red dwarf – Page 5

Pillow Talk on Night Network

Published 17th November 2020

This year on Dirty Feed, I’ve talked about identifying the dates of some of my early TV memories.

Here’s a little tale about identifying the date of somebody else’s.

* * *

Long before Paula Yates invited people On the Bed, Emma Freud was doing the same on Pillow Talk, part of ITV’s late night programming Night Network.¹ And who did she have on the bed in 1987? None other than a certain Chris Barrie, who spends much of the interview looking fairly uncomfortable. They should have just had sex in multiple different positions and had done with it.

A few things to ponder, then, before I reveal the real MEAT of what has turned out to be a rather remarkable little time capsule.

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For a far more detailed discussion of ITV’s late night efforts, you should listen to this podcast by Jaffa Cakes for Proust, which is truly excellent. ↩

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originally on G&T, red dwarf

Gold Digging

Published 7th November 2020

TV Comedy

It’s odd, the things you assume, with absolutely zero evidence whatsoever.

Take Red Dwarf repeats, for example. Over the years I’ve written countless stupid articles about the show. But one thing I never got round to is a full list of repeats Dwarf has had over the years. So if you want that, you should read Christopher Wickham’s excellent The Red Dwarf BBC Broadcasts Guide.¹

Still, one self-confessed omission from that article is anything to do with cable/satellite repeats and the like. I don’t intend to provide a full list of these, because while I might be a moron, I am not an absolute fucking moron. It seems worth asking one question, however: when was the first repeat of Red Dwarf in the UK which was not on the BBC?

Before researching this post, my massively naive guess was: around 1992. UK Gold launched on the 1st November of that year; I’d just assumed that repeats of Red Dwarf had been part of the channel from the very beginning. But then, I never had access to the channel back when it started; the first time I ever experienced the wonders of multichannel television was in the late 90s, when we got NTL analogue cable, and even then we couldn’t afford any of the extra pay channels. Instead, I whiled away my days cheating the receiver into giving me 10 minutes of free Television X. Believe me, when you’re 18, 10 minutes is all you need.

Anyway, there is a very easy way of telling when Red Dwarf was first shown on UK Gold, and it doesn’t involve doing any hard research. Just ask people on Twitter, and get them to do that hard work for you. And here is the answer from Jonathan Dent, cross-referencing the Guardian’s TV listings and this Usenet post. The repeats of Dwarf on UK Gold started with a double-bill of “The End” and “Future Echoes”, and premiered on the Sunday 5th October 1997 at 11:05pm.

UK Gold schedule for first showing of Red Dwarf

That’s a bloody great day of telly, isn’t it? But I digress.

What I find especially interesting about all this is that it coincides with the 1997 resurgence of Red Dwarf, which started with the first broadcast of Series VII 10 months previously, along with the programme’s first Radio Times cover. A resurgence which I look back on with mixed feelings, to say the least – but very much part of the second wave of the show and its fandom. Being someone who got into Red Dwarf during the 1994 BBC2 repeat season, I had no idea that I was already watching the show before it got its very first non-terrestrial UK showing. These repeats are all so much later than the history I had made up entirely by myself in my own head.

Now, would it be too much to hope for that this first broadcast on UK Gold was captured by someone on video? Maybe even with the accompanying – and presumably quite excitable – continuity announcement?

A version of this post was first published on Ganymede & Titan in September 2019.

In fact, you should read his blog Ludicrously Niche regardless. TV edits, gamebook analysis, and Radio Times capsules, who could want anything more from the internet? ↩

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originally on G&T, red dwarf

Emohawk: Covington Cross II

Published 25th October 2020

TV Comedy

“The Red Dwarf sets have been built on Stage G at Shepperton Studios, home of countless films and television projects, including The Third Man, Oliver!, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Mel Gibson’s Hamlet, for the past three seasons. Scattered amongst the workshops and sound stages at Shepperton are a number of disused backlots, which have proved to be a bonanza for the Red Dwarf production team. This year, they’ve already returned to the wooded glade used in last season’s ‘Terrorform’ to shoot exteriors for episode four, ‘Rimmerworld’, and next week they’ll be shooting segments of episode five, ‘Emohawk’, in a village of wooden huts – a set left behind by the short-lived American series Covington Cross.”

The Making of Red Dwarf, Joe Nazzaro, p. 17 (published 1994)

“The GELF settlement was a re-dressed medieval village set which had been created for the aborted British/American television series Covington Cross.”

“Emohawk: Polymorph II” Wikipedia entry (retrieved October 2020)

Any self-respecting Red Dwarf fan has a few standard facts at their disposal. The first recording dates for Series 1 were cancelled due to an electrician’s strike. Robert Llewellyn was electrocuted on his first day at work. “Meltdown” was put back in the episode order due to worries about the Gulf War.

Slotting in among these standard set of facts is that the village scenes in the episode “Emohawk: Polymorph II” were shot on an abandoned set for a series called Covington Cross. And that’s… kinda it. That is The Fact, done, ticked, off we go.

I don’t think that’s good enough. Let’s take a proper look.

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

Arnold J. Rimmer, BSc, SSc

Published 14th October 2020

TV Comedy

Sometimes a joke in a sitcom isn’t just funny, and doesn’t just reveal character. Sometimes, a joke is so good it literally seems to define your character. When Father Ted protests “that money was just resting in my account”, or Lieutenant Gruber sheepishly admits that “it was very lonely on the Russian front”, it somehow seems to be everything you need to know about them. A whole life, in a few short words.

For instance, take this joke in Series 1 of Red Dwarf (1988). As Lister prepares to watch Rimmer’s auto-obituary in “Me²”, he notices the following caption at the start.

HOLLY: “BSc, SSc?” What’s that?
LISTER: Bronze Swimming certificate and Silver Swimming certificate. He’s a total lunatic.

In that moment, you feel like you know everything there is to know about Arnold J. Rimmer. His abject failure to achieve anything, and his desperation to hide that by any means possible.

The thing is with these kind of jokes: they stick. When a joke means that much in terms of defining a character, the writers often can’t quite let go of it.

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best of, red dwarf, wally who?

That’s the Joke

Published 29th June 2020

TV Comedy

With all my WILD and CRAZY opinions, what do you think the most pushback I’ve ever had to something I’ve posted here on Dirty Feed? Saying something nice about That Puppet Game Show? Slagging off a beloved element of Animal Crossing? Posting BBC Micro porn in living colour? (Please believe me when I say that last link is genuinely NSFW.)

No. The most pushback I’ve ever had is when I said I agreed with John Cleese. No, not about those comments. About a perfectly innocuous Fawlty Towers joke. Specifically, the bit in “Gourmet Night”¹, where Basil faints while trying to introduce the Twichens to the Halls.

MR. HALL: No, no, we still don’t know the name.
BASIL: Oh, Fawlty, Basil Fawlty.
MR. HALL: No, no, theirs!
BASIL: Oh, theirs! So sorry! I thought you meant yours! [maniacal laughter] My, it’s quite warm, isn’t it? I could do with a drink, too. So, another sherry?
MR. HALL: Aren’t you going to introduce us?
BASIL: Didn’t I?
MR. HALL: No!
BASIL: Oh, sorry. This is Mr and Mrs… [mumbles]
MR. HALL: What?
BASIL: Er, Mr and Mrs…

Basil faints.

For years, I thought the joke was that Basil simply forgot the Twitchens’ name – him having forgotten his own name in the previous scene. But no. John Cleese explains all in the DVD commentary:

CLEESE: Now, what’s interesting here is that one of the best-loved jokes in Fawlty Towers, which is Basil fainting, is I’m afraid totally misunderstood by everyone who’s ever seen it, because – it is entirely Connie’s and my fault – it’s not set up properly. When Basil faints because he cannot remember Mr. Twitchen’s name, it’s not actually because he can’t remember Mr. Twitchen’s name. He can – but he’s talking to a man whose head is constantly twitching… and he doesn’t like to say “this is Mr. Twitchen” to someone whose head is twitching because that might annoy that person. So that’s actually what the joke is.

Anyway, in this piece on those commentaries, I made the error of admitting that I had misunderstood the joke too. And despite John Cleese literally explaining that it was a bad joke because too many people misinterpreted it, I’ve never had more people hinting that I was a bit of a moron. Someone even called me a “dunce”. I can only hope that my subsequent work examining exactly what was reshot of the Fawlty Towers pilot, and a long investigation into an early incarnation of the show now absolves me of dunce status.

All this got me thinking recently. If I sat here detailing all the jokes in sitcoms I’ve misunderstood over the years, I’d be here all day. But one particular example has always stayed with me, because it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out. And unlike the above example, it’s set up entirely correctly, and I should have no excuses.

So let’s take a trip to Red Dwarf – specifically, “Kryten”, and learn about decimalised music²:

RIMMER: It’s because you’re bored, isn’t it? That’s why you’re both annoying me.
HOLLY: I’m not bored. I’ve had a really busy morning. I’ve devised a system to totally revolutionise music.
LISTER: Get out of town!
HOLLY: Yeah, I’ve decimalised it. Instead of the octave, it’s the decative. And I’ve invented two new notes: H and J.
LISTER: Hang on a minute. You can’t just invent new notes.
HOLLY: Well I have. Now it goes: Doh, ray, me, fah, soh, lah, woh, boh, ti, doh. Doh, ti, boh, woh, lah, soh, fah, me, ray, doh.
RIMMER: What are you drivelling about?
HOLLY: Hol Rock. It’ll be a whole new sound. All the instruments will be extra big to incorporate my two new notes. Triangles will have four sides. Piano keyboards the length of zebra crossings. Course, women will have to be banned from playing the cello.
LISTER: Holly: shut up.

For an embarrassingly long time, I didn’t understand that last cello joke. I first saw the episode in February 1994, when I was 12, and maybe I should have got it then. Regardless: I didn’t. I can’t remember exactly when I did, but it had clicked by 2007.

There’s an odd thing, when you’ve watched a sitcom from an early age. An age where you get the idea of the programme, and many of the jokes… but miss a few obvious ones along the way, as well. Because my mind has a tendency to get a little – for want of a better word – stuck. When watching the same show as an adult, I hear the words, but the joke isn’t always heard afresh. The result: a joke that you would have got if you were coming to it for the first time remains impenetrable, long after you should understand it.

Well, that’s my excuse, anyway, and I’m sticking to it. Leave me alone.

“Gourmet Night” also contains perhaps the harshest and bleakest joke in the whole of Fawlty Towers. “How’s that lovely daughter of yours?” / “She’s dead.” Very rarely remarked upon amid the rest of Basil’s nonsense, but it’s properly horrific. ↩
A joke that Grant Naylor used in various forms for years. ↩

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fawlty towers, red dwarf

Great Expectations

Published 27th January 2020

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my other stuff, red dwarf

I’ve Covered My Website in Complete and Utter and Total Absolute Nonsense Gibberish

Published 27th December 2019

TV Comedy

Slightly alarmingly, it seems I have been writing for Red Dwarf fansite Ganymede & Titan for a full 16 years now. My oldest contributions there can now technically have sex with articles from a Doctor Who fansite, to produce the most unpleasant offspring you can imagine.

Still, over the years, my contributions – while definitely increasing in quality – have certainly decreased in quantity.¹ So this year, I set myself the challenge of updating the site at least once a month, a feat I haven’t managed since 2007. Slightly unexpectedly, I actually managed to achieve this.

Which means over the last year, I have provided answers to the following questions:

Which failed US TV show provided a set used in Red Dwarf VI?
Is the fifth episode in a six part series always the worst?
How on earth can you see the hull of Red Dwarf in the final moments of Filthy, Rich & Catflap?
Where can you see the first series of Rob Grant and Doug Naylor’s other audience sitcom?
Which member of Red Dwarf‘s cast used to have a human jukebox act?
What reshoots were needed to the first series of Red Dwarf because of Norman Lovett’s whinging?
What did a bunch of schoolkids think of the first series of the show?
Which article on the site did I get entirely bored of writing, to the point where you can detect weariness from the very first paragraph?
Likewise, how did I manage to get 907 words out of a particularly stupid topic, and not even reach any kind of conclusion?
What did Red Dwarf look like on public television in Iowa?
When was Red Dwarf first repeated on UK Gold?
If you had a time machine, how could you make shitloads of money out of Red Dwarf fans in the mid-nineties?
At exactly what point does Robert Llewellyn doing a Douglas Bader impression become highly uncomfortable?
Which show did Chris Barrie and Craig Charles appear on in-between the recording and broadcast of Series 1?

And to round everything off, I also wrote the G&T Christmas Message for this year; our traditional address to the nation rounding up all the Red Dwarf news over the last 12 months. Until fairly recently, I could have probably just written “that silly AA advert” and had done with it, but this month saw the first of two audience recordings for a new special to be broadcast next year. Meaning there will be a whole new spate of people saying “What, I thought Red Dwarf finished years ago with that dodgy one set in prison, I didn’t know there had been new episodes since then”, despite there being literally 21 brand new episodes made and broadcast since 2009.²

Away from the wacky world of Red Dwarf³, don’t forget that the 1st January sees the 10th anniversary of a particularly stupid website called Dirty Feed. So pop over here in the New Year for a celebration of the fact that very, very occasionally, I write something which doesn’t deserve immediately throwing into a large bin.

And not just because of an extended sulk in 2009 after Back to Earth. ↩
It’s no secret I’m not crazy about most of the new episodes, but if you haven’t seen any of the Dave-era shows and want to dip your toe in: my personal opinion is that Lemons, The Beginning, Officer Rimmer, M-Corp and Skipper are your best bets. ↩
Or “whacky”, if you really have to. ↩

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my other stuff, red dwarf

“The 100 Years War?”

Published 29th September 2019

Internet

I have to admit, Dirty Feed and podcasts is a bit of a sore point. I did three episodes in 2012… and the fourth one has yet to materialise. Yes, a wait of seven years and counting is taking the fucking piss. All I can say is that it will return one day. I’ve spent far too much on jingles for it not to.

I have been involved in another podcast these last few years, mind. Over on Ganymede & Titan, the Red Dwarf fansite which is unaccountably still running and updated in 2019, we just published our 100th episode of DwarfCasts. The reason we managed to get to 100 episodes is because all I have to do is turn up and speak loudly and annoyingly about Red Dwarf, rather than actually do any of the hard work of getting the show prepped, recorded, edited, and published. So when I say I’m proud of that 100th episode, it’s nothing to do with me, and everything to do with Ian Symes, who put that beautiful little documentary together.¹

Still, it got me thinking. Maybe 100 episodes of a podcast made over 13 years isn’t the most impressive thing in the world, even if that is 98 episodes more than most podcasts manage. But it strikes me that there’s something pleasant about devoting myself to the same thing for that length of time. Indeed, take a look at Ganymede & Titan as a whole – I’ve been writing for the site for 16 years and counting, and if you look back at the very first incarnation of the site, it’s been going for a full 20 years. And doing the same kind of thing for so long means that I’ve ended up writing and talking about areas that I never would have examined if I’d done what so many people did.

Because most sensible 90s Red Dwarf fans did the following: got a job, got a family, and stopped thinking that much about Red Dwarf. I managed the first two, but somehow never stopped doing the third. And sure, I’ve written about my frustration about that at times. I do have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the show these days.

But if I’d done what normal fans do, and drifted away from doing anything in fandom, I’d never have written some of my favourite pieces on the show. On the development of Holly in the early days of the show, on the very earliest stirrings of Rob and Doug playing with the nature of reality, or about how the glimmerings of one of Red Dwarf‘s most famous episodes can be seen in Hancock’s Half Hour, to name three of many.

All this is on my mind as we come up to this January, and the 10th anniversary of Dirty Feed. In one sense, anniversaries are an arbitrary waste of time. But as an excuse to take stock of where we are, and what’s to come, I find them useful. Over the last ten years, I’ve published stuff on here I love, and stuff which I now think is a bit crap. But the fact that I’ve been publishing stuff in the same place for a full ten years feels meaningful, somehow. As with the DwarfCasts, I haven’t been as prolific on here as I would have liked to have been; other bits of life got in the way. But over the years, it adds together into a really nice archive of fun stuff.

There’s an advantage to plugging away at the same thing for years, without getting bored and flitting to the next thing. You don’t have to give it endless chunks of your time each week. Nor do you have to worry about any kind of long-term plan, or where exactly it is you’re going. And after a few years, you may just look back in surprise.

Without even realising it, you’ve made something you’re proud of.

Shhhhhh. Don’t tell him I was nice about him. ↩

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Only as a Myth, a Dark Fable, a Horror Tale…

Published 18th June 2019

TV Comedy

This year, I’ve been trying to do a bit more writing than usual over on Ganymede & Titan, the Red Dwarf fansite run by “over-entitled pricks who are upset that it isn’t actually 1992 anymore”. And one thing I’ve been doing this year is taking some Standard Red Dwarf Facts™, and digging a little deeper than usual with them.

Here’s three of those pieces in particular that I think turned out OK.

G&TV: Covington Cross
This is one of the most endlessly parroted facts among Dwarf fans: the outside village from Emohawk: Polymorph II was an abandoned set from US series Covington Cross. Which, indeed, is absolutely correct. But nobody has ever actually gone through both shows and pinpointed shots where exactly the same parts of the set are used. I have, and for some reason I am proud of this.

Take the Fifth
This is a bit of an odd one, in that this is a “fact” that we had pretty much convinced ourselves of over on G&T: that the penultimate episode of each series of Red Dwarf is where they usually hid the worst episode of the run. But does this end up being true? (I would do well to examine my own assumptions more often.)

You Stupid Ugly Goit
Probably the best thing I’ve written so far this year, on a very early piece of Red Dwarf lore. It’s generally known that at the start of the production of Series 1, Norman Lovett was originally out-of-vision, and the decision was made to make Holly a visual character after shooting had already started. But the details of exactly what was reshot to make this happen are very complicated. I think I drag up a few new things to consider here.

* * *

Meanwhile, back to Dirty Feed. And although I published some fun stuff last month, overall things have been a little quiet over here recently. I do have some silly ideas in the works, though, building up to the site’s 10th anniversary next year.

Stay tuned, as the kids definitely don’t say any more.

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my other stuff, red dwarf

Set to Rights

Published 12th December 2018

TV Comedy

This year, I have been writing for Red Dwarf fansite Ganymede & Titan for a full 15 years. Anybody sensible would think that was more than enough, and go and do something else instead.

Spoiler: I am not sensible.

Recently I published two articles over there which might interest you, taking a look at the set design of the first couple of series. There’s this piece about the reuse of a certain corridor set, and then there’s this piece about the disappearing and reappearing Captain’s Office set. These are the first two parts of an ongoing series which should continue into next year.

Corridor pipes set, from Waiting for God

I’ve got to admit, it’s been fun writing these. I sometimes find Red Dwarf a little hard to write about these days; we’ve all talked about the old shows endlessly, so going over the same old thing can feel a little dull. Meanwhile, the new shows don’t really capture my imagination in a way which makes me want to write about them. But this really is a topic that hasn’t been talked about in quite this way before. I’ve watched those old shows countless times, but when you put everything else aside just to look at how those sets were put together, it’s amazing what new things you can spot.

I sometimes think there are two kinds of people. Those who understand why I find stuff like deleted scenes, unbroadcast pilots, and the reuse of sets to be fascinating… and those who can’t even begin to understand. I don’t think it’s even a geeks v. non-geeks thing per se: there are plenty of geeks who only care about a show in-universe, and possibly its cast members, rather than how the show was put together.

They won’t get a single thing out of this. But if you’re a silly person like me, then hopefully you’ll enjoy them.

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