Closing the Gap

On the 21st March 1988, Danny John-Jules appeared as The Cat in the Red Dwarf episode “Me²“, the final episode of Series 1.

On the 6th September 1988, Danny John-Jules appeared as The Cat in the Red Dwarf episode “Kryten”, the first episode of Series 2.

But between those dates, on the 30th May 1988, Danny John-Jules appeared as The Cat in something altogether different: a show called Babylon 2, part of the BBC’s brand new youth strand DEF II.

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I was really too young to watch DEF II. It aired on BBC2 between 1988 and 1994; I was only seven when it started. For that matter, I was also too young for Red Dwarf, at least when it came to our house’s viewing habits; I only got into that during the 1994 repeat run. I certainly don’t remember watching any of the three events listed at the start of this article. Which means I heard about Danny’s appearance on DEF II only as a myth, a dark fable, a horror tale, told across the flickering embers of a midnight fire, wherever hardened space dogs gather to drink fermented vegetable products and compete in tales of blood-chilling terror.

I can remember when I first heard of it, though. In 2006, the BBC made the quite remarkable decision to make its internal catalogue system, Infax, open to the public.¹ This lead to all kinds of interesting internal notes about programmes going to a far wider audience than was intended; for instance, did you know that the first two series of The Fast Show are labelled “DO NOT WIPE WITHOUT PERMISSION OF CHARLIE HIGSON”?

Inevitably, this public-facing version of the catalogue was pulled in 2007, due to data protection concerns.² It’s remarkable that the project ever launched in the first place; a post-GDPR world has made it essentially inconceivable, especially when it comes to news material. In 2014, BBC Genome launched, now known as the BBC Programme Index. Based on information which was always intended to be public-facing, this proposition was an awful lot safer.

Anyway, before it was unceremoniously yanked, I managed to write a couple of articles using it, over on my old stomping ground Ganymede & Titan, searching for Red Dwarf-related nonsense.³ And one particular entry will sound familiar:

Babylon 2 (30th May 1988) – “Danny JOHN-JULES pres this collection of nostalgic clips from classic children’s progs”. Excellent! 1988 seems pretty early for him to be doing this kind of thing, interestingly – only Series 1 of Dwarf had gone out at that point, and Marian hadn’t started yet either. Incidentally, guess who did the next two programmes in the series? Harry Enfield and Stephen Fry! I’d kill to see those episodes too.

Sadly, this material never ended up on any of the Red Dwarf DVD releases, and nobody seemed to have a copy of it. It seemed like it was just lost into the ether.

Well, nearly. In June 2025 on Roobarb’s Forum – locked to unregistered visitors, but the following seems harmless enough to quote – somebody asked the following:

“I seem to remember Danny John-Jules hosting the programming strand “Def II”, in character as The Cat, claiming various things as his own with his spray, as he is seen doing in Confidence and Paranoia.

Did I imagine this? I can’t find evidence of this anywhere online. There doesn’t seem to even be a mention of it. Did it happen? Does anyone have the footage?”

Warbodog on the Ganymede & Titan forums then gave some extra, exciting information. In Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition 10: The Complete Seventh Doctor, published in 2005, we are told:

“An extract from The Claws of Axos Episode Four appeared on BBC2’s DEF II on Monday 30 May [1988], one of a number of items introduced by Danny John-Jules in his Red Dwarf persona as the Cat and pre-recorded on Tuesday 24 May.”

A recording date for the Cat links! Just six days before air. But sadly, the programme itself remained elusive.

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Until, that is, the 23rd November 2025. When the entire programme was uploaded to YouTube⁴, and then posted to the G&T forums. And in pretty damn good quality, to boot.

Note that the production know it’s weird that Danny has to do the general DEF II links and the specific Babylon 2 links on virtually the same set… so lean into it and deliberately do a silly cut between them, rather than try to pointlessly disguise it.

Finally seeing this after all these years also inspired me to go rummaging around in various bits of paperwork. And while they aren’t credited on-screen, Danny’s links here were scripted by… Rob Grant and Doug Naylor themselves. It’s fun to watch the above video with that in mind. To all intents and purposes it’s “new” Red Dwarf material, from the show’s glory years.

Which is the odd thing about all this. When that edition of Babylon 2 first aired in the spring of 1988, the context was extremely clear: a character which you’d seen in that sitcom you quite enjoyed, pops up again on the same channel to do a few links. Simple. And yet over the years, due to this material not being in general circulation, it became something altogether different, and altogether more mysterious.

For those of us working in the pop culture mines, the point of all our efforts was to help us all feel as close to the programme as viewers did in 1988 – and if possible, even more so. Over the years, whether it was posting memories, rooting through databases, checking paperwork, or literally uploading the programme itself, the aim was the same: to close the gap.

We eventually got there. Just a million and four gaps to go.

1. Infax was the current internal catalogue system in 2006. It’s been replaced twice over now. ↩

2. My joke at the time: “DO NOT USE – MRS JENKINS NOW HAS CANCER.” ↩

3. Note that Part Two promises a third part, which never happened. Dickhead. ↩

4. By the account Sticky tape ‘n’ rust. I highly recommend a browse through their stuff. You could lose yourself for hours watching their videos. ↩

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