I HEART 80s

Red Dwarf, Series 1

Posted in tv 1988

Uh-oh Baby! This was top, top stuff. First shown on Monday 15 February 1988 I was hooked from the start. The premise is just so mind bogglingly far out that there was no way that I could do anything other than just adore it.

On the deep space mining vessel Red Dwarf, vending machine technician, Dave Lister (Craig Charles) has been placed in stasis for smuggling a cat on board the ship, when (unbeknownst to him, 3 million years later) he wakes to find the entire crew of the vessel has been wiped out in a radiation leak.

Of course, he is not alone - not much scope for laughs there - but is doomed to suffer the company of another technician Arnold J Rimmer (Chris Barrie) his former roommate. At least it looks like Rimmer and certainly sounds like him, but is actually a hologram of Rimmer, generated by the ship's computer Holly (Norman Lovett) in order to keep Lister sane. Of course there is also Cat, played by Danny John-Jules, a human / cat descendant of the original cat, Frankenstein, for whom Lister had got into trouble in the first place.

Red Dwarf is one of those special memories for me. They say that humour is the best medicine and having this to laugh at on a Monday evening in February / March 1988 made life that little bit more bearable.

Red Dwarf: Complete BBC Series 1 [DVD]
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Description

Notoriously, and entirely appropriately, the original outline for Doug Naylor and Rob Grant's comedy SF series Red Dwarf was sketched on the back of a beer mat. When it finally appeared on our television screens in 1988 the show had clearly stayed true to its roots, mixing jokes about excessive curry consumption with affectionate parodies of classic SF. Indeed, one of the show's most endearing and enduring features is its obvious respect for the conventions of SF, even as it gleefully subverts them. The scenario owes something to Douglas Adams's satirical Hitch-Hiker's Guide, something to The Odd Couple and a lot more to the slacker SF of John Carpenter's Dark Star. Behind the crew's constant bickering there lurks an impending sense that life, the universe and everything are all someone's idea of a terrible joke. Later series broadened the show's horizons until at last its premise was so diluted as to be unrecognisable, but in the six episodes of the first series the comedy is witty and intimate, focusing on characters and not special effects. Slob Dave Lister (Craig Charles) is the last human alive after a radiation leak wipes out the crew of the vast mining vessel Red Dwarf (episode 1, "The End"). He bums around the spaceship with the perpetually uptight and annoyed hologram of his dead bunkmate, Arnold Rimmer (Chris Barrie, the show's greatest comedy asset) and a creature evolved from a cat (dapper Danny John Jules). They are guided rather haphazardly by Holly, the worryingly thick ship's computer (lugubrious Norman Lovett). On the DVD: Red Dwarf I arrives in a two-disc set, with all six episodes on the first disc accompanied by an excellent group commentary from Craig Charles, Chris Barrie, Danny John Jules and Norman Lovett. (There's also a bonus commentary on "The End" with the two writers and director Ed Bye.) The 4:3 picture is unimpressive, but sound is decent stereo. The second disc has an entertaining 25-minute documentary on the genesis of the series with contributions from the cast, writer Doug Naylor and producer Paul Jackson. Navigate the animated menus to find a gallery of extra features, including isolated music cues, deleted scenes, outtakes ("Smeg Ups"), a fun "Drunk" music montage, model effects shots, Web links, audiobook clips, the original BBC trailer and even the entire first episode in Japanese. --Mark Walker