Red Dwarf

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{{Infobox_Television | show_name = Red Dwarf | image = Image:Red dwarf logo.png | caption = Red Dwarf logo | format = Science fiction Britcom | runtime = 30 mins | creator = Grant Naylor
(Rob Grant and Doug Naylor) | starring = Chris Barrie
Craig Charles
Danny John-Jules
Norman Lovett
Hattie Hayridge
Robert Llewellyn
C. P. (Clare) Grogan
Chloë Annett
Mac McDonald | country = United Kingdom | network = BBC | first_aired = | last_aired = | num_episodes = 52 (+2 bonus/lost) }}

This article describes the British science fiction comedy television series. For the type of star, see Red dwarf.

Red Dwarf is a British science fiction sitcom that ran from the late '80s to the late '90s, the last new episode being broadcast in 1999. It was created and originally written by Grant Naylor (a so-called "gestalt entity", in reality a collective pseudonym for the writing duo Rob Grant and Doug Naylor).

Despite the pastiche of science fiction used as a backdrop, Red Dwarf is primarily a character-driven comedy, with many off-the-wall science fiction elements used as complementary plot devices. For example, in the early series a recurring source of comedy was the 'odd couple' relationship between Lister and Rimmer, its two central characters.

Contents

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Scenario

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
See also: List of Red Dwarf episodes

Image:RedDwarfCast.jpg The mining ship Red Dwarf is a spaceship 5 miles long belonging to the Jupiter Mining Corporation. An on-board radiation leak kills everyone except for low-ranking technician Dave Lister, who was in suspended animation at the time, and his pregnant cat, Frankenstein, who was safely sealed in the cargo hold. Lister had smuggled Frankenstein aboard the ship following shore-leave on Titan, but had been caught in possession of the illegal life form and was sentenced to eighteen months in stasis. Following the accident, the ship's computer Holly had to keep Lister in stasis until the background radiation had died down - a process that took three million years. Lister therefore emerged from stasis as the last human being alive - but not the only lifeform onboard the ship. His former bunkmate and immediate superior Arnold Rimmer, a cowardly and neurotic man, was resurrected by Holly in hologrammatic form after the accident to keep Lister sane, while a creature known only as The Cat is the last surviving member of Felis sapiens, a race of humanoids that evolved in the ship's hold from Frankenstein in the millions of years that Lister was in stasis.

The main dramatic thrust of the series is Lister's attempt to get back to Earth (indeed, in the novels, this was introduced as a desire of his even before the accident stranded him three million light-years away). Along the way, however, are frequent distractions that usually see the not-so-intrepid Dwarf crew encountering strange races and lifeforms that have developed in the intervening millions of years (although a core tenet of the series is that there are no aliens anywhere in the universe - every element of the large and bizarre mix of intelligent life within the Red Dwarf universe is in one way or another derived from Earth, a result of developments in robotics and/or genetic engineering).

Furthermore, the crew roster changes as the years go by. During the second series, the Dwarfers encounter the sanitation mechanoid Kryten, rescuing him from a long-since crashed vessel. Initially, Kryten leaves Red Dwarf to go and start a new life tending a garden of his own creation, but by the beginning of series III he has been picked up again, having crashed into an asteroid, and remains with the crew for the remainder of the series' history. At the end of series V, however, disaster strikes when Lister loses Red Dwarf, having forgotten which planetoid he parked it around. This forces the crew to travel in the smaller Starbug craft for two series, with the added side-effect that they lose contact with Holly. And in the seventh series, Rimmer departs the crew to take up the role of his alter-ego from a parallel universe, Ace Rimmer, whose name has become a long-standing legend and a legacy passed down from dimension to dimension. Shortly afterwards, the crew find a replacement for Rimmer when they encounter another parallel version of themselves. In this universe, it was Kristine Kochanski - Lister's ex-girlfriend and long-time crush - that went into stasis, while Lister died and was brought back as a hologram. A complicated series of events leaves Kochanski stranded in "our" universe, and she is forced to join the crew.

Finally, in the eighth (and so far final) series, Red Dwarf itself is reconstructed by the "nanobots" that had stolen it and broken it down into its constituent atoms. In the process, the entire crew of the ship - including Rimmer - are resurrected, but the Starbug crew all find themselves sentenced to two years in the ship's brig on a set of convoluted charges.

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Characters and actors

Main article: Red Dwarf characters
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Regular cast

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Recurring guest characters

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Guest actors

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Production history

The first series aired on BBC2 in 1988. Seven further series have so far been produced, and a film is supposed to be in pre-production, though little has been heard of it in recent years (see below under Spinoffs). The idea was originally developed from the Dave Hollins: Space Cadet sketches introduced on Grant and Naylor's BBC Radio 4 show Son of Cliché. Having first written the pilot script for Red Dwarf in 1983, former Spitting Image writers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor had hawked it around a number of places before it was finally accepted by BBC Manchester in 1986, a happy result of a spare budget being assigned for a second Happy Families series that would never arise. The show was lucky to be remounted after an electrician's strike partway through rehearsals shut the entire production down, and the first episode, 'The End', finally made it onto screens on 15 February 1988.

Grant and Naylor wrote the first six series together, before Grant left in 1996 leaving Naylor to write the next two with a series of new and less well-known writers, notably including Paul Alexander, as well as actor Robert Llewellyn. Other non-professional writers (including Stephen Carlyle-Smith) were interviewed prior to Series VII (and as part of this provided synopses of possible future episodes) but were not taken on.

For the most part, Ed Bye produced and directed the series. He left before Series V due to a scheduling clash, and Juliet May took over as director, but she parted ways with Grant and Naylor partway through the series for personal and professional reasons. Grant and Naylor took over direction of the series in addition to writing and producing. Series VI was directed by Andy De Emmony, with Bye returning for the final two series.

Series I, II and III were made by Paul Jackson Productions, with subsequent series produced by the writers' own company Grant Naylor Productions, all for BBC North; all eight series were broadcast by the BBC on BBC2. At the beginning of series IV production moved from the BBC's Manchester studios to Shepperton.

The theme tune and incidental music were written by Howard Goodall and performed by Jenna Russell. Goodall also wrote music for the show's various songs, including 'Tongue Tied', with lyrics written by Grant and Naylor, which Danny John-Jules reorchestrated and released as a top-20 single. Craig Charles wrote, performed and sang 'Cash' from the episode 'Timeslides' with his band.

A period of four years elapsed between Series VI and VII, partly due to the imprisonment and subsequent exoneration of Craig Charles, but also due to cast and crew working on other projects (notably The Brittas Empire) and disputes over pay. When the series returned, it was filmised and no longer in front of a live audience (a common misconception is that canned laughter was used, when in fact the completed episodes were later shown to an audience). Although critics praised the higher production values for Series VII, many fans hated it, and when the show returned two years later for Series VIII, it had dropped use of the filmising process and restored the live audience.

In 1998, on the tenth anniversary of the show's first airing (between the releases of Series VII and VIII), the first three series of Red Dwarf were remastered and released on VHS. The remastering included reformatting the series in 14:9 widescreen, applying the same 'field-removal' film effect as series VII, replaced model shots with computer graphics, cut various small pieces of dialogue (and, in some cases, entire scenes) and updated music and ambient sound effects. Red Dwarf Remastered was met with a generally poor fan reaction in the UK, but massive international broadcast success. No further series were remastered and the later DVD releases of the same series reverted to the original versions, although the first episode of Series VII (Tikka to Ride) would also include an alternate "Remastered" version, featuring upgraded CGI as the only difference to the original broadcast version.

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Spin-offs

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Books

The franchise has expanded to include four novels, written by the show's creators, Doug Naylor and Rob Grant (under the combined name of Grant Naylor).

These novels contain deeper insights and more thorough backstories for the main characters, as well as more information on humanity's future state of affairs. Rather than adapting the show outright, the books provide yet another, possibly idealized version of the series' backstory. They reinterpret and reposition elements from past episodes, and even introduce ideas that would later be used in the show.

For various reasons, Grant and Naylor decided to both work alone when writing the sequel to Better Than Life, and so two completely different, contradicting sequels were made. Last Human (by Doug Naylor, who would go on to make two further television series) introduced Kochanski to unsuspecting fans and felt very much like series seven of the TV programme, while Backwards (by Rob Grant) was more in keeping with the previous two books, feeling much like series six. The styles of these sequels vary wildly from the two predecessors and each other. While opinion differs strongly on which solo effort is superior, neither matched the widespread fan acclaim of the original co-written novels.

All four books were published in audiobook format, the first two read by Chris Barrie with Last Human read by Craig Charles and Backwards read by its author Rob Grant.

The BBC World Service re-recorded the first two books as The Red Dwarf Radio Show with Chris Barrie narrating and included additional sound effects. The first series was broadcast on 3 December 1995 to 17 February 1996 and the second March 13 1997 to March 28 1997.

Other books include:

  • The Official Red Dwarf Companion - 1992 - Bruce Dessau - ISBN 1852864567
  • Red Dwarf VIII Scriptbook - 1999 - Doug Naylor et al - ISBN 1852278722
  • Red Dwarf Programme Guide - 2000 - Chris Howarth & Steve Lyons - ISBN 0753504022
  • The Space Corps Survival Manual - 1996 - Doug Naylor & Paul Alexander - ISBN 0749323744
  • The Red Dwarf Quiz Book - 1994 - Nicky Hooks & Sharon Burnett - ISBN 0140236627
  • Red Dwarf Log No. 1996 - 1995 - ISBN 0434003700 (Diary)

There have also been two script books - Primordial Soup (1993, ISBN 0140178864) and Son Of Soup (1996, ISBN 0140253637) - each containing six scripts, and an extremely rare short book entitled Scenes From The Dwarf (ISBN 0146002431) was also released in 1996 as part of the Penguin 60s series, and contained scripts of a handful of scenes from the series.

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U.S. version

A pilot episode for an American version was produced for NBC in 1992, though never broadcast. The show followed essentially the same story as the first two episodes of the original series compressed into one 45-minute episode, substituting American actors (including Craig Bierko as Lister, Chris Eigeman as Rimmer, and Hinton Battle as the Cat) for the British; exceptions being Robert Llewellyn, who reprised his role as Kryten, and the British actress Jane Leeves as Holly.

A later, extremely low-budget network promo consisting of scenes from the first pilot edited in with new footage (and featuring Terry Farrell as a female Cat) was also unsuccessful.

Clips from the first pilot can be found on the DVD of Series 5 in the featurette Dwarfing USA, along with interviews with the British cast and Doug Naylor. Bootlegs of the pilots are widely circulated among Red Dwarf fans, and sold at conventions.

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Red Dwarf: The Movie

Since the end of series VIII, Doug Naylor has been attempting to get funding to make a feature length film version of the show, but on every occasion so far has been thwarted by circumstances. He has long persisted with his conviction that the making of the movie (for which the script has been written for many years) takes precedence over the production of a ninth TV series. On the Series VIII DVD documentary "The Tank", however, he admits to being - perhaps mindful of the age and schedules of the principal cast - close to having to make a final, outright decision of whether to continue to pursue the film, make a series IX or some one-off TV special(s) (as Only Fools & Horses did previously), or simply end the series as is.

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Tongue Tied

The song "Tongue Tied", originally featured in a dream sequence in the episode Parallel Universe, was rearranged and rerecorded by Danny John Jules (under the name "The Cat") and released as a single in 1993. It reached number 17 in the UK charts. It was expected to get higher, but a planned Top of the Pops performance never eventuated, thus halting momentum for the single.

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DVD and video

All eight series are available on DVD in Regions 2 and 4, each release accompanied with a feature-length documentary about the making of the respective series and a bonus disc filled with extra material. The DVD releases have been praised for their particularly extensive bonus material, which includes cast commentaries, exhaustive deleted scenes, raw effects footage, previously-broadcast one-offs and specials about the show, amateur fan films and much more, including in one instance a special audio/part-animated version of an unmade episode, performed by Chris Barrie. Series I-VII are also available in Region 1, with the eighth and (currently) final series due for release in May 2006 [1]. There are also various country-specific releases, usually without extras, across the globe.

Regions 1, 2 and 4 have also seen the release of Just The Shows : Volume 1, a special digipack boxset containing all the episodes from series I-IV without any extras. Volume 2 is expected in Autumn 2006. In late 2006, meanwhile, an Interactive Quiz DVD entitled Red Dwarf : Beat The Geek will be released. The quiz will allow "hardcore fans" to compete against casual viewers, in addition to offering general knowledge questions for friends/family not au fait with the series[2].

Prior to the DVD releases, all eight series had been available on VHS. All the videos are now deleted, but none - save for "Six Of The Best" - are particularly rare. Three episodes of Series VII were also released as special "Xtended" versions with extra scenes and no laugh track (these "Xtended" episodes would later be included on the DVD), while the the Remastered versions of series I-III were released individually and in a complete boxset. A special limited edition "Six Of The Best" boxset was released in 1997, featuring one episode from each (then-existing) series selected by the writers, and an audio CD of discussion and commentary by Rob Grant, Doug Naylor and Ed Bye (this discussion would later be split up and used as extras and easter eggs on the DVD releases).

Finally, two outtake videos were released, the famed Smeg Ups in 1994 and its sequel Smeg Outs in 1995. Smeg Ups contained outtakes from series IV-VI, with brand new specially-recorded links performed by Robert Llewellyn as Kryten, and featured the never-before-seen original ending of Out Of Time. Smeg Outs featured outtakes from the first three series, with more new links (now also featuring Craig Charles in character), in addition to the full-length video for Tongue Tied. These videos were a strong commercial success, and Red Dwarf's outtakes remain among the most famous in television. All the outtakes featured on the videos have now been included on the relevant DVDs, but the links have yet to be re-released. However, Smeg Ups is set to be re-released on UMD in June 2006, with Smeg Outs to follow "for Christmas" [3].

Meanwhile, three episodes - Marooned, Quarantine and Cassandra - are also available to view on selected mobile phones on a "ROK Chip".

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Notable series characteristics

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Fandom

Red Dwarf is known for its extremely cult status, largely due to its position in the sci-fi genre, and also due to the fact that it initially garnered low viewing figures (starting fairly strongly but dropping off to the point where a second series may not have even been commissioned [4]) but began to gain momentum on repeat showings and on video. That said, many have in recent years questioned its position as "true" cult nowadays, since it is one of the most well-known sitcoms ever to come out of the UK; it ranked 18th in the BBC's 100 Best British Sitcoms, received over eight million viewers during its eighth series [5], and has been syndicated worldwide to great success.

Nevertheless, Red Dwarf does attract a certain kind of fan, often a curious hybrid of the sci-fi geek and the comedy buff. Most-commonly known as "Dwarfers" or "Smegheads", Red Dwarf fans are also notable among the sci-fi community for their large female proportion, and their propensity for obsessive trivia about the show (the Red Dwarf Quiz Books have been bestsellers, while a special quiz themed around the show was broadcast in 1998 entitled Universe Challenge).

Its official fan club is still going strong, some seven years after the show was last seen on air, and the annual convention "Dimension Jump" is consistently well-attended. There are also still a significant number of active fansites devoted to the show.

Notable celebrity fans of the show include Bill Clinton, Stephen Hawking, Terry Pratchett and Patrick Stewart, who famously recalled during BBC2's Red Dwarf Night in 1998 an incident whereby he was channel-hopping and came across an episode of the series, initially believing it to be "a ripoff of Star Trek" before it made him laugh and he became hooked.

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Mixed reactions

The many changes that were made to the series' cast, setting, creative teams and even production values from series to series have meant that opinions differ greatly between fans as to the quality of certain series. In particular, series VII was seen by many as a major disappointment - while much slicker and higher-budget in appearance, the shift away from outright sitcom and into something approaching comedy drama did not impress the majority of longstanding fans. Furthermore, the attempt to then shift back into traditional sitcom format for series VIII was greeted with a similarly lukewarm - and at times downright hostile - reception by many fans who felt that the level of humour in that series was far below that which they'd come to expect from the show. There was also a significant amount of criticism aimed at the decision to resurrect the entire crew of the Red Dwarf, as many felt this detracted from the series' central premise of Lister being the last human being alive.

On the other hand, there are many Red Dwarf fans who feel that series VII and VIII, either individually or as a whole, are the equal of - if not superior to - the earlier series, and the topic is therefore the subject of constant fervent debate among the show's fandom. Similar discussions revolve around the quality of series VI (seen by some as the strongest series, but by others as a descent into formulaic comedy with an unwelcome change of setting), although not to the same extent; and there are even those who argue that the show lost its way with the significant changes made after the second series.

Within the context of British comedy in general, meanwhile, Red Dwarf occupies a curious position. While revered by many - and still a successful programme, as recent DVD sales have shown (series IV and V were the third and fourth bestselling BBC DVDs respectively in 2005 [6]) - it is also often looked down upon by those in the comedy fraternity. This could be the result of any number of factors - its niche content, the fact that its writers largely worked alone and are noted for little else in the industry, or the "unfashionable" status of some of its cast members.

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Invented words

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Expletives

Red Dwarf famously employed a vocabulary of fictional expletives in order to avoid using potentially-offensive expletives in the show, and to give nuance to futuristic colloquial language. By far, the most famous example is smeg. Variations of the word include: smegger, smeghead, smeg off, smeg-for-brains, and smegging hell. The writers of Red Dwarf have stated that they invented the word and that it has no connection with any similar real words, such as smegma; however, lexicographer Tony Thorne, in his 1990 Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (ISBN 074752856X), reports instances of smeg (and derivatives) being used as a term of "mild contempt and even affection" among "schoolboys, students and punks" as early as the mid-1970s—a decade or so prior to the inception of the Red Dwarf phenomenon—and unequivocally traces the etymology of the term back to smegma.

Other invented expletives and euphemisms include goit (one who is annoying or awkward; perhaps adapted from the words git and oik) and gimboid (one who is stupid or clumsy; possibly an adaptation of the word gimp). Another term of abuse used in the show was the word gwenlan, the last name of Gareth Gwenlan, a former BBC head of comedy who had once passed on the show.

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Other

  • Bazookoid: The Red Dwarf crew's weapon of choice is the bazookoid. This is in actual fact a piece of mining equipment, and not officially a weapon. Obviously derived from the word bazooka.
  • Currency in use at the time Red Dwarf left the Solar System was apparently the dollarpound, divided into one hundred pennycents. It is also sometimes referred to as the "buckquid".
  • GELF: A class of beings that makes recurring appearances in the programme is the GELF, an acronym for Genetically Engineered Life Forms. This term was also used in the unrelated American series seaQuest DSV, which aired for three seasons in the early 1990s. As Grant and Naylor were keen never to include aliens in their series, GELFs are man-made beings, as are all the life-forms the Red Dwarf crew encounter - see also references to simulants and the polymorph.
  • Jozxyqk: In the episode "Bodyswap", Cat plays the word jozxyqk in a game of Scrabble, claiming it to be a cat word meaning "the sound you get when you get your sexual organs trapped in something."
  • Quagaar: The name of the species in which Rimmer believes will make him a real body, in the episode "Waiting for God". It turns out that the Quagaars never existed, the pod that he believed they resided in was actually a Red Dwarf garbage pod.
  • Shash: In the Series 5 episode "The Inquisitor", Kryten refers to a statement made by Lister as "complete and utter shash", leaving the viewer to assume that shash is synonymous with nonsense.
  • Simulant: A mechanoid that despises humans. They were created for war that never happened, and still are floating around the unknown parts of space. The Red Dwarf crew occasionally run into simulants.
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Continuity

The number of continuity errors contained in the series as a whole is huge. Grant and Naylor approached many of the timeline errors by simply ignoring them, but highlights include:

  • Probably the most famed example is of Lister having had his appendix out twice, as it is removed by Legion in series VI, despite the fact that Rimmer "remembers" having had it removed as part of the memories he is given by Lister in Thanks For The Memory. Rob Grant covers this in an interview by stating that Lister regrew his appendix during the episode DNA, while another explanation is found in Doug Naylor's novel Last Human, in which it is revealed that Lister was born with a double appendix.
  • In series 1 Lister has shared a total of 171 words with Kochanski(he had a better verbal relationship with his potted plant) and had never asked her out. By series IV they had dated for 3 months before she dumped him for a catering officer named Tim.
  • The number of people aboard the ship is 169 in Series 1, rose to 1,169 in Series IV, and was implicitly reverted to 169 in "Inquisitor". The Red Dwarf of the novels had a complement of 11,169 pre-radiation leak.
  • References to the series' pre-accident time period vary, with Lister describing himself as "an enlightened 23rd Century guy", even though the radiation leak is said to have happened in the 21st Century, and Lister was supposedly abandoned as a baby in the 22nd.
  • Lister drops a tombstone on one foot in the episode Thanks for the Memory, and the plastercast eventually appears on the other.

One way in which many of the series-to-series continuity errors can be explained away is by exploring the possibilities of different series taking place in alternate dimensions. Indeed, this is often used as a general explanation for the many changes in style (and characters' histories) between series II and III - with many fans taking the words "THE SAME GENERATION... NEARLY" in the opening episode's scrolling text as indicative of this. Indeed, it is at this point in the series that Grant and Naylor began to introduce elements from the novels' continuity (such as Lister and Kochanski having actually had a prior relationship) into the series.

A fan-written document entitled the Plot Inconsistencies Project has circulated around the internet for many years. Contributed to by a large variety of Red Dwarf fans, it documents just about every known continuity error in the show, in addition to attempting to come up with logical, in-continuity explanations for many of them, and was even used as reference by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor when writing the "Ten Most Asked Things About Red Dwarf" segment of Smeg Ups.

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Pastiche and parody

While Red Dwarf is a comedy series, there is a mistaken belief that it exists solely as a "parody" of existing sci-fi shows. This, however, is untrue - the sci-fi elements of the series are always treated seriously by Grant and Naylor, and indeed there are many concepts introduced by the series that would later go on to be used by more "serious" programmes. Nevertheless, like many sitcoms of its era, a number of its episodes contain references to other (not always sci-fi) films and television shows. These include:

  • The End - the first 2 series' opening theme is based on the soundtrack for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
  • Kryten - Kryten's favourite soap Androids is a parody of the real-life television show Neighbours. Kryten imitates Marlon Brando in The Wild One.
  • Queeg - Queeg's name comes from The Caine Mutiny, whilst Holly's line "This is mutiny Mr. Queeg." is based on Mutiny on the Bounty. "The Ballad of High Noon" plays as Holly goes to confront Queeg, and Holly's death is a parody of HAL's death in 2001: a Space Odyssey.
  • Backwards - The episode opens with high-speed text in the style of the introduction from the Star Wars films. Lister and the Cat talk about The Flintstones in the opening scene.
  • Marooned - The TARDIS from Doctor Who can be seen, hidden in the hangar for the very observant.
  • Polymorph - The episode was based on the Alien Quadrilogy. The cargo bay scene is supposed to resemble a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Heat-seekers produce a sound similar to that of the Star Wars lightsabres.
  • The Last Day - When Kryten asks "Is this the human value you call "friendship"?", Lister gives the grumpy response "Don't give me this Star Trek crap, it's too early in the morning!"
  • Camille - A parody of the popular film Casablanca. Also featured a scene where the Cat and Lister discuss Hammy Hamster from Tales of the Riverbank.
  • D.N.A. - Features the line "How can the same smeg happen to the same guy twice?", a reference to the Die Hard films. The Curry Monster's demise is in the manner of the death of the shark in Jaws.
  • Dimension Jump - The character of Ace Rimmer owes something to 007 star James Bond. The sound track was inspired by Top Gun's Take My Breath Away.
  • Meltdown - The scene where Rimmer inspects the Waxdroid troops resembles a scene in Full Metal Jacket.
  • Gunmen of the Apocalypse - The showdown scene pays tribute to High Noon.
  • Stoke Me A Clipper - Opens with another 007-esque sequence.
  • Beyond a Joke - The crew visit Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice World on the A.R. Machine.
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See also

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External links

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Cast links

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