RED DWARF to return (again)

It's been confirmed that Red Dwarf will be returning - yet again - with new episodes in 2025. The venerable British science fiction sitcom celebrated its thirty-sixth anniversary in February and a long-running rights dispute between co-creators Rob Grant and Doug Naylor was settled last year, allowing both writers to continue working with the franchise (they worked on the show together for its first six seasons before splitting in 1993).

The new episodes will be helmed by Doug Naylor again, who has also helmed all of the episodes produced since 1993, and will take the form of a 90-minute special split into three 30-minute episodes for broadcast. With the cast now getting on a bit, there had been doubt over whether the show would return, with the 68-year-old Robert Llewellyn particularly reluctant to don the heavy prosthetics needed to play the android Kryten. But he notes that he was talked back into the role once more, for a possible last (?) hurrah.

Rob Grant has also confirmed that he is working on a new project called Red Dwarf: Titan, a prequel set before the events of the original show with Lister stuck on Saturn's titular moon when he runs into the officious Arnold J. Rimmer. The prequel explores their relationship before they wound up on the mining ship Red Dwarf and its fateful radiation leak which killed the entire crew (bar Lister). This project is being developed as both a novel and a TV show, possibly for streaming. The project may involve the original cast introducing or framing the main story, which would obviously need to be recast with younger actors. This might be a crucial moment in determining if the franchise has a long-term future. The premise (four people stuck on a spaceship three million years in the future and thousands of light-years away) does not easily allow for spin-offs, and so far the producers have resisted recasting any of the lead roles (aside from Kryten, who was played by a different actor on his very first appearance, with Llewellyn taking over for the second).

Red Dwarf originally aired six seasons on BBC2 from 1988 to 1993. Two additional seasons were produced in 1997 and 1999 before a long hiatus, caused by problems in trying to get a feature film off the ground. The show returned on comedy channel Dave for a one-off special in 2009, followed by new, full seasons in 2012, 2016 and 2017. Another special aired in 2020.

The new Red Dwarf episodes will shoot in October for transmission in 2025.

RED DWARF rights split between its original creators

In an interesting move, it's been announced that the rights to venerable British SF sitcom Red Dwarf have been split between its two creators, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, as part of a legal agreement. This clears the way for the return of Red Dwarf to television and possibly its debut in other areas.

Red Dwarf celebrated its 35th anniversary last month. The live-action sitcom started airing in 1988 and depicted the misfortune of Dave Lister, probably the last human being alive in the universe. Lister is put into stasis as punishment for smuggling a pregnant cat aboard his mining ship, the gigantic Red Dwarf. Unfortunately, during his confinement the ship's crew are killed by a lethal radiation leak and the vessel's sentient AI, Holly, orders the ship out of the Solar system to prevent further contamination. Unfortunately, it takes three million years for the radiation to disperse and for Lister to be released safely. As well as Holly, Lister is soon joined by a holographic recreation of his dead superior officer, the mind-numbingly tedious and arrogant Arnold "Judas" Rimmer, and the last survivor of a humanoid species which evolved from his cat. Later seasons add Kryten, a service mechanoid rescued from a derelict spacecraft, and occasionally Kristine Kochanski, Lister's ex-girlfriend whom, in a parallel universe, survived instead of him.

The show aired six seasons in rapid succession from 1988 to 1993, becoming one of the biggest shows on British television. Co-creators and co-writers Grant and Naylor split up their partnership after Season 6, and Naylor returned (first with other collaborators, then solo) to produce two additional seasons in 1997 and 1999. Naylor was then side-tracked into trying to make a movie which never came to fruition, so returned with a three-part special in 2009, followed by new, full seasons in 2012, 2016 and 2017. The latest bit of Dwarf to air was a TV movie, The Promised Land, in 2020.

In 2021 it was revealed that Naylor had either been fired or forced to resign from Grant Naylor Productions, the production company he had set up with Rob Grant to produce the show. Although Grant had left in 1993, the show had continued with his permission as a co-director of the company. The reasons for Naylor's departure were disputed, with Naylor claiming he'd been forced out and Grant claiming that work had been underway on two further TV specials with Naylor slated to write. Grant subsequently confirmed that he was planning to return to the franchise to write for the first time since a 1996 spin-off novel.

Today's agreement suggests that both Naylor and Grant will proceed with different Red Dwarf projects, potentially both involving the original castmembers. The cast themselves, now all in their late fifties and sixties, have expressed doubt on how long they can keep playing their roles, leading to speculation that the future of Red Dwarf may lie in a possible reboot, maybe on a streaming service. A previous attempt to adapt Red Dwarf to the American market in 1993 resulted in two pilots which never made it to series, but the show's longevity and the increased American demand for streaming product may tempt them to revisit the idea.

Whether this means that the two previously-planned TV movies involving the original cast can now go ahead is unclear.

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.

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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.

New RED DWARF episodes start airing tonight

Red Dwarf returns to UK TV screens tonight for its eleventh season, and the first full season in four years.

Red Dwarf is the world's longest-running science fiction sitcom, and the longest-running sitcom on British television. Created by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, it aired its first six seasons between 1988 and 1993, before Rob Grant chose to leave to work on other projects and novels. Naylor continued with two additional seasons in 1997 and 1999, although these were patchier and less popular. After a decade spent trying to get a film version launched, the show returned to TV for a mini-series (now retconned as the ninth season) in 2009, which was very poorly received, and a full, tenth season in 2012 which was much more warmly received.

The premise of the series is that Dave Lister, a low-ranking technician on the five-mile-long mining vessel Red Dwarf, is put into stasis as a punishment for smuggling a cat on board. Whilst he's in stasis a lethal radiation leak wipes out the crew and forces the ship's AI, Holly, to take the vessel in to deep space until the radiation danger has passed and Lister can be woken up. Unfortunately, this takes three million years. Upon waking up, Lister discovers the last survivor of a humanoid species that evolved from his cat and a holographic recreation of his officious and pedantic senior officer, Arnold Judas Rimmer. Later on they recover an android from a wrecked starship, the neurotic and borderline insane Kryten. Together, they attempt to survive with no female company and find a way back to Earth.

Early word on the eleventh season - the first episode was aired on streaming services last week as a preview - is that it's also pretty good, continuing an emphasis on the characters and dialogue rather than explosions and effects (a criticism levelled at Seasons 7 and 8). Encouragingly, Season 12 has already been filmed and will air next year.

Red Dwarf's eleventh season starts airing tonight at 9pm on British cable channel Dave.

RED DWARF XI to launch on 22 September

British TV station Dave has confirmed that the eleventh season of Red Dwarf will start airing in the UK on Thursday 22 September at 9pm.

Red Dwarf, created by British writers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, is the longest-running British sitcom overall and the longest-running science fiction sitcom in history. It tells the story of Dave Lister, the last human being alive in the universe after he is put into suspended animation for three million years. His only company is a humanoid creature which evolved from his pet cat, a neurotic mechanoid and the holographic recreation of his officious and pedantic former boss.

Its first episode aired on 15 February 1988 and it aired six seasons between then and 1993. Following a hiatus caused by the break-up of the Grant-Naylor writing partnership, Naylor regrouped to write two additional seasons, which aired in 1997 and 1999. Naylor would spend most of the next decade trying to get a Red Dwarf feature film off the ground before returning with a short mini-series in 2009. Although critically derided, it proved extremely popular on the Dave cable channel. A tenth season aired in 2012 and was surprisingly accomplished, being the best season since at least the sixth.

Hopefully Season 11 continues this return to form. Season 12, surprisingly, has actually already been filmed with production concluding recently. Season 12 will air in 2017, also on Dave.

Happy 25th Birthday to RED DWARF

Red Dwarf, the UK's second longest-running SF TV show, celebrates its 25th anniversary today. The first season began airing in the UK on 15 February 1988.

The core, long-term cast of Red Dwarf: Danny John-Jules as the Cat, Craig Charles as Dave Lister, Chris Barrie as Arnold Rimmer and Robert Llewellyn as Kryten.

Red Dwarf is a comedy series with an SF premise: Dave Lister (Craig Charles), a lowly technician on the vast mining ship Red Dwarf, is sentenced to eighteen months in temporal stasis (without pay) after smuggling an unquarantined pregnant cat onto the ship. In the interim, the ship suffers a colossal radiation leak that wipes out the crew. The ship's AI, Holly (Norman Lovett, later Hattie Hayridge), takes the vessel out of the Solar system to avoid contamination and waits for the radiation to die down before releasing Lister. Unfortunately, this takes three million years. After Lister is awoken to face the possibility of eternity alone in deep space, Holly resurrects Lister's anally-retentive superior officer, Arnold Rimmer (Chris Barrie), as a hologram to help keep him sane. The cast is rounded out by Cat (Danny John-Jules), a humanoid being whose ancestors evolved from Lister's cat's progeny, and Kryten (Robert Llewellyn), a neurotic android recovered from a crashed spacecraft.

The show is notable for not featuring aliens: instead the crew encounter a variety of human-built computers, androids, cyborgs and genetically-engineered lifeforms, most of whom have gone insane due to the length of time that has passed since their creation. The eventual fate of the rest of the human race in the series is not known, though often speculated upon by the characters. The series features SF concepts such as relativity, time travel, parallel universes, genetic engineering, the dangers of sentient AI. Though a comedy, the first five seasons or so are also notable for their focus on characterisation and the evocation of pathos - Lister is the last human being alive in a cold, vast and apparently godless universe - for effect. Later seasons are more concerned with broad comedy, slapstick and running gags.

The series was created by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, and was an evolution of their radio sketch Dave Collins: Space Cadet, which aired in 1984. Grant and Naylor wrote the first six seasons together. The show had initially disappointing viewing figures, but the highest audience appreciation stats of any programme since the Queen's Coronation in 1952, which convinced the BBC to renew the series. The show rapidly climbed the viewing figures, with the fifth and sixth seasons gaining five million viewers, a staggering high for BBC2 (where many programmes regularly only need to get two to three million to be considered a success).

The full cast of Red Dwarf: Danny John-Jules (Cat), Norman Lovett (Holly Mk. 1, Seasons 1-2, 7-8), Robert Llewellyn (Kryten), Craig Charles (Lister), Chris Barrie (Rimmer), Chloe Annett (Kochanski, Seasons 7-9) and Hattie Hayridge (Holly Mk. 2, Seasons 3-5), with the show's long-term director Ed Bye.

After the airing of the sixth season in 1993, the show went on an extended hiatus due to legal troubles faced by actor Craig Charles, as well as creative differences between Grant and Naylor. Rob Grant quit the franchise to concentrate on writing novels and, more recently, stand-up comedy. Doug Naylor continued flying the flag for the series, assembling a writing team for the seventh season which finally aired in 1997. A cool reception to this season, which was praised for its high production values but criticised for poor writing, resulted in a shift in format for the subsequent eighth season (aired in 1999) which, though better-received (and, with eight million viewers, was by far the most popular), was still criticised for lacking the more effective character-based comedy of earlier seasons.

A ten-year hiatus followed, during which time Doug Naylor attempted to find financing for a feature film version of the series. Production almost started several times, only for financing to fall through on each occasion. Eventually Naylor abandoned plans for a film in favour of a return to television, but inexplicably the BBC refused to consider resurrecting the show, despite its enormous viewing figures and high DVD sales. Instead, the small cable channel Dave agreed to finance a three-part special called Back to Earth, which aired in 2009. Despite appalling reviews, the special attracted significant audience figures for the tiny channel, enough for them to commission a new, six-part season. This tenth season aired in late 2012 to good ratings and the strongest critical reception the show had received since the sixth season. An eleventh season is currently being discussed by Doug Naylor and the Dave channel.

In 1992 NBC bought the rights to produce an American version of the show. They produced two pilot episodes, with Robert Llewellyn crossing the Atlantic to play Kryten in the American version as well. NBC was not happy with either pilot and did not commission a series. The pilots are notable for featuring actresses who went on (almost immediately) to much more famous roles: Jane Leeves, who played Holly in the first pilot, went on to star as Daphne in Frasier, whilst Terry Farrell, who played a female version of the Cat in the second, was almost immediately cast as Jadzia Dax in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine after the pilot was not picked up. However, the show did win an International Emmy Award for Best Comedy in 1994, for the Season 6 episode Gunmen of the Apocalypse.

The series has also spawned a series of best-selling novels.

Trailer for RED DWARF X

The first trailer for the tenth season of Red Dwarf has been released:

Red Dwarf was a hugely successful SF sitcom, airing on the BBC in six seasons from 1988 to 1993 and returning for two more seasons in 1997 and 1999. After a lengthy period trying to get a feature film version commissioned, co-creator Doug Naylor wrote a three-episode mini-series (which has now effectively been retconned as the ninth season) in 2009 for the British cable channel Dave. Although critically panned, the mini-series got very high ratings, smashing all previous records for the channel. Dave subsequently commissioned a six-episode full season, shot in December-January 2011-12 and due for airing in the autumn.

Will it be any good? The omens are not great. Red Dwarf was dealt a serious blow when co-creator and co-writer Rob Grant left the series following the filming of the sixth season. It never really recovered from it. The seventh and eighth season had a few decent moments, but overall were pale shadows of their former selves (despite relatively big budgets and use of CGI, which some fans suggested may have contributed to the problems). The Back to Earth mini-series was even worse still.

However, for this new season there are some signs of hope. Limited funds mean that they have to make more use of the classic format of the four guys hanging out on the ship and getting into weird scrapes. They are also acknowledging the ageing of the characters rather than ignoring it, which is good, and the actors seem to have retained their old chemistry.

Better Than Life by Rob Grant & Doug Naylor

Three million years into deep space on the mining ship Red Dwarf, the last human alive, Dave Lister, wants nothing else other than to go home. Instead, he has become trapped in a virtual reality computer game, Better Than Life. In his fantasy he is a resident of Bedford Falls (the town from his favourite movie, It's a Wonderful Life), married to Kristine Kochanski with twin sons. The Cat has his own Gothic castle, where his every whim is attended to by Valkyrie warriors in skimpy underwear and he amuses himself by going dog-hunting on his favourite fire-breathing yak. Service mechanoid Kryten has mountains of washing-up to get done. And Rimmer is a multi-billionaire, married to the most beautiful woman alive and using a time machine to get 'the lads' (General George S. Patton, Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte) together every now and then so he can beat them at Risk. Outside the game, the AI Holly embarks on a mission to return his IQ to its previous level of 6,000, but unfortunately relies on the advice of a sentient toaster, with catastrophic results.


The problem with the game is that it is almost impossible to escape from, and, eventually it will kill you. However, Rimmer's psyche is so ridiculously self-loathing that he cannot stand to see himself or his friends happy, and it sets out to destroy them...

Better Than Life, published in 1990 when the Red Dwarf TV show was on hiatus for a year, is the follow-up to Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers and is the last novel written by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor as a team. After this book they concentrated on the TV show for a few years until their writing partnership dissolved in the mid-1990s. They would return with solo Red Dwarf novels further down the line: Naylor's disappointing Last Human in 1995 and Grant's superior Backwards in 1996.

Better Than Life itself is an improvement over the first novel in several areas. First of all, the already-strong characterisation is deeper and more interesting than before, getting into the psyches of these damaged people, laid bare by the game. The contrast between Lister's fantasy, in which he just wants an enjoyable job and a loving family in a happy community, and Rimmer's world of corporate jets, time machines, gorgeous supermodels and a ridiculously huge manhood, is hilariously emphasised, though the Cat is a bit one-note in the book. We have a new character in the shape of the Talkie Toaster ($£19.99 + tax), whom Holly rather unwisely activates to provide him with some companionship. Unfortunately, the Toaster is completely and totally obsessed with force-feeding everyone around him with toast. It's a great gag, but one in the TV series that was wisely used in only a few scenes and then dispensed with. He hangs around for longer in the novel and starts getting annoying but, realising this, the authors do some very funny things with his character to turn this into an asset, and his eventual fate is amusing.

As with the first novel, the authors re-work the plot of several episodes but use them to form a longer narrative. So, as well as the Better Than Life episode itself (which is more of an inspiration than a direct contribution) we get the Polymorph showing up, an interaction with a realm where time runs backwards, Rimmer and Lister being marooned together and having to help each other survive, and a close interaction with a black hole (a white hole in the TV series). Unlike the first book, where the episodic nature of the plot was more obvious, here events are more successfully combined to create a more cohesive story that stands free from the TV series.

Again, there are elements of pathos and tragedy that enter the story, particularly towards the end which is unexpectedly emotional (and then brilliantly subverted in the opening to Backwards, the chronologically-succeeding novel). But Lister learning the eventual fate of Earth and rising to become the leader of an entire community (kind of) is well-handled.

Better Than Life (****½) is a stronger novel than its forebear, cleverer, funnier and more enjoyable than that already-strong book. It is available now in omnibus form with its predecessor in the UK and USA.

Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers by Rob Grant & Doug Naylor

Mimas, 2180. After an epic all-night bender in London to celebrate his 25th birthday, Liverpudlian slob Dave Lister wakes up a billion kilometres away on one of Saturn's moons with the mother of all hangovers. Desperate to get home, Lister hits on the plan of enrolling in the Space Corps, getting a job on an Earth-bound ship and then going AWOL the second he gets home. Unfortunately, the only vessel that will have him is the city-sized Jupiter Mining Corporation ore-hauler Red Dwarf. And before it gets back to Earth, it's going all the way to Triton on a job. So it will take Lister four and a half years to get home.


Driven to distraction by his mind-bogglingly anally-retentive bunk-mate Arnold Rimmer and heartbroken by a doomed romance with navigation officer Kristine Kochanski, Lister hits on a plan: by smuggling an unquarantined cat on board and getting caught, he gets condemned to spend the rest of the trip in temporal stasis and forfeit four years pay. Unfortunately, whilst he's in stasis, the Dwarf's fusion reactor unleashes a deadly radiation pulse which kills everyone. The ship's AI, Holly, takes the Dwarf into deep space and waits for the radiation to die off before reviving Lister...which takes three million years. Lister awakens to find his only companions are a holographic simulation of Rimmer, a senile AI and a creature which evolved from his pet cat. Their mission: to get back to Earth. Somehow.

As the above precis indicates, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (originally published in 1989) is a spin-off of the British TV series Red Dwarf, published just after the airing of the show's third season. It is not a novelization of the episodes, but can be regarded as sort-of reboot of the format. Creator-producers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor were unhappy with both the small budget given to the show and how that money was spent for the first two seasons; notably, when they took over as showrunners in the third season it took a quantum leap forward in its visual style and quality. When asked by Penguin Books to write a novel based on the series, they leapt at the chance and used the opportunity to write the big-budget SF epic that the BBC's lack of money had denied to them.

The result is something far more interesting than a bog-standard TV novelization. Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers stands alone very nicely as a solo SF novel, with no foreknowledge of the TV series required. The storylines of several episodes have been reworked into one large over-arcing narrative and the start of the story is very different, with a lot more time spent on the pre-accident Red Dwarf. This allows the writers to flesh out a number of other characters (some new, some recast versions of TV characters) before the accident takes place and they zero in on the characters of Rimmer and Lister.

These two characters are well-established in the TV show, but the authors take advantage of the novel format to really delve into their psyches and get into their internal drives and motivations. Lister benefits from this the most, since as the TV show continued Lister was sometimes sidelined in favour of the more inherently funner character of Rimmer. The Cat also benefits from added material, turning him from a rather one-note character in the first two seasons to a more rounded figure whose alien, non-human characteristics are emphasised. Holly also gets more development, with the reasons for his computer senility made clear (though current editions of the novel drop his ongoing inexplicable hatred of 1970s British footballer Kevin Keegan for legal reasons, sadly).

The novel is cleverly written, using ingredients and events from several episodes to build up a larger storyline. Some jokes are re-used a little too freely from the TV series and there's a couple of spots where the episodic building blocks betray themselves (Lister's determination to go back into stasis until they get back to Earth is handwaved away a little too easily in both the TV series and novel, but in the novel is more jarring given we move into the Nova 5 storyline almost immediately), but overall this works well.

As the novel continues, the more amusing and comic moments start giving way to moments of pathos, even tragedy, which gives the novel more depth than it first appears. It's a very funny book, but it's also one that focuses on character-building and using the humour to illuminate the story and themes. A more disappointing element is that the actual science in the novel is occasionally woeful (the writers' understanding of relativity, breaking the speed of light and, in particular, how long it takes to travel between different star systems at below lightspeed is rather lacking). Given that the TV series, particularly in later series, prided itself in the use of real science to back up the story, the somewhat shoddy application of it here is unfortunate.

Overall, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (****) is a splendid comic SF novel, funny but with real depth of character. The book builds along nicely to a big climax (that riffs heavily on the movie It's a Wonderful Life) and a huge cliffhanger. The novel is available now in an omnibus edition with its sequel, Better Than Life, in the UK and USA.

Red Dwarf VII

As mentioned in the previous review, Red Dwarf abruptly went off the air following transmission of its sixth season at the end of 1993. A criminal case involving actor Craig Charles and the breakdown of the working relationship between writer-producers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor proved disastrous, and although both problems were eventually overcome (Charles was fully exonerated; Rob Grant departed to become a novelist leaving Naylor in charge) it took a long time to sort it all out.


Other problems also seemed to conspire against Red Dwarf's return. As of the sixth season, Red Dwarf was pretty much the sole reason for the continued existence of the BBC's special effects and miniatures department, and with the show on indefinite hiatus the department was closed down, meaning that future special effects requirements would have to be handled by private firms and thus on a far more expensive basis. Actor Chris Barrie had also gone on to enjoy even greater success as the title character in BBC-1 sitcom The Brittas Empire, which was a much simpler and faster show to shoot than Dwarf. As a result, he decided not to appear in Red Dwarf on a full-time basis in the next series. Possibly even a bigger change was the removal of the studio audience, with the show now being fully pre-recorded and only the tape being shown to a studio audience later on. This clearly throws off the rhythms of the actors in the show, with some lines obscured by audience laughter and a few out-of-place pauses for laughs that weren't as big as was hoped for.

Despite these problems, the show's ultimate return was not in doubt. It was BBC-2's single highest-rated TV programme, it was one of the biggest-selling BBC series on video (of any kind) in the 1990s and during the years it was off the air the BBC received numerous enquiries as to when the show would return.

Season VII aired on BBC-2 in early 1997 and it was immediately clear that this was a different show to what had come before. Chris Barrie's character of Rimmer departed in the second episode, though he appeared in several further episodes in brief flashbacks or cameos. Despite a higher budget, the show also struggled with its special effects requirements, with very primitive CGI and some seriously shoddy model work replacing the very accomplished miniature filming and digital effects of Seasons 5-6.

To help secure funding for the long-planned Red Dwarf movie (the prospective backers for which had asked for a major female character to be added to the roster), Naylor decided to add the character of Kristine Kochanksi to the crew on a full-time basis. Kochanski had appeared in several previous episodes in Seasons 1, 2 and 6 played by Clare Grogan, but with Grogan unavailable the role was recast with Chloe Annett. This move wasn't initially popular with the fans, as Annett's previous role had been in the quite spectacularly awful Crime Traveller, but Annett actually turned in a good performance and eventually won over many of the fanbase.

With all of these behind-the-scenes changes it is perhaps inevitable that the quality of the scripts suffered quite badly. Season VII isn't quite the unwatchable pile of cack some hardcore fans describe it as, but it clearly hasn't had the same care and attention paid to the writing as in previous seasons. The extremely rapid dismissal of the Season VI cliffhanger is a little disappointing, but the completely nonsensical technobabble reasons given to explain why Starbug is now many times its former size are very strange indeed. That said, the rest of the opener, Tikka to Ride, in which the Red Dwarf crew inadvertently change history when they travel to Dallas in November 1963, actually has quite a clever premise and a strangely affecting conclusion. It also just about manages to fall on the right side of good taste.

The second episode, Stoke Me a Clipper, is a bit of a disaster. A James Bond-style opening sequence featuring Ace Rimmer sky-surfing on the back of a crocodile is quite entertaining, but the rest of the episode is weak, illogical, badly contrived and deeply unfunny. The third episode, Ouroboros, re-introduces Kochanksi (or rather, a version of Kochanski from an alternate reality) and sees Lister's ex-wife (from Emohawk) showing up again. It's a little bit funnier, but still not up to the standards we expect from the show. Duct Soup, a 'bottle' show set in Starbug's flooded engineering decks, is probably the highlight of the season with some good dialogue and a few good laughs reminiscent of earlier seasons. Blue, in which Lister realises that he misses Rimmer, is also quite amusing as Kryten sets out to remind him precisely what Rimmer was like.

Beyond a Joke starts with a great sequence in which Kryten, annoyed with the crew for missing supper due to being in a VR 'Jane Austen World' simulation, invades the simulation in a Russian T-73 tank and kills everyone (resulting in the largest explosion ever filmed for the series, due to over-eager army demolitions experts who were fans of the show trying to impress the actors). After this it nosedives into the ground with a lot of guff about 'nega-drives', more rogue simulants, more GELFs and a second 4000 series mechanoid who isn't very funny. Epideme has a good premise - a sentient virus that chats to its host whilst it tries to kill him - but the virus has a very annoying voice and the script doesn't really go anywhere after establishing the initial idea.

Nanarchy, the Season VII finale, finally has the crew locating Red Dwarf and learning what happened to the ship when it disappeared. It's a mixed bag of an explanation, being amusing and SF-oriented, dealing with the hitherto unexplored-on-the-show science of nanotechnology, but it's also reliant on the idea that Kryten, a robot whom we have been reminded many times as having being built for the express purpose of cleaning lavatories and was extremely cheap, also had inside him billions of nanobots capable of rearranging atoms. It doesn't really make any sense. Anyway, there's another cliffhanger ending, the return of Holly (the original, played by Norman Lovett) and overall it's a decent enough ending to the season.

The seventh season is a mixed bag, it has to be said. The visual effects and writing are radically inferior to what has come before, although the acting (from both the regulars and guest stars such as Brian Cox) remains strong. The addition of Kochanski to the cast also works surprisingly well, somewhat better than I think most people were expecting at the time. At the same time, this season was also made with significant background problems, and in that context it could have turned out worse. The biggest problem, and one that was unavoidable, is that the series really hurts without Rimmer as part of the mix. Luckily, Chris Barrier had such a blast filming this season that he agreed to return full-time for the eighth, which contributed to that season's somewhat higher quality.

Red Dwarf: Season VII (**½) is available on DVD in the UK and USA.

Red Dwarf VI

Returning for its sixth season in 1993, Red Dwarf underwent the largest shake-up to its basic premise since its beginning. Writers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor decided that the crew had things a little too easy living on a five-mile-long spaceship with absolutely tons of supplies, so devised a storyline in which Red Dwarf - and thus Holly - disappears whilst the crew are on an away mission and they have to chase after it in Starbug with not much in the way of food and water.


Psirens introduces the new situation with a cold open with Lister being revived after 200 years in cryo-sleep. Since he is temporarily amnesiac, Kryten has to re-explain the show's premise to him, thus providing a handy jumping-on point for new viewers. The episode has Starbug stumbling across a graveyard of ships and asteroids infested with 'psirens', hideous insectoid creatures that lure passers-by onto the rocks and then suck out their brains ("Just like Ulysses and that ancient Turkish myth!" - Lister). It's a creepy and dark episode with some decent ideas, a few good laughs and some nice guest spots from the likes of Anita Dobson and Richard Ridings (soon to be seen in Game of Thrones), but it feels a bit off. The episode suddenly resets Lister's character back to being the undeveloped slob of earlier seasons as if the last five years never happened, which is weird. On the other hand, there is a long-awaited new job for the Cat, with his superior reflexes making him a natural pilot for Starbug, which is a welcome move.

Legion sees Starbug taken aboard a vast space station whose only inhabitant is the enigmatic, brilliant and eccentric humanoid Legion. Legion is initially friendly, solving the crew's supply problems and giving Rimmer a new 'hard light' drive allowing him to interact with solid matter again, but obviously turns out to be a bit of a mentalist nutjob (what a surprise) whom the crew have to engage in battle. This is a reasonably funny episode featuring some excellent CGI and a good hard SF idea about gestalt intelligences, but is let down by some rather over-obvious slapstick in the finale.

The Emmy Award-winning (no, seriously) Gunmen of the Apocalypse is the strongest episode of the season by far. The crew run afoul of a warship belonging to rogue simulants and engage in a pitched battle to the death (Starbug having been upgraded with laser cannons to give it a sporting chance) that ends with the ship being infested by a computer virus. The crew use a VR interface to go into the ship's systems and battle the virus, a fight embodied as a Wild West showdown. It's a pretty bizarre idea but works brilliantly, with a genuine Wild West re-enactment town in Kent providing some surprisingly authentic atmosphere. A classic.

Emohawk: Polymorph II is the sequel to Season 3's Polymorph although it also sees the return of Ace Rimmer (from Season 4's Dimension Jump) and Duane Dibley (from Season 5's Back to Reality) after the crew enrage a bunch of GELFs, who dispatch a new, more capable version of the polymorph after them in revenge. There's some funny stuff in the episode, most notably when Lister has to marry a GELF to get a vital engine part, but the latter part is less successful simply because the episode re-uses a bunch of gags from those earlier episodes. It's the first in what will later become a worrying trend, namely the recycling of old ideas rather than the pursuit of new ones.

Rimmerworld sees Rimmer forced to abandon ship in an escape pod that crash-lands on a planet 600 years away from rescue (thanks to time dilation). As the pod is equipped with emergency cloning and terraforming equipment, Rimmer is able to create his own verdant paradise world and populate it with, erm, himself. Again, this is a decent episode with some funny lines and a good central premise, but there is also a strong sense of deja vu, as this is similar ground to Season 6's Terrorform.

Out of Time ended the season on a completely jaw-dropping and shocking note back when it first aired. The crew gain control of a temporal drive which allows them to travel in time. They encounter their future selves from fifteen years hence, and discover that the ability to travel anywhere they want in time and space has given them enormous power...and power corrupts. It's an excellent idea which is genuinely unsettling and the episode has an unusually doom-laden atmosphere to it building up to a huge cliffhanger ending.

And then...nothing. Several months after filming of Season 6 was completed, lead actor Craig Charles became embroiled in a major scandal that led to police charges being filed (Red Dwarf had made Charles one of the biggest names on TV at the time, and he enjoyed the rock 'n' roll lifestyle a little too much, something that later came back to trouble him on Coronation Street as well). He was eventually fully exonerated, but it took a long time for him to clear his name. At the same time, the writing relationship between Rob Grant and Doug Naylor unfortunately broke down and their partnership split. Rob Grant left the series to start writing novels, whilst Doug Naylor became the sole writer and flag-carrier for the series.

Eventually, Red Dwarf returned for a new series in 1997, but it was a very different show to what had come before. But I'll be covering that in due course.

This season saw a marked change in the series. Still watchable and still funny with brilliant production values (for a BBC show in 1993, anyway), there was more trading on past glories than the exploration of fresh new ideas, and a much greater reliance on running gags. Lister, having been set up as a pretty canny guy over the previous five seasons, was also reset into a slightly dim slob, which wasn't really fair to the character. However, the performances remained strong, Gunmen of the Apocalypse is a classic episode and the cliffhanger ending is still startling today.

Red Dwarf: Season VI (***½) is available on DVD in the UK and USA.