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.
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. ↩
