Like Two Badly-Parked Morris Minors

One book I remember very fondly from my teenage years is The Official Red Dwarf Companion by Bruce Dessau (Titan, 1992). Along with the various editions of The Red Dwarf Programme Guide, it represents one of the very first books to examine behind-the-scenes of Red Dwarf.

For instance, the Series V DVD release in 2004 gave us a look at shots of the despair squid from Back to Reality, cut from the broadcast episode:¹

But 12 years earlier, The Official Red Dwarf Companion showed us a picture of the original, unused model:

The exact timeframe of these things is often lost, so it’s worth remembering: this was published the very same year that Back to Reality was broadcast. With all that we’ve found out about the show since over the decades, it’s notable that one of the very first revelations came so early.

Other parts of the book fare a little less well. In the episode guide section, squashing three episodes onto a page for Series 1 and 2, while giving a page each to each episode from Series III onwards felt like an odd decision in the 90s, let alone now. (The tiny write-up given to “Queeg” is especially a shame.) Still, as an extremely early go at tackling Red Dwarf in any kind of serious fashion, you have to give the book a fair amount of credit.

But being so early means you can easily wander into traps. One of the most obvious changes on-screen in Red Dwarf is the transition from Paul Montague as production designer for the first two series, to Mel Bibby taking over for the third:

Series 2 bunkroom

Series III bunkroom

The Official Red Dwarf Companion states the following:

“Bibby is another BBC veteran, having notched up twenty years worth of work for Auntie. His background, however, is in comedy rather than sci-fi. During the mid-eighties he worked with Paul Jackson and Ben Elton at BBC Manchester and was, in fact, unable to do the first two series of Red Dwarf. Bibby was tied up with, “I shouldn’t say this, another Paul Jackson production and the greatest flop we’ve ever seen, Morris Minor and the Majors.”

So, Mel Bibby couldn’t work on Red Dwarf‘s first series, because he was busy with Morris Minor and the Majors, another Paul Jackson sitcom. This little fact has gone down in lore with certain old-school Red Dwarf fans. It’s certainly always stuck in my head.

And yet this seems to be the only place where Morris Minor is mentioned in conjunction with Mel Bibby’s availability. In the Series III documentary All Change, we get the following from Doug:

DOUG NAYLOR: Mel wasn’t available for those early series, and then he became available for Series III, so Rob and I were very enthusiastic for getting him on board.

And in Issue #14 of Red Dwarf Smegazine, Mel Bibby himself says the following:

“I was actually asked by Paul Jackson to do the first episode of the first series,” he reveals, “but I was working on another one of his productions which was running at the same time, so I couldn’t do it.”

The problem is, as soon as we start poking Morris Minor and the Majors as the reason for Bibby not working on Red Dwarf, it almost immediately falls apart. For a start, the show isn’t even called Morris Minor and the Majors; it was Morris Minor’s Marvellous Motors. I’m going to cheat, and let Mark Lewisohn describe the series:

“A comedy-fantasy series for younger viewers centred on Morris Minor’s Marvellous Motors, a car workshop in Normalton that repairs Morris Minor cars but, as a result of there being very few in the town, has next to no business. The leaseholder of the property, Mrs Plugg, puts a young man – whose name happens to be Morris Minor – in charge of the garage, and among his many distractions is the dastardly local restaurant owner Angus Head, who – with his henchman Martin – hatches nefarious schemes in order to gain control of the business (where, incidentally, his daughter Sonia works as a trainee mechanic). Morris is aided by his two employees, Sparky Plugg, the leaseholder’s son, and Sedgefield.

The comedy-musician Tony Hawks co-wrote the show, and his band Morris Minor And The Majors provided the music that was integral to the storylines – they become Normalton’s biggest band (which wasn’t saying much). Beyond the show, the band also scored a number 4 hit in 1987 with ‘Stutter Rap (No Sleep ‘Til Bedtime)’.”

The series was broadcast April-May 1989. And already, we start running into problems. The first series of Red Dwarf was recorded in late 1987. Would a sitcom broadcast in 1989 really stop Mel from doing Series 1 of Red Dwarf?

But hey, it’s worth checking properly. If Morris Minor really was such a disaster, in the words of Mel Bibby himself, then it’s possible it simply sat on the shelf for ages. When was the show actually recorded?

Inserts recorded 5th-6th January 1989.
Location material recorded 16th-20th January 1989.

Early 1989, just a few weeks before air. In no possible way could Mel Bibby working on Morris Minor have stopped him working on Series 1 of Red Dwarf in 1987.² Bibby must simply have misremembered which programme it was he was working on.

So, can we figure out which programme it actually was which Mel was busy with? In fact, we can. In this interview with reddwarf.co.uk, Bibby gives a far more likely candidate:

“I was doing quite a lot for Paul Jackson – who was instrumental in getting Red Dwarf on the air in the first place – around that time. Lots of things that nobody’ll remember such as Happy Families, which was written by Ben Elton. I was doing Filthy Rich and Catflap at the time Red Dwarf came up; Paul wanted me to do that. I said, ‘I can’t, it’s too much commitment to too many jobs.’

I didn’t do the first two series as it turned out. I was doing a lot of comedy at the time – Morris Minor and the Majors with Tony Hawks. Which was a big, disastrous epic! (Laughs) A whack comedy with music thrown in. Like most things I worked on, it ran one series and was then dropped. Red Dwarf is the exception.”

Mel again gets the name of the show wrong, although it’s a particularly easy brain fart. More to the point, Filthy Rich & Catflap was broadcast at the start of 1987, so it already seems a more likely candidate for Mel’s attentions. But hang on; Series 1 of Red Dwarf was recorded in September-November 1987, nine months later. Would the two shows really clash in the way Bibby describes?

In fact, yes. There’s another wrinkle we have to bear in mind here. As I’ve discussed before, the recording of the first series of Red Dwarf was put back due an electrician’s strike. The original sets for Red Dwarf would have been prepared for those first, abandoned studio dates, not the ones which actually happened:

So Red Dwarf was originally intended to be recorded in January 1987. And when was Filthy Rich & Catflap made?

November and December 1986. The dates most definitely clash when you take into account pre-production. So there you have it: the reason why Mel Bibby couldn’t do the first series of Red Dwarf was because he was already working on Filthy Rich & Catflap.

Meaning he was busy working on fabulous things like this:

As for Morris Minor’s Marvellous Motors itself, the series is rather more difficult to get your hands on than you might think. The first episode was uploaded to YouTube last year, but has sadly been deleted. So instead, enjoy “Another Boring B-Side”, the self-referential flip side of “Stutter Rap”.

“You’re listening to the product of considerable neglect…”

1. This was replaced with an electronically-generated shadow in the final episode. The shadow is undoubtedly superior – the old adage of what you don’t see often being scarier than what you do see – but I don’t think the cut effect is that bad. ↩

2. I can hear some of you pondering now: did Morris Minor’s Marvellous Motors have an unbroadcast pilot, which could easily have been in 1987? I’ve done some digging around, including in places I shouldn’t, and I can find absolutely no evidence of any such pilot at all. ↩

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filthy rich & catflap, red dwarf