red dwarf – Page 3

Two Amusing Grant Naylor Sketches from Spitting Image

Published 6th February 2023

The problem with being a mouldy old Red Dwarf fan is that you end up viewing every bloody comedy show from around that time through a Dwarf-shaped prism. With something like early Spitting Image, with Grant Naylor as script editors as well as Chris Barrie doing impressions, the links become utterly inescapable.

For instance, take this joke in the first episode of Series 2 of Spitting Image (TX: 6/1/85)¹, in a sketch about Zola Budd:

VOICE 1: 2 hours 56 minutes! That’s a world record for a marathon.
VOICE 2: Pity she’s running the 100 metres.

And then remember this joke from Red Dwarf‘s “Future Echoes” (TX: 22/2/88), where Rimmer does a spot of running himself:

RIMMER: 6:47. Not a bad little time for the mile. Pity I was only doing the 300 metres.

Of course, it’s not just Red Dwarf. How about this sketch from the first episode of Grant Naylor’s Radio 4 sketch show Son of Cliché (TX: 23/8/83), and “20 Golden Indian Restaurant Tracks”?

Download “20 Golden Indian Restaurant Tracks” (MP3, 1:09)

Which bears a startling resemblance to this Spitting Image sketch from Series 2, Episode 10 (TX: 17/3/85), where KGB-TEL promise “20 Golden Pieces of Sombre Music”:

The rewrite on that sketch is fascinating in its own right, taking the same basic idea – how foreign music can sound identical to untrained ears – and adds a whole extra layer of political jokes. I don’t have writing credits for individual sketches here, but it wouldn’t surprise me if other writers were involved.²

Either way, as a fan of Grant Naylor’s work, it’s a very odd feeling to watch Spitting Image, and see shards of their earlier and later work suddenly pop up. And it’s also proof that people who say they wouldn’t bother watching the show as the topical references mean it’s “dated” – and this isn’t a straw man argument, I have literally seen exactly that – are somewhat missing the point.

Because the above examples show both a topical joke being re-used in a decidedly non-topical way… and a non-topical joke being transformed into a topical one. It’s all part of the same thing. Which is a far more fascinating realisation than merely sulking about a reference to Zola Budd.

In all these posts about Spitting Image on Dirty Feed, I’m going by the DVD numbering for the series, rather than Mark Lewisohn’s rather different numbering in the Radio Times Guide to TV Comedy. In particular, Lewisohn states there are two different series in 1984 rather than one, and ditto in 1986. The series numbers aren’t really that important anyway; just go by the TX dates. ↩
Possibly Hislop and Newman? ↩

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Relative Time Dilation in an Amazingly Compressed Space

Published 18th October 2022

TV Comedy / TV Presentation

It’s Tuesday 21st November 1989 at 9pm, and the Red Dwarf episode “Marooned” is broadcast on BBC2 for the first time.

What was I doing? I have no idea. It was presumably a school night. I don’t think I even knew what Red Dwarf was. My Dad always watched the Nine O’Clock News at this time anyway. I had no rights over the television by that point in the evening.

The moment passed, unnoticed. By me, anyway.

* * *

It’s Friday 15th April 1994 at 9pm, and the Red Dwarf episode “Marooned” is broadcast on BBC2 for the third time.

What was I doing? Something very different than in 1989. This was the famous¹ repeat season, where BBC2 showed every single episode of the first six series of the show.² A lot of fans got into the series through this set of repeats, and I was no different. I quickly became obsessed with the show.

I was, however, only 12, verging on 13. My Dad still had a monopoly on the television, and still always watched the Nine O’Clock News. Luckily, I had a plan. I’d manually set the video recorder going downstairs, then rush upstairs to my bedroom to watch the episode… on an old black and white telly. It wasn’t as good as watching it in the living room on the proper TV, but it would do. And I could always watch the show downstairs later using my video. Which I did.

Endlessly.

* * *

It’s Saturday 14th June 2014 at 9:55pm, and the Red Dwarf episode “Marooned” is broadcast on BBC Two for the sixth time.

Lots has happened since 1994. I’ve long since been subsumed into Dwarf fandom, or at least, one particular corner of it. At this point, I’d been writing for fansite Ganymede & Titan for over a decade. But I’m not sitting watching the episode at home. And not just because I now own the episode on DVD.

Three months earlier, I’d finally got the job of my dreams: working in BBC presentation, in charge of originating most of the BBC’s domestic channels. And I just happen to be in work that evening. But unfortunately, I’m not doing BBC Two right now. I’m on another channel.

Luckily, just like when I was 12, I have a plan.

At 9:50pm, I gently appear at the door of NC2, the BBC Two pres suite. There is a very experienced director in the chair. The most experienced, longest-serving director we have, in fact. I ask if he minds if I sit with him for the next five minutes. He’s fine with it. I pull up a chair.

I watch, as I Love 1988 ends. The director runs a couple of trails: Shopgirls, Tigers About the House. Then there’s the ident; a special one, for BBC Two’s 50th anniversary. Duncan Newmarch, the duty BBC Two announcer, opens his mic and speaks: most continuity announcements are still done live. The director counts down through the ident. At 0, the picture fades down, then up again, and “Marooned” is on air, for the next 28 minutes and 35 seconds.

And two decades apart, two different parts of my life join together, briefly. Watching the same episode of Red Dwarf… but from opposite sides of the TV screen. And my teenage love of the show, and my brand new adult job, were now properly linked. Forever.

Sometimes, I’m aware enough of what’s going on around me to make sure a piece of personal history actually happens, rather than letting it slip from my grasp. Just sometimes.

With thanks to Christopher Wickham for the endlessly useful Red Dwarf BBC Broadcasts Guide, and Pip Madeley for inexplicably but brilliantly having the above video to hand.

In Red Dwarf fan circles, anyway. ↩
Minus “Psirens”, due to Craig Charles’ legal situation at the time. ↩

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best of, red dwarf, tv memories

Join the Dots

Published 6th August 2022

TV Comedy

It’s odd how things in your life can suddenly connect, completely unexpectedly.

Take the Red Dwarf episode “Timeslides” (TX: 12/12/89), which I’ve already written about recently. Short version of the plot: Kryten finds some photographic developing fluid which has mutated, and it now makes photographs come to life. Interestingly, this is one of the few times the series actually uses the fact things have been sitting around on the ship for three million years, and odd things might happen during that time.

But before we get into the meat of the episode proper – Lister going back and changing his own history – we get a series of gags about the kind of things you could do with the concept of living photos. So as well as causing trouble at Rimmer’s brother’s wedding, or pondering what they could do with a set of naughty beach photographs, we get the following amusing idea.

What if Lister had sent some photos to be developed, and got someone’s skiing holiday snaps back by mistake?

The official Red Dwarf site offers the following amusing titbit about this scene:

“But even the writers aren’t infallible, as Timeslides clearly proved. As production on the episode began, the scene where Lister claims he got somebody’s skiing holiday picture back by mistake was discovered to have an error by none other than Craig. The skiers had scripted lines about how they got Lister’s rather scary birthday snaps – which would have been fine, except, at that point in time, the skiers would not have received them yet. The lines were summarily cut.”

Very good Craig, well done. But this is no longer my favourite fact about this scene.

* * *

Recently, I’ve been doing some research on the very first Spitting Image book, published in 1985. Not that it was new to me. It was a favourite of mine as a teenager in the 90s. I once lent a girl my copy of it in one of my last years at secondary school, who I then proceeded to fail to have sex with.¹

Now, I knew that Rob Grant and Doug Naylor wrote Red Dwarf; even back then, I was as interested in who wrote something as who starred in it.² I also vaguely knew that they had something to do with Spitting Image, and clocked their names mentioned in the book. These days, I know all about how Grant Naylor essentially waded in halfway through Series 1 of Spitting Image and saved the show, but I didn’t really know the details at the time.

Nor did I notice the following. One of the double page spreads in that first Spitting Image book is a parody of teen photo story magazines; specifically, My Guy. They did a bloody good job too; the layout is identical. Click/tap for a bigger version:

But hang on, what’s that silliness, happening right at the end of the strip?

Yes, the story falls apart, because… the wrong film came back from the chemist, and they got some skiing holiday snaps instead!

Which is fascinating for all kinds of reasons. Partly because of something else I posted about recently; about how easily some of Red Dwarf‘s supposedly science fiction ideas turn out not to be rooted in science fiction at all. It’s also interesting because it specifically marks the photo story parody as being at least partially the hand of Grant Naylor; none of the individual pages in the book have author credits.

But most of all, I love it because I’ve always loved that Spitting Image book. Like The Young Ones spinoff book Batchelor Boys, it was part of my comedy education growing up; a way of experiencing the show without the cost of endless blank tapes, or expensive commercial videos. Yet somehow, I’d never linked that skiing joke in the photo story to the Red Dwarf moment before, despite the knowledge that Grant Naylor worked on both shows. A brand new path suddenly opened up in my brain, connecting two things completely unexpectedly.

I find it utterly delightful.

Most of my teenage anecdotes end like this. I did once lend a girl a copy of Craig Charles’ The Log, in exchange for a feel of her breasts. This is the best thing that book ever achieved for anybody. ↩
If I’m honest, it still bemuses me today that everybody doesn’t think like this. ↩

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Broken Dreams

Published 30th July 2022

TV Comedy

Discussing the influences and antecedents of Red Dwarf can be tricky. Do we look at the show in terms of its science fiction, or as a sitcom?

In terms of science fiction, albeit comic science fiction, Dark Star is the big one. The idea of having normal people rather than heroes, and in particular its portrayal of working class people in space, seems to have originated here for Grant Naylor. Alien also feeds into this, along with influencing many sets in the show, not to mention all the shenanigans in “Polymorph”. Holly clearly has his roots in HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey¹, and so does the first opening theme tune.

As for pure sitcom, there’s the classic “Steptoe and Son in space”, which is often thrown around as an early concept for the show. Porridge is also endlessly mentioned, in terms of the claustrophobic situation between characters which the show was trying to evoke. All of this is certainly true, but with the odd honourable exception, there’s typically very little analysis beyond mentioning a TV show or film, along with a one line description.

And then there’s Hancock’s Half Hour. A show which doesn’t immediately spring to mind when talking about Red Dwarf. Yet the episode “The Tycoon” (TX: 13/11/59) has a number of remarkable similarities to the Red Dwarf episode “Better Than Life” (TX: 13/9/88), broadcast nearly thirty years later. Moreover, I don’t just mean in terms of character work – the main plot beats of the episode are broadly identical, despite “Better Than Life” seemingly hanging off a science fiction idea which Hancock would find impossible to replicate.

Rather than vague hand-waving or simplistic single line reductions, let’s take a look at both episodes in detail, shall we?

[Read more →]

A fact made more obvious by looking at Red Dwarf‘s precursor “Dave Hollins: Space Cadet” in Radio 4’s Son of Cliché, featuring… Hab. ↩

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originally on G&T, red dwarf

Tales From BBC North West’s Scene Dock

Published 10th July 2022

Children's TV / TV Comedy

Sometimes, if I put on my magenta-tinted spectacles, I think that the most fun I ever had with Red Dwarf was in 1994. That was the very first time I watched the series, and indeed the very first time the show had been repeated from the beginning at all. So I could blithely enjoy the show without being troubled by what other people thought of it… or specifically, what the writers thought of it.

So the fact that Rob Grant and Doug Naylor hated the grey sets by production designer Paul Montague in the first two series of Dwarf was unknown to me. I really liked them. I also liked the new sets from Series III onwards, by Mel Bibby. I just… liked Red Dwarf an awful lot. And Grant Naylor poking fun at the sets of their own show in Me² (TX: 21/3/88) entirely passed me by.

LISTER: But why are they painting the corridor the same colour it was before?
RIMMER: They’re changing it from Ocean Grey to Military Grey. Something that should’ve been done a long time ago.
LISTER: Looks exactly the same to me.
RIMMER: No. No, no, no. That’s the new Military Grey bit there, and that’s the dowdy, old, nasty Ocean Grey bit there. (beat) Or is it the other way around?

Truth be told, I still love those early Red Dwarf sets, and no amount of people who actually worked on the show slagging them off will change that. In particular, I think the endless permutations of the same basic sections did a really good job at selling the ship as something genuinely huge, and I don’t think this is acknowledged enough. I didn’t even mind the swing bin.

Ah, yes, the famous swing bin. Of all the elements made fun of with those first two series, this one is a perennial. You can see it in action during the very first episode, “The End” (TX: 15/2/88), in McIntyre’s funeral:

It is undeniable: McIntyre’s remains are blasted into space through the medium of a kitchen swing bin, built into a circular table-like object. The commentary on this scene in the 2007 DVD release The Bodysnatcher Collection is brutal:

DOUG NAYLOR: The idea of this is was that it’s supposed to be quite moving, wasn’t it?
ROB GRANT: Yeah, I liked this scene in the script, because it was tender, and a different tone.
DOUG NAYLOR: Yes, but obviously it’s not working as conceived? Now first of all…
ROB GRANT: The canister.
DOUG NAYLOR: The canister, and then the… kitchen bin.
ROB GRANT: Just fantastic! But he pressed that button good, that’s good button-pressing acting… I mean, what is that? It’s not even a good bin, is it?
DOUG NAYLOR: And because there’s nothing in the bottom of the kitchen bin, it just thuds to the bottom, and I think eventually they put tissues in so it didn’t make that terrible clanking noise.
ROB GRANT: Oh dear Lord.

The above scene did actually go out as part of the first episode. But our notorious swing bin also played a big part in what has become one of the most famous deleted scenes in the whole history of Red Dwarf. Shot during the original recording of the first episode, but cut from transmission, we see Lister trying to give a respectful send-off to the crew.

Rimmer’s “What a guy. What a sportsman” is one of the great lost lines of Red Dwarf, as far as I’m concerned. Swing bin or no.

So, what happened to our notorious prop, after the first episode was completed? Well, it hung around in the Drive Room set for the rest of the series, sometimes used as a table whenever the need arose:

Waiting for God

Confidence & Paranoia

But once those first six episodes were over, that was it. Series 1 was recorded at the tail end of 1987; when Series 2 started recording in May 1988, not only was our famous swing bin prop nowhere to be seen, but the entire Drive Room set had been replaced, with something rather less… grey.

Series 1 Drive Room

Series 2 Drive Room

Surely our swing bin was never to be seen again?

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Bad Teenager

Published 14th May 2022

Life / TV Comedy

It’s funny, the things you remember. The things you remember when everything else surrounding is a dull haze. Standing out in the middle: a conversation with someone who I used to know at primary school, but saw less often now I was at secondary.

I can’t even remember how old I was. I got into Red Dwarf in 1994 when I was 13, so it must have been after then. A couple of years later? We’d talked about the show before, anyway. And then once, during a normal conversation, he suddenly informed me that he didn’t like Red Dwarf any more. He’d grown out of it, you see. The show was for kids.

I was confused. I mean, the show definitely wasn’t made for kids. Even forgetting its teenage audience, the show was clearly made for adults. But he was adamant. He’d grown out of the show, and – by heavy implication – I was a baby for still liking it. Oh well.

Looking back, that was the moment when I realised that some people won’t be honest with you about this stuff. That some people will worry more about how they look, than about what they like.

This guy’s contempt for a show he used to enjoy was just teenage posturing.

* * *

A few years later, I was standing in a bowling alley, attempting to be an American teenager. I was in a group. A… mixed group.

Somehow, the conversation got onto the Spice Girls. My best friend slagged off “Mama”. I was confused.

“But I thought you said you liked that one!”

Awkward silence. My friend was livid. But I fancy that even the girls thought I hadn’t really played ball with society’s expectations.

I never was very good at that pesky teenage posturing.

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Tonight’s Special Guest Star: Adolf Hitler as Himself

Published 20th March 2022

TV Comedy

It is perhaps a mark of the kind of show Red Dwarf is that an episode can start with having Lister climb into a living photo featuring Adolf Hitler, beat him up, nick his briefcase, and accidentally foil an assassination attempt.

Nevertheless, ten minutes into “Timeslides” (12/12/89) that is exactly what has happened, leading to Rimmer’s memorable line: “You can’t just stick one on the leader of the Third Reich.” But we’re not here to talk about the actual comedy in the episode. That would be ludicrous.

No, we’re here to talk about this prop newspaper:

News Chronicle newspaper: headline Hitler Escapes Bomb Attack at Nuremberg

In grand time travel story tradition, this is the shot that tells us that what Lister did is real. His leap into the living photograph had actual, lasting repercussions for the universe; it didn’t exist in its own little bubble. It’s the revelation that powers the whole rest of the episode.

It’s also the kind of shot which makes me think: hang on, did they make that newspaper front page from scratch, or is it based around a real one? Of course it made me think that. I have form.

[Read more →]

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best of, newspaper props, red dwarf

Jump The Shark ²

Published 14th March 2022

Meta / TV Comedy

I write about Red Dwarf a lot on here. Far more than I ever actually intended to. I thought, after 17-odd years¹ of talking about the show on Ganymede & Titan, that I might be kinda done with it. Turns out that there’s a particular strain of production nonsense that I still find interesting, and it can’t be kicked out of me.

But there is one aspect of the show that I don’t really talk about these days. One which probably deserves a bit of explanation. Let me quote a tweet I received yesterday; name stripped because this is about me, not them. In reply to my recent piece about the sets in “Back to Reality”:

“The last ever episode of Red Dwarf.

(Any episodes you may remember being made after this one are merely a product of your fevered imagination.)”

Now, did I find this tweet annoying? Yes, I did. But partly for a reason that this poor unfortunate person could never have known.

Because: after all those years in Red Dwarf fandom, I cannot over-emphasise how bored I am talking about when Red Dwarf stopped being good.

I mean, I have my opinions. God, I have my opinions. I could spray them all out to you right now, like so much fetid diarrhoea. But I talked about that shit for 17 years. It’s a topic which creeps in when you least expect it to. You could be having a lovely little chat about the mechanics of time travel in “Timeslides”, and suddenly somebody’s dislike of Series VII pops up in the conversation and ruins the whole thread.

I’m not exaggerating. It’d happen literally all the time. Sometimes, it would be me throwing the VII-bomb in, because I couldn’t fucking help myself.

Not that this is a purely VII thing. I also took part in podcasts about quite a few series that I didn’t really like very much. Don’t get me wrong; some of those podcasts were very good indeed, albeit not because of me. But I sometimes found making them a stressful experience; I wrote this in 2017 which captures some of my frustration. It’s not always much fun to be part of something like that, only to end up whining like hell. You get sick of the sound of your own voice.

To be clear, this isn’t a jab at fandom per se, Red Dwarf or otherwise. There is a nasty habit some people have of focusing on all the bad things about fandom, and ignoring the good. I have zero time for that point of view. Fandom of all kinds has been responsible for so many amazing things. I’ve especially warmed to fanfic and fanart for certain TV shows over the last few years, which I incorrectly turned up my nose at for ages.

But when I write about Red Dwarf now, it’s with a very specific aim. It’s about taking the bits of the show I love, and seeing what makes them tick. I really want to try and avoid all the old boring conversations about which episodes of the show are any good; I’ve done them to death. Nor am I interested in having any kind of opinion about the episodes I’m not that keen on. I’m reclaiming my love for the show by avoiding the stuff I’m bored with, and forging ahead with brand new actual facts. There’s always something new to discover.

So if anybody wonders why I don’t get into those discussions… there you are. Fandom can be great, but it can also leave scars. Consider the articles I write on here my laser removal treatment.

Very odd. ↩

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Leisure World International

Published 13th March 2022

TV Comedy

Red Dwarf‘s “Back to Reality” (RX: 5-6/12/91), befitting its story, has something of a dual nature. In many ways, it’s a bold, unusual episode, pushing Red Dwarf to places it had never been before. In other ways, it’s just the natural conclusion to themes which had been present in the show from the very beginning. It’s not like one of the best sitcom episodes of the 90s sprung out of the television without warning.

Nevertheless, perhaps more than any other episode of Red Dwarf, it absolutely commits to its central idea. Seven minutes in, our crew are dead, and thrown into their nightmare. And one thing which makes it feel unlike any other episode is how few of the usual standing sets it uses. Just Starbug. The rest of our familiar, friendly haunts are nowhere to be seen.

Which presents the show with an interesting production problem. At the end of the series¹, Production Designer Mel Bibby suddenly has to pull out a brand new bunch of sets, just for a single episode. From scratch.

[Read more →]