Red Dwarf (XIII): The Promised Land

In the 21st 23rd 22nd Century (probably), the mining ship Red Dwarf was subjected to a lethal radiation leak that killed the entire crew. The ship's AI, Holly, aimed the ship out of the Solar system to prevent contamination. Sealed in the hold of the ship, a pet cat named Frankenstein had a litter of kittens. Their descendants, over three million years, evolved into a humanoid lifeform. There was a huge religious war, the result of confused race-memories of their god/owner, Cloister the Stupid, and the humanoid cats fled Red Dwarf on their own fleet of hastily-assembled ships, leaving behind only the stupid and bewildered. In the modern Cat Fleet, great religious arguments are again raging. Three true believers set out for the ship of their origin, to find their God...they may be risking some disappointment.

The qualitative trajectory of Red Dwarf's history is well-known: okay first season (1988), a solid gold classic "imperial period" consisting of Seasons 2 through 6 (1988-93), then three very disappointing seasons on the trot (1997, 1999 and 2009). Fans had largely written the franchise off, but an unexpected return to, if not form, at least adequacy saw another three seasons that were pretty solid (2012, 2016, 2017). Not classic, but pretty entertaining with some good ideas.

Unfortunately, this run could not continue. The show's four main actors had other commitments and were also getting on a bit, with the oldest castmember Robert Llewellyn in particular becoming less and less keen at the extensive prosthetics and makeup work needed to embody the character of Kryten in his sixties. Writer Doug Naylor also found the task of handling the entire show, from writing through producing to directing every episode of the last three seasons, to be quite demanding, meaning that a new season every year or even couple of years was not viable.

To square the circle, Naylor suggested a new approach: feature-length specials, approximately the length of three normal episodes but which could be edited into single long movies, with filming for all the episodes done simultaneously to make shooting as tight and efficient as possible. This would minimise the workload for everyone and allow the show to make return appearances well into the future.

The Promised Land was the first project to appear in this format. Writer Doug Naylor surprised fans by actually answering a question they'd been asking for decades: what happened to the other humanoid cats who abandoned the ship before Lister's awakening in the first episode? The show had teased this question but never really answered it, resorting instead to the old standbys of bringing in more GELFs (Genetically-Engineered Life-Forms) and simulants (killer androids) whenever it needed an outside threat. Naylor deemed the special a big enough canvas to bring back the rest of the cat species in force and find out what happens when they meet their god, and discover he's a middle-aged, curry-obsessed, lager-guzzling, unambitious geezer.

The story is reasonably decent, with a rare, excellent villain, this case Ray Fearon as Rodon, the tyrannical leader of the cats. The guest cast is also generally great, though unusually large by Dwarf standards, meaning that each guest character is only thinly-sketched and doesn't have much to do (Lister's three acolytes are a bit one-note). This is enhanced by the special also reintroducing Holly (Norman Lovett, returning after a brief appearance in the Season 12 finale) and giving the main cast a lot to do, including a new "Diamond Light" mode for Rimmer which turns him into a superhero, at least until his battery runs out. Surprisingly, the least-well-served character here is the Cat himself (Danny John-Jules). With the entire supporting cast being made up of cats, it feels like Naylor doesn't have as many cat-things for him to do. One late-breaking storyline hints at a larger role for him but this doesn't go very far.

Whilst the story is solid and there's a lot of extra interesting ideas to play around with, like Holly being reset to factory settings and immediately going hard on the characters because they're not disciplined, proper crewmembers (shades of Queeg here, but the show doesn't make the connection), it does feel like the allocated time is too much for the concept. Perhaps a tighter 60-minute story, split into two episodes for repeats, would have been better. As it stands we do have several chase sequences, a brief-but-fun space battle, and in the scenes where Starbug crashes in the desert, easily the most impressive vfx sequence ever created for the show.

There's also some ideas that Naylor has wanted to pursue since the very start of the series. He and Rob Grant had wanted to portray the holograms in the show in black-and-white as opposed to their full-colour crewmates, but 1980s vfx just wasn't up to it. Here he gets his wish as Rimmer goes onto low-power mode and spends a third of the story traipsing around in black-and-white (and plugged in to a wall socket!).

There's some nice ideas as Lister has to convince Rimmer to go on living, and has to deal with religious faith and the motivating force for it. Red Dwarf is at its best when it throws some big philosophical concepts into the mix, and it does that here successfully, though not as much as you might think given the storyline.

Events culminate in a reasonably clever ending with some big moments for all the characters. And, unfortunately, that's it for now. Since The Promised Land aired in early 2020, there have been no further adventures on-screen. Plans for a series of TV movies to follow this one up fell through when co-creator Rob Grant took legal action to regain part control of the franchise for his own planned TV prequel and additional novels, something Doug Naylor maintained was unnecessary and basically blocked any chances of new episodes being made. The situation was resolved, but too late; by the time the smoke cleared, the Dave TV network had suffered savage budget cuts and could no longer afford to make much in the way of original new TV. The BBC maintained its curious decades-long indifference to making new episodes, and Rob Grant's attempts to interest a streamer in a rebooted version of the show came to nothing.

Even more tragically, Rob Grant passed away earlier this year, taking the wind out of the sails for a lot of fans. Whilst new episodes cannot be ruled out - this show has come back from the dead more often than Optimus Prime, Superman, Batman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Kenny from South Park combined - it does feel more remote than previously, especially as the actors start edging into their seventies.

If this is how it ends...it's an okay way to go out. Red Dwarf: The Promised Land (***½) is fine. It has some good ideas, some good performances, some thoughtful and introspective moments, some outstanding vfx and some good laughs, and even gives Holly some really good story and character moments for the first time since arguably Season 4. There are some painful jokes that just don't land, the cast is a bit too large to allow everyone to be serviced well, and the pacing feels off. But we're a long way from the show at its worst, and if the show and franchise can't go out with a bang, maybe going out with a miaow instead is fine.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Red Dwarf X

Three million years into deep space, the crew of the Jupiter Mining Corporation ship Red Dwarf continue to try to find ways of staying sane. Unfortunately, the universe is not interested in helping them.

Back in 2012, it was fair to say there was trepidation awaiting the arrival of the tenth season of venerable British science fiction sitcom Red Dwarf. The show had just had three pretty weak seasons back-to-back-to-back, with co-creator and long-time co-writer Rob Grant still not involved, the prospects for the show being a success seemed limited.

It was with tremendous relief that Red Dwarf X turned out to be pretty good. Not on the level of the "imperial period" of Seasons 2-6, of course, but still a pretty fine run of episodes. It helps that the season has a lower budget than the last few, forcing Doug Naylor to rely on the strength of the scripts to sell the ideas instead of flashy vfx. We get more Lister-and-Rimmer two-hander scenes, the core of the show, and more creative use of the show's setting. The continuous reappearance of both GELFs (genetically-engineered lifeforms) and killer simulants through the last few seasons had become rote, but they are used more creatively in this season and some fresh life is breathed back into the old concepts.

The ideas are generally great: Rimmer getting to meet one of his superstar, space hero brothers as a hologram gives us some more grist for the Rimmer emotional turmoil mill, and the results are pretty funny. The storyline of Lister becoming his own father in Season 7 was weird, but here they revisit the concept in an original and amusing way, as well as showcasing a new, hyper-efficient computer. Another episode has the crew time travel to the first century and meet Jesus before he was well-known, but what could have been a bad-taste extravaganza turns out to be a surprisingly well-considered, even thoughtful yarn about what happens when you find out you're destined to become one of the single most famous humans to have ever lived. The season finale, featuring the arrival of a new type of killer simulant, is also very entertaining.

None of these episodes are challenging Marooned, Polymorph, Back to Reality or Thanks for the Memory in comedy, drama or pathos, but they each have something interesting to offer. It helps that Naylor is happy to row things back and tackle smaller-scaled ideas (Lister discovering the history of his ex-girlfriend through letters she sent him which have only just caught up with the ship) as happily as the really big SF ones, like an AI can foresee the next few seconds of a conversation with total accuracy, making it unnecessary to have the conversation  (shades of Cassandra from Season 8, but better-executed).

There are some negatives. There is still the occasional lowbrow and easy-pickings kind of humour that the earlier seasons tried to avoid. The relaxed approach to continuity, though by now such a feature of Red Dwarf that it mocks it itself, may aggravate some as the missing Kochanski, offline Holly and how Rimmer saved the ship in Season 8 are referenced but never explained. But it feels like the negatives are hugely lacking compared to what fans had endured for three seasons at that point.

Overall, Red Dwarf X (****) is a huge improvement over the preceding three seasons and highly enjoyable to watch, even if it still can't match the show in its prime.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Red Dwarf (IX): Back to Earth

Nine years have passed since the crew of Red Dwarf saved their ship from destruction at the hands of a matter-destroying microbial virus. In the meantime, Kristine Kochanski has apparently died in an airlock accident, Holly was offlined due to a water tank malfunction and the aging crewmembers have had to face the probability of them dying in deep space due to dwindling supplies. However, a sequence of unusual events sees them return to Earth...and gives Lister hope of a reunion with Kochanski.

Back in 1999, Red Dwarf VIII aired. Although the most critically-lambasted season to date, it also matched Red Dwarf VII's extremely high ratings (well over six million for some episodes, unheard of for a sitcom airing on BBC2). Fans could be excused for expecting the show to continue for many years to come. Instead, they got nothing.

The reasons why the show went off the air seem obtuse, but it seems to have been a combination of the enormous workload on Doug Naylor for writing and producing the series almost single-handedly (after the departure of his co-creator Rob Grant after Season 6) and his insistence, likely not coincidentally, on making a Red Dwarf feature film instead. Funding had apparently been sourced for a larger-budgeted theatrical theatre, only for this to fall through at the last moment. Additional funding was secured but again collapsed. By the time Naylor had gotten tired of this dance and gone back to the BBC, the BBC had lost interest. More bemusingly, they remained resolutely uninterested even after Doctor Who returned in 2005 and became a monster hit, and the BBC started looking for other genre TV ideas (such as Merlin) whilst ignoring their other proven, long-running SF success.

It fell to cable channel Dave to give the show its long-awaited resurrection. Made with what initially appeared to be a reasonable budget, Red Dwarf: Back to Earth (the "IX" is a retcon, applied solely to make the ordering of the seasons make more sense on streaming services and on media releases) was a surprise hit for Dave and led to the commissioning of further series. Critically, however, Back to Earth was mauled on release in 2009 and time has not been much kinder to it.

The mini-season starts promisingly, with some solid Rimmer/Lister gags in the bunk room on Red Dwarf. You may be wondering how the crew survived the events of the Red Dwarf VIII cliffhanger and how Rimmer is back again as a hologram and what happened to the hundreds of crewmembers who evacuated the ship...and you can go on wondering, as you'll get no answers here (to be fair, the wiki has a reasonable guess). More important to the plot is that Kochanski is apparently dead and Holly decommissioned due to a malfunction. There's some very solid CGI at work here, including some half-decent virtual sets and an excellent CG model of Red Dwarf itself, and the show's first move into high-definition is reasonably impressive.

The plot kicks in when the ship's science officer Katerina Bartokovsky is resurrected and promptly decides to retire Rimmer, whom she deems has failed in his mission to keep Lister sane. A sequence of events results in our familiar crew travelling to a parallel universe where their lives exist solely in a television series called Red Dwarf. In an increasingly metafictional story, the crew meet one of the actors playing them on the show and have to find their creator before he decides to write a final episode in which everyone dies, which would kill them in their reality as well.

This metafictional idea isn't necessarily a bad idea, and in fact has been explored in Red Dwarf before, particularly in the likes of Better Than Life and Back to Reality, but those episodes were co-written with Rob Grant. The Grant-Naylor partnership made those meta episodes work, but Naylor by himself struggles. Especially weird is that he latches onto the idea of basing some story ideas on the 1982 movie Blade Runner, a very fine film, but also quite an old one by that point with no guarantee that the general audience knew what he was referencing. The special also relies a lot on knowing that Craig Charles plays a character on soap opera Coronation Street and knowing whom some of the incidental actors were on that show, which dates it painfully. It's also not particularly funny, the direction (also by Naylor) is not great and the pacing is terrible. The lack of a laughter track also hurts the show's timing, with the actors visibly struggling at times with not getting any feedback.

However, the story does perk up whenever Lister has to confront the spectre of Kochanski's death and the parallel world giving him the opportunity to possibly meet her again. Red Dwarf is at its best when it mixes comedy with pathos, something it forgot in the last couple of seasons, and it does bring that element back here with some great scenes of emotional intensity for Craig Charles, which he rises to.

Beyond that, the special is, well, not very special. Some good ideas and great vfx are undermined by poor storytelling. Sophie Winkleman as Katerina is saddled with a terrible accent and sound mixing that makes her unintelligible in some sequences. For every joke that lands, there are at least three that do not.

Red Dwarf: Back to Earth (**½) is not totally without merit, with some impressive visual set-pieces and at least a few gags that land well. But poor pacing and direction undermine its better parts. After this special, fans started pondering if it was better for the show to simply end forever. Fortunately, the Dave channel had other ideas.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

RED DWARF celebrates its 32nd anniversary

Red Dwarf, the greatest SF sitcom of all time, today celebrates its 32nd anniversary.

The series launched on BBC2 in the UK on 15 February 1988 and has run - somewhat intermittently - ever since. It has chalked up 12 seasons and 73 episodes in that time, a rather modest amount given its longevity, but fans have cited the show's slow rate of release as being helpful to its quality, with the writers and actors only reconvening when they feel they have some new stories to tell.

The premise of Red Dwarf is that the crew of the five-mile-long mining vessel Red Dwarf are wiped out by a lethal radiation leak. The sole survivors are Dave Lister, who had been sentenced to temporal stasis for smuggling an unquarantined cat onto the ship; the aforementioned cat, safely hiding in the cargo hold; and Holly, the ship's computer with an IQ of 6,000. Holly steers the ship out of the Solar system to avoid contamination and waits until the radiation clears...which takes three million years. Lister awakens to find himself probably the last human being alive. His companions are Holly, who has been driven slightly loopy through loneliness; a humanoid creature who is the last known survivor of a race which evolved from his cat; and a holographic recreation of Lister's pedantic and officious superior, Arnold Rimmer.

Over the course of the series, the premise remains constant but also evolves. Kryten, a service mechanoid, is rescued from a wrecked ship in Season 2 and joins the crew full-time in Season 3. In Season 7 the crew are joined by Kristine Kochanski, Lister's ex-girlfriend whom they rescue from a parallel universe (she disappears again by Season 9); whilst in Season 8 they temporarily resurrect the entire crew of the ship. The crew become more knowledgeable and skilled in space travel, but also make a number of powerful enemies, including genetically-engineered mutants and a race of killer androids.

The main reason for the show's longevity, aside from the charisma of the central cast, is that the show is a comedy which just happens to be set in an SF setting, rather than a comedy which takes the mickey out of science fiction (as all too many failed SF sitcoms do). In fact, the show has featured often cutting-edge SF ideas like nanobots, genetic engineering and black/white hole theory, sometimes taken fairly seriously (although often with amusing outcomes for the crew and the plot). The spin-off novels were particularly notable for being written just after the writers had absorbed A Brief History of Time, hence becoming the first SF novels to mix jokes about class warfare, curries and football alongside discussions of spaghettification and quantum singularities. The author of the latter, Stephen Hawking, was a huge fan of Red Dwarf.

Red Dwarf is due back on screens later this year with a 90-minute special which finally addresses arguably the show's biggest dangling plot thread, the fate of the rest of the humanoid cat species.

Here's to 32 years of adventures with the smegheads, and hopefully many more to come.

RED DWARF TV movie commissioned for 2020

A two-hour Red Dwarf TV movie has been commissioned for release in 2020.

Red Dwarf is probably the longest-running sitcom in the world, in terms of the time from its commissioning without ever being formally cancelled: it was commissioned in 1987, aired its first two seasons in 1988 and its most recent season - its twelfth - in 2017. The show has also spun off a best-selling series of novels and a huge amount of merchandise.

Co-creator Doug Naylor spent many years during the show's longest hiatus (between its eighth season in 1999 and its ninth in 2009) working on a feature-length movie version of the story, several times bringing it close to filming only for funding to disappear. It is unclear if the new film is based on the same script.

The cast's growing age and commitments to other projects (which has frequently stymied reunion plans) has led to some speculation that this movie may mark the end of the Red Dwarf saga. This remains to be seen. For now, there will be some new Red Dwarf on screen in 2020.

Gratuitous Lists: The Ten Best RED DWARF Episodes

In honour of Red Dwarf's thirtieth anniversary today, it's time to take a look at the ten best episodes of the show's run.

The stories are not presented in quality order because at this level, there's not much between these episodes. This is the show firing at its very best and frankly all of these episodes are worth watching.

The End

Season 1, Episode 1

"Everybody's dead, Dave." The very first episode of Red Dwarf sets up a very strong premise, with Dave Lister, the lowest-ranking crewmember on the five-mile-long mining ship Red Dwarf (because the service robots have a better union than the human maintenance crew), being sentenced to spend the rest of the mission in temporal stasis after smuggling an unquarantined cat on board. This proves unexpectedly helpful when the crew is wiped out by a lethal radiation leak. Holly, the ship's AI (IQ 6,000, "the same as 12,000 traffic wardens"), steers the ship into deep space and waits for the radiation to die down to a safe background level...which takes 3 million years.

Emerging from stasis, Lister discovers his only company is the now-senile Holly, a humanoid lifeform who descended from his pregnant cat and a holographic recreation of Lister's commanding office, the painfully officious and unpleasant Arnold J. Rimmer.

It's a great premise which gets the show off to a good start (arguably the second episode, Future Echoes, is also required viewing as it sets up how the show can move beyond its limited premise), showcases the amazing cast and features some good gags. It all started here, and it's startling to think how far it would come.

Better Than Life

Season 2, Episode 2
Red Dwarf started off being quite claustrophobic, but in Season 2 the writers started finding ways of getting the crew off their miserably grey spaceship. In Better Than Life the crew get hooked into a video game designed to give them their fantasies. Unfortunately, the game is not prepared for the invasion of Rimmer's self-loathing, disturbingly twisted psyche which sets about sabotaging the game for everyone else with wild abandon. The result is an escalating series of catastrophes in the game as Rimmer's subconscious sets about destroying anything that threatens to make him or his friends happy. It's both extremely funny and also desperately sad and twisted as we realise for the first time that Rimmer has deep-seated reasons for being such an unpleasant man, which the series soon starts mining for great material.

Meltdown

Season 4, Episode 6

Red Dwarf is at its best when mixing pathos and comedy, mining the characters to produce funny material. But sometimes the show just likes to kick back and be absolutely daft with a high concept, in this case ripping the mickey out of the movie Westworld. This episode is definitely in that category. The crew arrive on "Waxworld", a theme park planet inhabited by wax-droids who are supposed to act out historical scenes for the edification of visitors. Unfortunately the droids have gone a bit insane over the last million years or so, and are now trapped into fighting a horrendous war based on their characters' programming.

Or, to put it another way, the episode features the crew teaming up with the unlikeliest band of heroes in history, consisting of Pythagoras ("Alas our numbers do not reach twenty-one; at least then we could form an equilateral triangle,"), Santa, Stan Laurel, Marilyn Monroe, Sergeant Elvis Presley, Gandhi ("DON'T EYEBALL ME GANDHI! Drop to your knees and give me fifty, now!"), Mother Theresa and Queen Victoria. Their enemies are the ultimate team-up of evil and depravity: Adolf Hitler, Rasputin, Emperor Caligula ("Bring hither the swimsuit with the bottom cut out and unleash the rampant wildebeest!"), Al Capone, Richard III and James Last. Inspired by the martyrdom of Winnie the Pooh, the good guys have to fight one last battle to gain victory. Which would be more hopeful if some idiot hadn't put Rimmer in charge of military strategy.

Kryten

Season 2, Episode 1 
The second season of Red Dwarf immediately opens up the world of the series, introducing the character of Kryten, a service mechanoid suffering from neuroses and an obsession with cleaning. For this first appearance, the character is played by David Ross rather than Robert Llewellyn (who took over when the character was made a regular in Season 3), but Ross nails the character's tics very well. The episode works so well because it gets up our heroes hopes - Kryten reports that the all-female crew of his starship, the Nova 5, are still alive which turns out to be a slight exaggeration - and then shatters them before delving into both Kryten's character and also the worst excesses of Rimmer at his most obnoxious. The "Kryten's rebellion" scene, where Kryten suddenly starts channelling Marlon Brando, remains excellent.

Back to Reality

Season 5, Episode 6

When Season 5 of Red Dwarf aired back in 1992, the production team let it slip that negotiations for a sixth season had become complicated and the show might end forever. This made the final episode's conceit - that the last four years have been part of a VR game played by four people desperately trying to escape a dystopian cyberpunk future of total law enforcement - a little more disturbing as it could possibly have been true. The episode leans into genuine dramatic moments surprisingly well before bringing things around for an uproariously hilarious finale in which the crew engage in an epic car chase whilst being pursued by rocket launcher-wielding motorcyclists and helicopter gunships...all of which happens conveniently (for the sake of the budget) offscreen. This episode also introduces us to the crew's alternate-reality alter-egos, most memorably Duane Dibley (the Cat's thermos-wielding, sandal-wearing alter-ego) and "Jake Bullet, Cybernautics! (traffic control)".

Quarantine

Season 5, Episode 4
Given that, for most of its run, Red Dwarf has an all-male cast, it's interesting when the show spotlights this fact. Quarantine forces the Cat, Kryten and Lister into living in the same room for a week. At first this seems fine as they hang out all the time anyway, but the inability to leave the room for a break soon pushes them past breaking point. The examination of not-always-healthy male friendships is interesting but not allowed to interfere with the comedy, which kicks in a notch when we are introduced to Mr. Flibble, the universe's most psychotic laser-wielding penguin.

Gunmen of the Apocalypse

Season 6, Episode 3
Did you know that Red Dwarf won an Emmy Award? It did, an International Emmy in 1994, for this episode. Gunmen of the Apocalypse was filmed on location in a replica Wild West town erected in, er, Kent and it's clear that both the writers and actors fell in love with the concept. The episode sees the Wild West town stand in as the personification of Kryten's mind as it is invaded by a computer virus. The crew take on new personas thanks to a VR game and enter his mind to fight the virus, which takes the form of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, here re-conceptualised as Wild West gunfighters.

The whole thing is massively high concept but works well, with some fantastic lines, comic timing and possibly the best musical score ever written for the series.

Thanks for the Memory

Season 2, Episode 3
Thanks for the Memory may be the most melancholy episode of Red Dwarf ever made. Feeling sorry for Rimmer on the anniversary of his death, after Rimmer drunkenly confesses he's never been in love, Lister decides to gift him the memory of the love of his life. It's an act of kindness which, of course, backfires.

The episode works because it has a central, genuinely SF idea that is explored in an interesting manner (namely memory transferal and the question of whether memories are what defines us, recently the focus of Altered Carbon) and the story explores the characters of both Lister and Rimmer in intelligence and depth. A criticism of the series is that the writers found Rimmer such a rich source of humour and story that they sometimes left the other characters out in the cold, including our ostensible hero Lister, but this episode works well in telling us more about Lister and the mistakes he's made in his own life. The result is one of Red Dwarf's finest hours, being emotionally affecting as well as very funny.

Marooned

Season 3, Episode 2

With the third season of Red Dwarf running rather expensive, Doug Naylor and Rob Grant decided to write a tight bottle-episode focusing on Lister and Rimmer after their ship, Starbug, crash-lands on an ice moon. With supplies running low (Lister being forced to choose between a Pot Noodle and a tin of dog food and is genuinely wracked by the decision), the two are forced to resort to desperate measures to survive. We learn more about the two characters than ever before and the episode is unusual in making Lister a bit more at fault than Rimmer. Rimmer is also shown for the first time to have a laudable sense of honour (even if it takes a lot to kick it into action).

Marooned is hilarious and Barrie and Charles have often mooted taking it on the road as a two-man play. Possibly Red Dwarf's best-written half-hour and an unmissable episode.

Polymorph

Season 3, Episode 3

One of Red Dwarf's strictest rules is that there are no aliens. Everything that appears in the show has to be human or made by humans. That means no ravaging monsters. Or at least it didn't, until the writers hit on the idea of GELFs (Genetically-Engineered Life Forms), human-created creatures which, invariably, had broken free of human control and turned in to raging maniacs. The shapeshifting polymorph, which also drains subjects of their negative emotions (turning Lister into a homicidal maniac, Cat into a bum and Rimmer into a vegan hipster) is the finest of these creatures. The crew set out to take on the creature in a mickey-take of Aliens that works fantastically well, resulting in some of the show's finest sight gags. This isn't Red Dwarf at its cleverest or deepest, but it may at it's just laugh-out-loud funniest.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods, which will also get you exclusive content weeks before it goes live on my blogs. SF&F Questions and The Cities of Fantasy series are debuting on my Patreon feed and you can read them there one month before being published on the Wertzone.

Happy 30th Birthday, RED DWARF!

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the airing of the very first episode of Red Dwarf, the world's longest-running science fiction comedy show. Set 3 million years in the future, Red Dwarf is the story of the last known human being alive, Dave Lister, a slovenly bum, and his friends and allies (and the officious, arrogant and borderline insane Arnold Rimmer, Lister's nemesis) as they explore deep space and occasionally try to get home.

Red Dwarf was created by writers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor in the mid-1980s. Grant and Naylor had been writing together for years, working as writers on satirical puppet show Spitting Image and on radio shows such as Son of Cliche. On Son of Cliche they created a character named "Dave Hollins, Space Cadet", an Earthman who gets stuck millions of years in the future with only a senile computer for company. They developed and expanded the concept, re-titling it Red Dwarf, and trying to sell it to the BBC or Channel 4.

They initially had a cool reception: the BBC was trying to shut down Doctor Who, feeling the show had run its course (they succeeded, if only temporarily, in 1989), and was fiercely resisting making another SF show. There wasn't much interest from other quarters. The show was only finally greenlit after influential producer Paul Jackson - who had produced the massive hit shows The Two Ronnies, Three of a Kind and The Young Ones - took on the project and championed it.

Despite this success, the show was assigned a tiny budget that badly affected Grant and Naylor's casting choices. They'd originally wanted Alfred Molina to play Lister and Alan Rickman Rimmer, but with less money to hand they settled on "punk poet" Craig Charles and one of their voiceover funnymen from Spitting Image, Chris Barrie. Dancer Danny John-Jules and stand-up comedian Norman Lovett completed the cast, place a humanoid descended from Lister's pet cat and the ship's super-advanced AI Holly, respectively. Given their original casting choices had all been white, Naylor and Grant had ended up with a cast that was 50% black, which came in for some bizarre criticism in the British press at the time. The show also had no regular female characters, although this was the point: later episodes established that the absence of any women on board would contribute to the crew's growing list of neuroses and bizarre tics. The show wouldn't gain a recurring female character until Season 3, when Hattie Hayridge took over from Norman Lovett as Holly (who could change his/her appearance at will), and then the addition of Chloe Annett as Kochanski in Seasons 7 and 8.

Red Dwarf debuted on 15 February 1988 to largely indifferent ratings, but a surprisingly strong critical response. In fact, the first episode of Red Dwarf - the ironically titled The End - attracted the highest Audience Appreciation Index response since the Queen's Coronation in 1952! The rest of the first season was patchy, with the terrible budget and awful sets letting the show down even when the gags were pretty funny.

The cast of Red Dwarf in the first episode, which aired thirty years ago today: Danny John-Jules as Cat, Chris Barrie as Rimmer and Craig Charles as Lister.

Season 2 followed later the same year, and saw a slight budget increase that allowed for location filming and some pretty good model work. Grant and Naylor also adjusted their writing style. Having been influenced by Alien and Silent Running, they liked the idea of nailing the isolation of the characters. They built episodes around the idea of loneliness and also around Rimmer's tragic backstory (which they were careful to ensure made the character more understandable, not magically more likeable). The second season was vastly superior to the first and ensured that a third season was commissioned. Naylor and Grant took more direct control as producers and were able to assign the budget more carefully, making it look like the series had been given a much bigger budget increase between seasons than was really the case. Season 3 had a faster pace, more location shooting, more elaborate visual effects, all-new sets and the addition of a new character, service mechanoid Kryten, played with scene-stealing relish by Robert Llewellyn.

It was at this point that Red Dwarf became a breakout, smash-hit success. Seasons 3-6 (airing from 1990 to 1993) saw a very high, consistent run of quality, with some remarkable effects and character work. The show benefited from Naylor's decision to include more actual science in the show, with it riffing on quantum science, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, parallel universes, alternate timelines and other cutting-edge ideas. Ratings were huge, breaking records for a show airing on BBC-2, and the critical acclaim was immense. Grant and Naylor co-wrote two bestselling novels based on the series, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers and Better Than Life, and discussions over a feature film began. The show's future appeared bright.

Then the show was rocked by two major problems. First off, Craig Charles was arrested on serious criminal charges. Although these charges were later dropped and he was fully exonerated, they took over three years to fully resolve. During this time Rob Grant also quit the show. He felt that the potential of the premise had been exhausted and he wanted to try other projects, including writing novels. Doug Naylor was left to take the reigns himself. With Charles's problems resolved, Seasons 7 and 8 were finally shot and aired in 1997 and 1999. Season 8 won the show's highest ratings of all time, smashing BBC-2's highest ratings recorded up to that time. However, Seasons 7 and 8 only got a lacklustre critical reception, with many viewers feeling that the show had run out of ideas and was badly missing Grant's input, who was much better at character whilst Naylor was more the ideas man.

Then the show disappeared for eleven years.

Chris Barrie as Rimmer, Craig Charles as Lister, Robert Llewellyn as Kryten and Danny John-Jules as Cat in Red Dwarf XII, which aired in 2017.

Doug Naylor had made a decision that Red Dwarf belonged on the big screen and dedicated the next decade of his life trying to get the show into cinemas. Scripts were written and rewritten, investors were lined up (only to pull out). Several times the film got within weeks of entering production only to fall apart at the last minute. Frustrated and annoyed, Naylor finally got the show back on the air in 2009, writing and producing a three-part mini-series for the BBC-owned cable channel Dave called Back to Earth (since retconned as Season 9). It was not well-received, but did get enormous ratings. These paved the way for a return of the series in full, resulting in Seasons 10 (2012), 11 (2016) and 12 (2017), all of which had a positive critical reception, as well as setting records for the Dave cable channel. A thirteenth season is now in the planning stages.

Red Dwarf's appeal has largely been down to the everyman factor, putting blue-collar workers in space who don't know anything about quantum entanglement or slipstream drives, they're just there to keep things ticking over. The show also mixes quite advanced gags about science with very basic gags about bodily secretions, as well punching a hole through the po-faced nature of science fiction. Kryten's quest to become human and learning about human concepts is treated dubiously by the rest of the crew (resulting in the memorable line, "Knock off the Star Trek crap, it's too early in the morning") and then given a very amusing resolution, when he actually becomes human for an episode and is so horrified by having to manage a penis ("Is that the best design someone could come up? The 'last chicken in the shop' look?") that he elects to become a mechanoid again ASAP.

The early appeal also came down to the mixture of laughs and tragedy, pathos and comedy, particularly in the character of Rimmer and in Lister's loneliness which he only manages to surmount by devoting every waking hour to winding Rimmer up. Red Dwarf is a sitcom but one with tremendous and maybe unparalleled characterisation.

There's also something admirable about the show in how it refuses to die. Seasons 2-6 were inarguably the show's golden period and it's been variable ever since Rob Grant left (reaching a nadir in Season 9 but then recovering strongly since then), but it constantly explores new SF ideas and finds new angles with which to approach the universe and the characters. It also helps that the actors were mosty in their twenties when the show started; the transition of these young twenty-something men into middle-aged and slightly world-weary fifty-somethings has felt very natural, helped by the fact they have pretty good genes. I can see these guys still exploring deep space and finding fun ways of doing so in another ten years. The show's long hiatuses, resulting in only 12 seasons in 30 years, have also helped in building up anticipating for the show's return and in giving the writers more time to come up with new ideas.

Red Dwarf is one of science fiction TV's great survivors, being funny, dramatic and human as required. Here's to many more years of exploring the final, smeggiest frontier.

Red Dwarf XII

The mining ship Red Dwarf continues on its long quest to return home, its dysfunctional crew consisting of the last human being alive, a hologram of his superior officer, a neurotic cleaning droid and a lifeform descended from the ship's cat.

In 2018 Red Dwarf will celebrate its thirtieth anniversary, making it comfortably the longest-running SF comedy show of all time (and one of the longest-running SF shows full stop, with only Doctor Who and Star Trek now outliving it). There are several reasons for its longevity: a core cast of four charismatic performers, a strong sense of humour that riffs on both human nature and cutting-edge scientific ideas and multi-year breaks between seasons that allow both the cast and writers to refresh themselves and come back with renewed energy. So whilst the show started thirty years ago, it's only now concluding its twelfth season.

The twelfth season is of a pair with last year's eleventh, written and filmed alongside it and recorded at the same time. This raised the spectre that writer Doug Naylor (alas, co-creator and co-writer of the show's golden age Rob Grant remains absent) might be burned out or tired, but this is not the case. Season 12 is, if anything, slightly better than Season 11, with fewer weaker moments and some much funnier moments rooted in both character (always Naylor's weak spot compared to Grant) and SF.

The season starts off well with Cured, which asks the question if people can be "cured" of evil and results in a classic Red Dwarf story beat where Lister jams on electric guitar with a "good" clone of Adolf Hitler. Siliconia, where Kryten is "rescued" from slavery by fellow mechanoids, is a bit throwaway but does have some great sight gags and does lean into the SF trope of the "happy slave" who is programmed to enjoy their treatment (something it'd be interested to see Star Wars address at some point).

The season's weakest episode is Timewave, set on a ship where criticism has been outlawed, which isn't as funny as it wants to be and has some very lazy gags. Mechocracy, in which the machines on Red Dwarf go on strike and Rimmer and Kryten stage an election to win back their loyalty, is solid if forgettable.

The season saves the best for last: M-Corp is a satirical take on Apple which could have felt lazy but actually steps up to being amusing and also makes some nice, intelligent points about (literally) blind brand loyalty and giving corporations ownership of everything. Skipper, the best episode of the season and possibly the last six seasons, taps into the well of Rimmer's self-loathing and disappointment in a way that hasn't been done since Grant was still on board. Although the episode suffers from some continuity issues (the show apparently forgetting that the events of Seasons 7 and 8 happened, and the existence of Ace Rimmer), it is extremely funny and brings back some fan-favourite characters without overusing them to boot.

The cast are a well-oiled machine at this point, the guest stars do a good job (although Johnny Vegas's guest appearance feels a bit incongruous) and the show does a lot with what is clearly a limited budget, a "problem" which I suspect has resulted in the show's improved quality since the relatively high-budget days of Seasons 7-9, since it forces a reliance on better dialogue and ideas rather than flashy visual effects.

For a TV show about to enter its fourth decade, Red Dwarf (****) is in surprisingly rude health. Superior to the previous two seasons (which were okay, if not outstanding) and certainly far better than the three weak seasons before that, the twelfth season of the show sees it getting back to, if not its best, certainly not far off. The season will be available from 21 November 2017 on Blu-Ray (UK, USA) and DVD (UK, USA).

Red Dwarf XI

The mining ship Red Dwarf, lost in deep space for three million years, is continuing its long voyage home. The four-man (well, one-man, one-hologram, one-android and one-bipedal-cat) crew continue to get into unusual scrapes as they seek to survive.

Red Dwarf began way back in 1988, making it easily the longest-running science fiction sitcom in history. Part of the show's success is its mixing of real SF ideas with funny gags and character development rooted in tragedy and pathos: Red Dwarf at its best is not afraid to make its audience feel sorry or even upset as it even makes them laugh.

Unfortunately, the more detailed characterisation and tragedy mostly left the show along with co-creator and writer Rob Grant after the sixth season. Since that time Red Dwarf has, under its other co-writer Doug Naylor, become a much more conventional sitcom with running gags, recurring characters and ideas and topical humour that may be outdated in a few years' time but raises a smile now.

This eleventh season airs four years after the tenth, itself a low-budget attempt to get the show back on the air via the UK cable channel Dave. That was very successful, hence a noticeable budget increase for this season with more visual effects, location filming and more elaborate sets. It's still a long way from the show at the height of its biggest success on the BBC at the end of the nineties (during the seventh and eighth seasons, when the humour risked taking a back seat to the spectacle), but it definitely frees the show up to open up the scale and employ some more highbrow and expensive ideas.

For the most part, it works. Without Grant or another more character-focused writer, the show is never going to be as good as it was back in its brilliant second through fifth seasons (and the only-marginally-weaker sixth), but we're also a long way from the more tedious episodes of the seventh through ninth seasons as well. Naylor seems to be writing within his limitations, knowing that what he's good at is channelling SF ideas for laughs. Some of these misfire - season opener Twentica hits a series of dud gags - but things rapidly improve from there. A vending droid is mistaken for a genius medical bot and is given the task of carrying out vital surgery, Kryten has a mid-life crisis and finds a way of communing with the universe, and - in easily the best episode of the entire series since Season 6 - Rimmer is promoted by a 3D-printed Space Corps officer and finally gets his dream job only for it to all go spectacularly wrong. There's also a couple of Cat-centric episodes which work pretty well.

Continuity is, as usual, treated as something optional, so there's no mention of the missing Kochanski or Holly, which will likely annoy some long-term fans, and the show is a little bit too eager to use simulants and GELFs again rather than creating some new concepts. But the cast is on fine form, even if their age is starting to tell, and even in its weaker moments the season remains firmly entertaining.

No, it's not the show at its best and some of its worst post-Grant indulgences do occasionally resurface, but the eleventh season of Red Dwarf (***½) is overall fun and watchable. It will be released on Blu-Ray (UK, USA) and DVD (UK, USA) in November. Season 12 has already been filmed, is currently in post-production and will air on Dave in mid-to-late 2017.