“The Red Dwarf sets have been built on Stage G at Shepperton Studios, home of countless films and television projects, including The Third Man, Oliver!, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Mel Gibson’s Hamlet, for the past three seasons. Scattered amongst the workshops and sound stages at Shepperton are a number of disused backlots, which have proved to be a bonanza for the Red Dwarf production team. This year, they’ve already returned to the wooded glade used in last season’s ‘Terrorform’ to shoot exteriors for episode four, ‘Rimmerworld’, and next week they’ll be shooting segments of episode five, ‘Emohawk’, in a village of wooden huts – a set left behind by the short-lived American series Covington Cross.”
The Making of Red Dwarf, Joe Nazzaro, p. 17 (published 1994)
“The GELF settlement was a re-dressed medieval village set which had been created for the aborted British/American television series Covington Cross.”
“Emohawk: Polymorph II” Wikipedia entry (retrieved October 2020)
Any self-respecting Red Dwarf fan has a few standard facts at their disposal. The first recording dates for Series 1 were cancelled due to an electrician’s strike. Robert Llewellyn was electrocuted on his first day at work. “Meltdown” was put back in the episode order due to worries about the Gulf War.
Slotting in among these standard set of facts is that the village scenes in the episode “Emohawk: Polymorph II” were shot on an abandoned set for a series called Covington Cross. And that’s… kinda it. That is The Fact, done, ticked, off we go.
I don’t think that’s good enough. Let’s take a proper look.