Ten facts you never knew about Red Dwarf – from star’s major U-turn to how show writers tackled ‘swear word ban’
RED Dwarf has been a TV phenomenon for more than three decades.
The series starred Craig Charles, Danny John-Jules, Chris Barrie and Robert Llewellyn and followed their adventures across the galaxy on a mining space-craft.
Starting in 1988, when fax machines and pagers were state of the art technology, and only a handful of yuppies even had mobile phones, the adventures of slobby Dave Lister, the last living human, a hologram of his incredibly annoying bunkmate Arnold Rimmer, a creature who evolved from a pet cat and a small handful of robots and computers, it is still running today.
Rumours are circulating of a new three-part mini-series coming to U&Dave next year – and the same core cast is still in place.
But how well do you know Red Dwarf? Author Tom Salinsky has revealed 10 top facts about the hit series that may come as a surprise to even die-hard fans.
1. Spoof song
Before launching Red Dwarf, writers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor worked on satirical puppet show Spitting Image where they penned the lyrics to the incredibly annoying spoof novelty single “The Chicken Song”
2. Casting chaos
Famed sitcom writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson (Hancock, Steptoe and Son) impressed upon them the importance of getting really experienced actors for the leads – people who could get viewers to buy into the relationships as well as be funny.
They ended up with a performance poet, an impressionist, a stand-up comedian and a West End dancer.
3. Accounting blunder
The show was commissioned only because of a BBC accounting loophole. BBC Manchester allocated funds for a second series of Ben Elton’s Happy Families, which he had no intention of writing.
Producer Paul Jackson took the cash and made Red Dwarf with it instead. Before this, BBC commissioner Gareth Gwenlan had rejected it three times.
4. Swearing ban
Not being able to have the characters swear was a real problem for the writers, so they invented the novel profanity “smeg” as a substitute.
This didn’t stop 19 viewers from calling the BBC complaint line, following a feature about the show on an edition of Points of View, to object to the word on the grounds that it had ‘sexual connotations’.
Other terms of abuse created by for the show include ‘gimboid’, ‘goit’ and, in one episode, ‘gwenlan’.
5. Colour confusion
When they first saw the model for the Red Dwarf spaceship, the writers were delighted – but confused. They had never imagined it was going to be red.
The modelmakers, of course, had never imagined that a ship called “Red Dwarf” would be any other colour.
6. Lister’s vehicle
The vehicle which Lister drives around the ship in the second series is a repurposed Sinclair C5 electric tricycle with added handlebars.
7. Continuity issue
It is made absolutely explicit that Lister is from the mid-21st century in the first series episode “Stasis Leak”.
And equally explicit in the fourth series episode “DNA” that he’s from the 23rd century. Continuity is for smegheads.
8. Star’s U-Turn
When the show was brought back (the first time), series star Chris Barrie was exhausted from working on both Red Dwarf and The Brittas Empire and asked to be given time off the science fiction show, on which everything seemed to take twice as long.
Then, when he was only working on Brittas, he became frustrated that nobody seemed to take enough care over anything, and was quickly back full-time in space where he belongs.
9. Breaking records
When the show was brought back (the second time), the three-part story Back to Earth broke records for digital TV viewership.
The official number for the first episode is 2.35 million, in an environment where anything over a million is seen as really very good.
But with the other two parts and various repeats, the aggregate number is something like 11 million. These are records that stand to this day.
10. Half-finished scripts
When the show was brought back (the third time), filming was suddenly brought forward to accommodate the actors’ schedules, and Doug Naylor – now sole writer and director – got so behind that shooting started with only four-and-a-half completed scripts.
Desperate for material, he cannibalised ideas from Red Dwarf The Movie, which he had spent most of the previous decade trying and failing to get funding for.
Tom Salinsky is the author of new book Red Dwarf: Discovering the TV Series and is available to order here.
Red Dwarf is available to watch on BBC iPlayer.