicked off with the original version of “The End”. As I’ve detailed previously, much of this episode was in fact shot twice: once at the beginning of the series, and then again at the very end, in a seventh week of production. Material from both recordings ended up in the final, broadcast version of the show, and in this article it’s important to distinguish between the two.

Luckily, this is easier than you might think. In 2007, the DVD set The Bodysnatcher Collection was released, featuring a grab bag of fun Red Dwarf things. And part of that release was The Original Assembly – a version of “The End” put together only using material from the original recording session.

And that includes Lister’s famed visit to see Hollister:

There’s the Captain’s Office. Hello there. Love you.

It’s also worth noting that Rimmer’s death sequence in “Me²” was also shot during the original recording of “The End”, to make use of Mac McDonald:

Until I started researching this article, I never really thought about this before: but surely it’s of note that Rimmer doesn’t die in the Drive Room, but actually dies in the Captain’s Office? There’s a great dramatic irony that the second lowest person on the ship, and the person who dreams one day of sitting in the Captain’s chair, instead perishes to death in a nuclear explosion in that very room.

If that’s purely an accident rather than a deliberate piece of writing, then it’s a very happy one. The script for “Me²” as published in the book Son of Soup proves that it was scripted this way, at least – while the scene itself is described as taking place in the Drive Room, we also get the following:

RIMMER: Gazpacho Soup…

SLO-MO: a glass paperweight (Red Dwarf in a dust storm) falls from the captain’s desk and shatters in front of RIMMER’s outstretched hand.

Anyway, enough of this tot. Back to the business in hand. Perhaps literally for some of us.

S1E3: Balance of Power

RX: 3rd/4th October 1987 • TX: 29th February 1988

The next episode shot was “Balance of Power” – and here, we have to be a little careful. The temptation is to look at the famous ‘Trout á la créme’ scene in the Drive Room… but considering this scene was reshot later in the series in order to to put Holly in vision, we can’t trust it as a representation of the set during the main “Balance of Power” recording. (For more on these Holly reshoots, check out this article.)

Instead, let’s use the scene near the end of the episode, just after Lister has buggered off to his Chef’s exam. This doesn’t involve Holly in vision at all, and so must have been part of the original recording:

WHERE HAS THE CAPTAIN’S OFFICE GONE, WHERE HAS IT GONE, WHY IS THERE A VENDING MACHINE THERE INSTEAD, I HATE MY LIFE, PLEASE SOMEONE WRITE SOME FANFIC TO HELP ME RESOLVE THIS.

In fact, we can answer this question – from a production point of view, at least – with the very next episode.

S1E4: Waiting for God

RX: 10th/11th October 1987 • TX: 7th March 1988

The set is in exactly the same configuration for “Waiting for God”, with no Captain’s Office to be found.

Fairly sure Lister’s just noticed there’s now a vending machine in the Drive Room instead of the Captain’s Office, and is wondering what the fuck has happened.

Here is what the fuck has happened. For the first three series of Red Dwarf, the set was rigged purely for the two days of shooting required, and then derigged afterwards; rehearsals happened back down south, at the rehearsal rooms in Acton. This meant that when the set was reassembled for the week’s recording, if there wasn’t a need for the Captain’s Office that week, it could be removed and the space given over to whatever other sets were needed for that recording.

This isn’t just theoretical; we have visual evidence for this. Take a look at this shot from the Dwarf DVD documentary It’s Cold Outside¹, which gives a behind-the-scenes record of how the sets were laid out during “Waiting for God”:

We can clearly see that instead of the Captain’s Office set, we have the pipes corridor which we analysed in our last article.

This traditional way of making yer sitcom continued right throughout the Manchester years. Once the show moved to Shepperton for Red Dwarf IV, the set was rigged at the start of the series and stayed there for the entire production.

S1E2: Future Echoes

RX: 17th/18th October 1987 • TX: 22nd February 1988

Next in recording order is “Future Echoes”, and… whoa ho ho, what’s all this? During the famous Double Rimmer sequence, and again when Lister expects to be blown to bits, we can see:

Oh, you’ve returned, Mr. Captain’s Office sir. Hello.

There’s a strong argument that the single most memorable moment in Series 1 of Dwarf is the shot above with Rimmer walking out of the Drive Room, and another Rimmer walking in. It’s worth noting then, that that shot simply couldn’t be done with the set in the configuration it was for “Balance of Power” and “Waiting for God”. Which is a little peculiar when you’re talking about one of your main sets.

S1E5: Confidence & Paranoia

RX: 24th/25th October 1987 • TX: 14th March 1988

OK, so up to this point, we’ve been in fairly standard territory. The Captain’s Office is either there or not, depending on whether the production needs it. Fine.

Except now, when “Confidence & Paranoia” needed a proper Medical Unit (as opposed to the smaller Medical Room “set” knocked together for “Future Echoes”), we get this…

Hang on, that looks vaguely familiar…

…oh, you just repurposed the Captain’s Office set.

That in itself makes total sense – of course the ship would be modular in the same way as buildings are today, so bits of the ship would obviously look like other bits of the ship. I would suggest however, that including shots which reveal the Medical Unit is now bang next to the Drive Room is a trifle odd.

At first glance, it seems that they also added a door to distinguish it from the Captain’s Office set. But this is actually a little odd in itself – from Rimmer’s movements in “Future Echoes”, it’s heavily implied that there is already a door in that position in the Captain’s Office. But we’ve never seen a door there until we get to this redress of the set!

S1E6: Me²

RX: 31st October/1st November 1987 • TX: 21st March 1988

Right, now we’ve got rid of the Medical Unit – at least for this series – what have we got now?

Oh hello, the Captain’s Office is back, and this time round we get to see the door in vision. Very nice.

Six weeks down, one to go. Surely there can’t be any more changes?

S1E1: The End (Remount)

RX: 7th/8th November 1987 • TX: 15th February 1988

The final recording session of Series 1 was the remounted version of “The End” – or, in other words, any footage which isn’t in The Original Assembly, but is present in the broadcast version of the episode. This is actually huge chunks of the finished programme, including key scenes such as the opening of the show, the first bunkroom scene, Lister’s entry and exit into stasis, and Cat’s introduction.

Crucially, any material with Mac McDonald wasn’t retaken during the reshoot, and was all part of the original session. I think you can guess where this is leading. So to clarify the point: on the left is the original version of “Have you any idea of the penalty for calling a deceased superior officer a smeghead?” moment, as taken from The Original Assembly, and on the right is the broadcast version of the same moment, as reshot during this final session:

Not only did they not erect the Captain’s Office set for this final session, but they didn’t even have the decency to stick a vending machine in front of the bare wall. In recompense, I would like the licence fee that my Dad paid in 1988 refunded.

There is something else notable about the reshoots here for “The End”; note that all the big sequences with a large number of extras (such as the pre-accident Drive Room sequence, or the scene in the refectory with McIntyre) are from the original recording. All the reshoots are the cheaper stuff done with just our core cast members (and Robert Bathurst).

This is particularly interesting, as you get the distinct impression from various sources that nobody was very keen on the Lister/Kochanski flirting in the Drive Room… but it seems they didn’t take the opportunity to reshoot it here. They just chopped it down to the minimum needed, and moved on. Either it was deemed too expensive to reshoot, or Clare Grogan wasn’t available.²

And that’s your lot for Series 1. Come Series 2, there’s only one episode which features that original Captain’s Office. Except… it’s not really the original Captain’s Office at all.

Stasis Leak

RX: 11th/12th June 1988 • TX: 27th September 1988

A flashback to pre-accident Dwarf. A plot involving the Captain. Surely if ever we needed the Captain’s Office, we needed it now.

But there’s a problem. Between Series 1 and 2, the Drive Room changes entirely, presumably because it was the set the production was least happy with. Lots more colour, movement, yadda yadda yadda:

What to do, then, when the Captain’s Office set was part of the old Drive Room set, and that’s been torn up between series, and the parts used for other sets?

Answer: you cheat.

It’s less obvious than it could have been – the black and white obscures things to an extent – but the above most certainly is not the Captain’s Office seen in Series 1, with or without a door. In fact, it does an extremely good job of appearing to be something quickly and cheaply knocked up which roughly resembles the original Captain’s Office, with a few of the props chucked in there for good measure.

Onscreen, it works… but it’s definitely a cheat. You only have to look at the very last picture above, where the right-hand side clearly reveals the set to be pretty much just a wall section plonked in front of another set. (To be fair, on the programme’s original transmission, a lot of that would have been in the overscan area of people’s televisions. DVDs reveal a lot of things that viewers at the time wouldn’t ever have seen.)

And that’s your lot for now.³ So I’ll leave you with one final thought. Take a look at the various incarnations of the Captain’s Office as pictured above – in particular, where various props are placed, and how the walls are arranged. Does any part of that room ever actually stay the same between episodes?

I think Rimmer goes in there, rearranges everything, and then plays at being Captain. And I think he used to do that before the accident, let alone afterwards. Go on, someone can definitely make a fanfic out of that.

A version of this post was first published on Ganymede & Titan in December 2018.

1. Yes, the Series 2 documentary, not Series 1. ↩

2. This scene sometimes seems to be almost universally reviled, especially the extended version in the deleted scenes on the DVD release. So it’s worth noting here that a friend recently praised it, describing it as “a really naturalist performance from both of them”. It’s always worth remembering that your Standard Opinions™ won’t be shared by everybody. ↩

3. I might deal with the Captain’s Office used in Red Dwarf VIII, along with the recreation of the original set we see in Skipper, in a future article… in 109 parts time. Or I might be dead. ↩

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originally on G&T, red dwarf, red dwarf sets