red dwarf – Page 5

Arnold J. Rimmer, BSc, SSc

Published 14th October 2020

Sometimes a joke in a sitcom isn’t just funny, and doesn’t just reveal character. Sometimes, a joke is so good it literally seems to define your character. When Father Ted protests “that money was just resting in my account”, or Lieutenant Gruber sheepishly admits that “it was very lonely on the Russian front”, it somehow seems to be everything you need to know about them. A whole life, in a few short words.

For instance, take this joke in Series 1 of Red Dwarf (1988). As Lister prepares to watch Rimmer’s auto-obituary in “Me²”, he notices the following caption at the start.

HOLLY: “BSc, SSc?” What’s that?
LISTER: Bronze Swimming certificate and Silver Swimming certificate. He’s a total lunatic.

In that moment, you feel like you know everything there is to know about Arnold J. Rimmer. His abject failure to achieve anything, and his desperation to hide that by any means possible.

The thing is with these kind of jokes: they stick. When a joke means that much in terms of defining a character, the writers often can’t quite let go of it.

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That’s the Joke

Published 29th June 2020

TV Comedy

With all my WILD and CRAZY opinions, what do you think the most pushback I’ve ever had to something I’ve posted here on Dirty Feed? Saying something nice about That Puppet Game Show? Slagging off a beloved element of Animal Crossing? Posting BBC Micro porn in living colour? (Please believe me when I say that last link is genuinely NSFW.)

No. The most pushback I’ve ever had is when I said I agreed with John Cleese. No, not about those comments. About a perfectly innocuous Fawlty Towers joke. Specifically, the bit in “Gourmet Night”¹, where Basil faints while trying to introduce the Twichens to the Halls.

MR. HALL: No, no, we still don’t know the name.
BASIL: Oh, Fawlty, Basil Fawlty.
MR. HALL: No, no, theirs!
BASIL: Oh, theirs! So sorry! I thought you meant yours! [maniacal laughter] My, it’s quite warm, isn’t it? I could do with a drink, too. So, another sherry?
MR. HALL: Aren’t you going to introduce us?
BASIL: Didn’t I?
MR. HALL: No!
BASIL: Oh, sorry. This is Mr and Mrs… [mumbles]
MR. HALL: What?
BASIL: Er, Mr and Mrs…

Basil faints.

For years, I thought the joke was that Basil simply forgot the Twitchens’ name – him having forgotten his own name in the previous scene. But no. John Cleese explains all in the DVD commentary:

CLEESE: Now, what’s interesting here is that one of the best-loved jokes in Fawlty Towers, which is Basil fainting, is I’m afraid totally misunderstood by everyone who’s ever seen it, because – it is entirely Connie’s and my fault – it’s not set up properly. When Basil faints because he cannot remember Mr. Twitchen’s name, it’s not actually because he can’t remember Mr. Twitchen’s name. He can – but he’s talking to a man whose head is constantly twitching… and he doesn’t like to say “this is Mr. Twitchen” to someone whose head is twitching because that might annoy that person. So that’s actually what the joke is.

Anyway, in this piece on those commentaries, I made the error of admitting that I had misunderstood the joke too. And despite John Cleese literally explaining that it was a bad joke because too many people misinterpreted it, I’ve never had more people hinting that I was a bit of a moron. Someone even called me a “dunce”. I can only hope that my subsequent work examining exactly what was reshot of the Fawlty Towers pilot, and a long investigation into an early incarnation of the show now absolves me of dunce status.

All this got me thinking recently. If I sat here detailing all the jokes in sitcoms I’ve misunderstood over the years, I’d be here all day. But one particular example has always stayed with me, because it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out. And unlike the above example, it’s set up entirely correctly, and I should have no excuses.

So let’s take a trip to Red Dwarf – specifically, “Kryten”, and learn about decimalised music²:

RIMMER: It’s because you’re bored, isn’t it? That’s why you’re both annoying me.
HOLLY: I’m not bored. I’ve had a really busy morning. I’ve devised a system to totally revolutionise music.
LISTER: Get out of town!
HOLLY: Yeah, I’ve decimalised it. Instead of the octave, it’s the decative. And I’ve invented two new notes: H and J.
LISTER: Hang on a minute. You can’t just invent new notes.
HOLLY: Well I have. Now it goes: Doh, ray, me, fah, soh, lah, woh, boh, ti, doh. Doh, ti, boh, woh, lah, soh, fah, me, ray, doh.
RIMMER: What are you drivelling about?
HOLLY: Hol Rock. It’ll be a whole new sound. All the instruments will be extra big to incorporate my two new notes. Triangles will have four sides. Piano keyboards the length of zebra crossings. Course, women will have to be banned from playing the cello.
LISTER: Holly: shut up.

For an embarrassingly long time, I didn’t understand that last cello joke. I first saw the episode in February 1994, when I was 12, and maybe I should have got it then. Regardless: I didn’t. I can’t remember exactly when I did, but it had clicked by 2007.

There’s an odd thing, when you’ve watched a sitcom from an early age. An age where you get the idea of the programme, and many of the jokes… but miss a few obvious ones along the way, as well. Because my mind has a tendency to get a little – for want of a better word – stuck. When watching the same show as an adult, I hear the words, but the joke isn’t always heard afresh. The result: a joke that you would have got if you were coming to it for the first time remains impenetrable, long after you should understand it.

Well, that’s my excuse, anyway, and I’m sticking to it. Leave me alone.

“Gourmet Night” also contains perhaps the harshest and bleakest joke in the whole of Fawlty Towers. “How’s that lovely daughter of yours?” / “She’s dead.” Very rarely remarked upon amid the rest of Basil’s nonsense, but it’s properly horrific. ↩
A joke that Grant Naylor used in various forms for years. ↩

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Great Expectations

Published 27th January 2020

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I’ve Covered My Website in Complete and Utter and Total Absolute Nonsense Gibberish

Published 27th December 2019

TV Comedy

Slightly alarmingly, it seems I have been writing for Red Dwarf fansite Ganymede & Titan for a full 16 years now. My oldest contributions there can now technically have sex with articles from a Doctor Who fansite, to produce the most unpleasant offspring you can imagine.

Still, over the years, my contributions – while definitely increasing in quality – have certainly decreased in quantity.¹ So this year, I set myself the challenge of updating the site at least once a month, a feat I haven’t managed since 2007. Slightly unexpectedly, I actually managed to achieve this.

Which means over the last year, I have provided answers to the following questions:

Which failed US TV show provided a set used in Red Dwarf VI?
Is the fifth episode in a six part series always the worst?
How on earth can you see the hull of Red Dwarf in the final moments of Filthy, Rich & Catflap?
Where can you see the first series of Rob Grant and Doug Naylor’s other audience sitcom?
Which member of Red Dwarf‘s cast used to have a human jukebox act?
What reshoots were needed to the first series of Red Dwarf because of Norman Lovett’s whinging?
What did a bunch of schoolkids think of the first series of the show?
Which article on the site did I get entirely bored of writing, to the point where you can detect weariness from the very first paragraph?
Likewise, how did I manage to get 907 words out of a particularly stupid topic, and not even reach any kind of conclusion?
What did Red Dwarf look like on public television in Iowa?
When was Red Dwarf first repeated on UK Gold?
If you had a time machine, how could you make shitloads of money out of Red Dwarf fans in the mid-nineties?
At exactly what point does Robert Llewellyn doing a Douglas Bader impression become highly uncomfortable?
Which show did Chris Barrie and Craig Charles appear on in-between the recording and broadcast of Series 1?

And to round everything off, I also wrote the G&T Christmas Message for this year; our traditional address to the nation rounding up all the Red Dwarf news over the last 12 months. Until fairly recently, I could have probably just written “that silly AA advert” and had done with it, but this month saw the first of two audience recordings for a new special to be broadcast next year. Meaning there will be a whole new spate of people saying “What, I thought Red Dwarf finished years ago with that dodgy one set in prison, I didn’t know there had been new episodes since then”, despite there being literally 21 brand new episodes made and broadcast since 2009.²

Away from the wacky world of Red Dwarf³, don’t forget that the 1st January sees the 10th anniversary of a particularly stupid website called Dirty Feed. So pop over here in the New Year for a celebration of the fact that very, very occasionally, I write something which doesn’t deserve immediately throwing into a large bin.

And not just because of an extended sulk in 2009 after Back to Earth. ↩
It’s no secret I’m not crazy about most of the new episodes, but if you haven’t seen any of the Dave-era shows and want to dip your toe in: my personal opinion is that Lemons, The Beginning, Officer Rimmer, M-Corp and Skipper are your best bets. ↩
Or “whacky”, if you really have to. ↩

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“The 100 Years War?”

Published 29th September 2019

Internet

I have to admit, Dirty Feed and podcasts is a bit of a sore point. I did three episodes in 2012… and the fourth one has yet to materialise. Yes, a wait of seven years and counting is taking the fucking piss. All I can say is that it will return one day. I’ve spent far too much on jingles for it not to.

I have been involved in another podcast these last few years, mind. Over on Ganymede & Titan, the Red Dwarf fansite which is unaccountably still running and updated in 2019, we just published our 100th episode of DwarfCasts. The reason we managed to get to 100 episodes is because all I have to do is turn up and speak loudly and annoyingly about Red Dwarf, rather than actually do any of the hard work of getting the show prepped, recorded, edited, and published. So when I say I’m proud of that 100th episode, it’s nothing to do with me, and everything to do with Ian Symes, who put that beautiful little documentary together.¹

Still, it got me thinking. Maybe 100 episodes of a podcast made over 13 years isn’t the most impressive thing in the world, even if that is 98 episodes more than most podcasts manage. But it strikes me that there’s something pleasant about devoting myself to the same thing for that length of time. Indeed, take a look at Ganymede & Titan as a whole – I’ve been writing for the site for 16 years and counting, and if you look back at the very first incarnation of the site, it’s been going for a full 20 years. And doing the same kind of thing for so long means that I’ve ended up writing and talking about areas that I never would have examined if I’d done what so many people did.

Because most sensible 90s Red Dwarf fans did the following: got a job, got a family, and stopped thinking that much about Red Dwarf. I managed the first two, but somehow never stopped doing the third. And sure, I’ve written about my frustration about that at times. I do have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the show these days.

But if I’d done what normal fans do, and drifted away from doing anything in fandom, I’d never have written some of my favourite pieces on the show. On the development of Holly in the early days of the show, on the very earliest stirrings of Rob and Doug playing with the nature of reality, or about how the glimmerings of one of Red Dwarf‘s most famous episodes can be seen in Hancock’s Half Hour, to name three of many.

All this is on my mind as we come up to this January, and the 10th anniversary of Dirty Feed. In one sense, anniversaries are an arbitrary waste of time. But as an excuse to take stock of where we are, and what’s to come, I find them useful. Over the last ten years, I’ve published stuff on here I love, and stuff which I now think is a bit crap. But the fact that I’ve been publishing stuff in the same place for a full ten years feels meaningful, somehow. As with the DwarfCasts, I haven’t been as prolific on here as I would have liked to have been; other bits of life got in the way. But over the years, it adds together into a really nice archive of fun stuff.

There’s an advantage to plugging away at the same thing for years, without getting bored and flitting to the next thing. You don’t have to give it endless chunks of your time each week. Nor do you have to worry about any kind of long-term plan, or where exactly it is you’re going. And after a few years, you may just look back in surprise.

Without even realising it, you’ve made something you’re proud of.

Shhhhhh. Don’t tell him I was nice about him. ↩

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Only as a Myth, a Dark Fable, a Horror Tale…

Published 18th June 2019

TV Comedy

This year, I’ve been trying to do a bit more writing than usual over on Ganymede & Titan, the Red Dwarf fansite run by “over-entitled pricks who are upset that it isn’t actually 1992 anymore”. And one thing I’ve been doing this year is taking some Standard Red Dwarf Facts™, and digging a little deeper than usual with them.

Here’s three of those pieces in particular that I think turned out OK.

G&TV: Covington Cross
This is one of the most endlessly parroted facts among Dwarf fans: the outside village from Emohawk: Polymorph II was an abandoned set from US series Covington Cross. Which, indeed, is absolutely correct. But nobody has ever actually gone through both shows and pinpointed shots where exactly the same parts of the set are used. I have, and for some reason I am proud of this.

Take the Fifth
This is a bit of an odd one, in that this is a “fact” that we had pretty much convinced ourselves of over on G&T: that the penultimate episode of each series of Red Dwarf is where they usually hid the worst episode of the run. But does this end up being true? (I would do well to examine my own assumptions more often.)

You Stupid Ugly Goit
Probably the best thing I’ve written so far this year, on a very early piece of Red Dwarf lore. It’s generally known that at the start of the production of Series 1, Norman Lovett was originally out-of-vision, and the decision was made to make Holly a visual character after shooting had already started. But the details of exactly what was reshot to make this happen are very complicated. I think I drag up a few new things to consider here.

* * *

Meanwhile, back to Dirty Feed. And although I published some fun stuff last month, overall things have been a little quiet over here recently. I do have some silly ideas in the works, though, building up to the site’s 10th anniversary next year.

Stay tuned, as the kids definitely don’t say any more.

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my other stuff, red dwarf

Set to Rights

Published 12th December 2018

TV Comedy

This year, I have been writing for Red Dwarf fansite Ganymede & Titan for a full 15 years. Anybody sensible would think that was more than enough, and go and do something else instead.

Spoiler: I am not sensible.

Recently I published two articles over there which might interest you, taking a look at the set design of the first couple of series. There’s this piece about the reuse of a certain corridor set, and then there’s this piece about the disappearing and reappearing Captain’s Office set. These are the first two parts of an ongoing series which should continue into next year.

Corridor pipes set, from Waiting for God

I’ve got to admit, it’s been fun writing these. I sometimes find Red Dwarf a little hard to write about these days; we’ve all talked about the old shows endlessly, so going over the same old thing can feel a little dull. Meanwhile, the new shows don’t really capture my imagination in a way which makes me want to write about them. But this really is a topic that hasn’t been talked about in quite this way before. I’ve watched those old shows countless times, but when you put everything else aside just to look at how those sets were put together, it’s amazing what new things you can spot.

I sometimes think there are two kinds of people. Those who understand why I find stuff like deleted scenes, unbroadcast pilots, and the reuse of sets to be fascinating… and those who can’t even begin to understand. I don’t think it’s even a geeks v. non-geeks thing per se: there are plenty of geeks who only care about a show in-universe, and possibly its cast members, rather than how the show was put together.

They won’t get a single thing out of this. But if you’re a silly person like me, then hopefully you’ll enjoy them.

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Listen to My Sexy Voice Talking About Red Dwarf

Published 13th October 2017

TV Comedy

Another year, and another series of Red Dwarf. And if you’d told me a few years back that I’d be saying that in 2017, I’d have told you off for talking BOLLOCKS. Yet here we are.

Sadly, with another series of Red Dwarf comes another series of LIVE DwarfCasts over on Ganymede & Titan, the Red Dwarf website where I recently wrote about not liking Red Dwarf very much. So what better person to sit and pontificate about the show for the next five Fridays, starting at 9pm tonight? Just visit our Spreaker page twenty minutes before the show starts for some HOT STREAMING ACTION. Don’t worry, I’m just there to cause trouble – there are people far more qualified than me who are actually running the show.

We’re going at UKTV Play pace this year, rather than broadcast pace – so if you want to join us, make sure you watch the episode available for streaming late Thursday evening, not the episode broadcast on Dave the same day. (We know it’s confusing. We know.) This week, that’s the second episode in the series, Siliconia, available right now.

Oh, and as for the first episode? That was last week, and I couldn’t make it. Don’t worry, we got Clayton Hickman to do it instead. Go and visit his Redbubble store, BTW, if you like an obscure TV show called Doctor Who. I’ve never heard of it, personally. I prefer Starhyke.

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my other stuff, red dwarf, uktv

Scrapings from underneath somebody’s crusty bellend

Published 30th August 2017

TV Comedy

Ah, it’s been rather quiet over here on Dirty Feed recently, hasn’t it? Sorry, I’ve been busy over on Ganymede & Titan, the Red Dwarf fansite I write for because I hate Red Dwarf.

Here’s what I’ve been up to over there, if you’re interested.

Better Than Reality
A short piece looking at the genesis of some of Red Dwarf‘s most popular episodes, as found in Radio 4 sketch show Cliché – Rob and Doug’s first solo writing credit. (I didn’t get much feedback on this one, and I don’t think it’s the best-written piece I’ve ever done, but the fundamental point is fascinating, I think.)

End of Part One, Red Dwarf XI Edition
A look at the placing of ad breaks in Red Dwarf XI, because I’m the only person in the world who would actually bother to write that article. (I did enjoy the person who told me on Twitter that ad breaks shouldn’t be used to set up cliffhangers in British TV shows. I told them they lost that argument in 1955.)

Observation Dome: Back From The Dead
About bringing an old part of Red Dwarf fandom back from the dead. (I’ll be writing more about this on Dirty Feed shortly.)

Red Dwarf and Me: Artificial Reality
On my relationship with Red Dwarf these days, which has been percolating in my mind for five years… and I only just figured out how to write it. The comment thread is lovely and well worth a read too.

Red Dwarf, there.

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my other stuff, red dwarf, uktv

Red Dwarf: An Accidental Trilogy

Published 31st July 2017

TV Comedy

When I’m not writing over here, you can find me over on Ganymede & Titan – the Red Dwarf fansite started in 1999 which is unaccountably still running. Having just published a brand new piece of mine over there today, it strikes me that over the past three years I seem to have accidentally written myself a little trilogy about the history, influences and themes of the show.

As they’re some of my better pieces, with a strong linking thread, if you feel like diving into my Red Dwarf writing you could probably do worse than check out the following. They do go into the show in a little more depth than “Dave Hollins was on the radio, and then it turned into Red Dwarf“.

History of a Joke (2015)
Tracing the history of a single joke Rob and Doug have used in various forms, right from their first solo radio show Cliché in 1981, to their novel Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers in 1989.

Hancock’s Half Hour: The Tycoon (2016)
A look at how the basic structure of the Red Dwarf episode Better Than Life was done by Hancock’s Half Hour thirty years earlier: even the supposedly science fiction element.

Better Than Reality (2017)
A brand new piece, which takes a look at how a single sketch in Cliché informed ideas that Red Dwarf would use time and time again – in Better Than Life, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, and beyond.

If any of my Red Dwarf writing interests you, give the above a go. They’re some of the best stuff about the show I’ve written over the past few years, so if you don’t like them then for fuck’s sake don’t hunt down any of my other shit.

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