red dwarf

In 1994, two things happened to me which had major implications years down the line. Firstly, my Dad died. Secondly, I got into Red Dwarf. I’m not quite sure which was the most damaging to me in the long run.

Also released in 1994 was a very formative book. The Making of Red Dwarf by Joe Nazzaro came at exactly the right point for me, being all my favourite topics in one volume. It also meant that I could shake my head sadly when people didn’t understand that sitcoms had a real studio audience present. Come on, I’d seen the Red Dwarf set plan with the place marked out for the audience seating for years!¹

But what I didn’t know back in 1994 was the troubled route that book had to publication. We only really found out about that three decades later, when Nazzaro published Comedy, Chaos – and Cowboys! The Red Dwarf Companion – his original draft of the Making Of book, which turns out to be vastly different to the final product. It’s a fascinating yet infuriating read, and you can do no better than read this review on Ganymede & Titan to find out why. Sadly, the number of typos and formatting errors in the book is absolutely off-the-charts, and smacks of – and I don’t say this lightly – genuine contempt for the book’s audience.²

And yet for all that, I still managed to wring an absurd amount of joy from the book. For instance, take this sequence from the episode “Psirens”, as one of our eponymous insectoid villains has just forced Kryten into the crusher:

God, Robert Llewellyn is great there. “I’m almost annoyed” is funny. His irritated expression is funnier.

Now, most of the above scene was shot on location at Bankside Power Station, which I already knew about. But what I didn’t know was that some of it was reshot in the studio on the penultimate day’s recording of the series, as part of a day of pick-ups.

Nazzaro quotes Red Dwarf VI‘s director, Andy De Emmony:

“We’re re-doing a compactor scene with Robert in the box. At the last minute, we were doing the shot where he walks away from camera to the edge and looks down. We now have him walking to camera which is funnier. I want to do a shot where he’s walking towards camera, laugh, and then we do an out of camera shot, as he’s walking away to the edge.”

The above doesn’t really give the clearest explanation of what’s happening with this reshoot. The below will probably explain it better. These are two consecutive shots:

I have to admit, I find discovering this utterly delightful, for two reasons.

Firstly, I think that mixing location and studio material is interesting in its own right. Once you know, perhaps the reshoot is obvious – the picture quality is slightly different, and the grille Kryten is waddling on changes between shots. But it’s matched up so cleverly with the lighting – particularly with the green glow on the grille itself – that nobody normal would ever notice, and 99.99% of abnormal people would never notice either. It’s a beautiful little piece of production.

But mostly I find it delightful because 30 years after first watching the episode, I’m still finding out fascinating little details about Red Dwarf. Stuff which you would have thought would have come out by now, with everything that’s been written about the series, but somehow never quite did. And while I can still find out new things like this, I just can’t tear my brain away from the show entirely.

Although, y’know, what they really needed to reshoot was Kryten’s fall onto the Psiren. Come on now, you don’t want an awkward bounce. You want a bloody squidge.

1. Yeah yeah, I know, this doesn’t mean that the audience soundtrack hasn’t been sweetened, but that’s a separate article. ↩

2. I read a draft of a TV-related book recently in order to give feedback, and I think I only fed back two or three obvious errors. And that hasn’t even been published yet. ↩

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red dwarf

While we’re on an anonymous questions kick, here’s something else I was asked recently: “Favourite behind-the-scenes moment?” Which gives me an excuse to talk about something brilliant.

Take a look at this scene from Red Dwarf, “Stasis Leak”, broadcast on the 27th September 1988.

This was shot on location in the Midland Hotel in Manchester, on the 5th/6th May 1988.¹ Note the plaque for “The Ganymede Holiday Inn” is clearly above one for the Midland Hotel. Although the really interesting thing about that plaque is that it includes a close approximation of the Holiday Inn logo, which is perhaps a little odd for a BBC show of the time!

Now let’s turn to The Bodysnatcher Collection, a Red Dwarf DVD release from 2007 which I’ve talked about many times before on here. One of the features on that release was an in-depth behind-the-scenes making of documentary of Series 2, It’s Cold Outside, which features plenty of previously unseen clips from the raw recordings, both studio and location.

Such as the following. A discussion between Danny John-Jules and Doug Naylor, taken from the shooting of the Ganymede Holiday Inn scene, about spraying the nice lady with water… and who gets to do it. And it’s fantastic.

There’s something about the way Doug acknowledges comedy in that clip that is just magical. Comedy as its own thing, as something worth fighting for, as something that matters.

There are a great number of TV shows made now which would benefit from somebody stepping forward and saying: “It’a a comedy spray.”

1. Two days for the material at the Midland Hotel seems excessive, but that’s what the paperwork states. Other location material featuring Mark Williams as Petersen was shot at the Albert Dock on the 11th May 1988. ↩

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red dwarf