Mike Agnew RIP News Posted by Ian Symes on 8th July 2025, 17:34 The very sad news has reached us that Mike Agnew has passed away. As the Production Manager for Red Dwarf Series 2 and III, he was one of the driving forces behind the show’s early success, and provided us with so many memorable behind the scenes stories. Mike started out as an actor, before moving behind the scenes as Rowan Atkinson’s tour manager. He broke into television after meeting Paul Jackson on the first ever Comic Relief, becoming part of his and director Ed Bye’s trusted team on Craig Goes Mad in Melbourne and Don’t Miss Wax. Joining Red Dwarf for its second series, Mike made a big impact on both sides of the camera, famously standing in for Craig Charles during the location shoot for Thanks For The Memory, after the actor sped off to attend the birth of his child. He made further notable appearances in Series III, as the auto-destruct voice in Bodyswap, Kevin the Polymorph, and most famously “Git in Pub” in Backwards, where you can also hear him shouting “!noitca” at the end/start of the fight scene. But it was behind the scenes that he made the biggest impression, with his Production Manager role encompassing floor management, location scouting, and assistant directing. He recounted some of his war stories in the It’s Cold Outside and All Change DVD documentaries; highlights include the tale of a mishap with a drape during a crucial moment of the Kryten shoot, and of the time Danny and Craig went missing on location for Backwards, which culminated in Ed Bye having to physically restrain him. More recently, he joined Rob, Ed, Paul and Dona Distefano for the Quarantine Commentary on Thanks For The Memory, and was interviewed for Dave’s Red Dwarf: The First Three Million Years. Immediately post-Dwarf, Mike was floor manager for such programmes as The Jack Dee Show, Knowing Me Knowing You With Alan Partridge and TFI Friday. Having got his first taste of directing on a scene in Timeslides, he then graduated to a mixture of producer and director roles, across such shows as The Big Breakfast, Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush, Tarrant on TV, You’ve Been Framed, Dog Eat Dog, Friends Like These and The Great Garden Challenge. Mike was a well respected figure in the television industry, and he leaves a big hole in the Red Dwarf family. Our thoughts and condolences go out to all those who knew him.
The Defunct Brands of Red Dwarf Features Posted by Ian Symes on 28th June 2025, 14:35 Red Dwarf's attitude towards real world references has fluctuated over the years. In the early days, Rob and Doug were keen to invent their own futuristic pop culture - Mugs Murphy, rastabilly skank, the London Jets - intertwined with more contemporary references to the likes of Kevin Keegan, Felicity Kendal and Ishtar. Generally speaking, the focus then shifted to historical figures, or those whose fame is international and timeless, your Wilma Flintstones, your Jane Austens, and of course, the all time number one. However, when it comes to brands and companies, the writers have never had any qualms with keeping the references relevant to the viewers at home. Other than the likes of the Jupiter Mining Corporation itself, Divadroid, Crapola, Leopard Lager and, much later, M-Corp, you're far more likely to hear about Pot Noodles, Shake 'n' Vac, FIFA, Brylcreem and Chicken (Mc)Nuggets than any invented equivalent. It's much more conducive to good comedy to give the audience a reference they're familiar with, plus Rob and Doug were never averse to leaning back on their observational comedy standards for a quick laugh. But Red Dwarf is thirty seven years old, and the world moves fast. What may have felt like enduring brands in the 80s and 90s - and even the 2010s - aren't necessarily going to have lasted to the modern day. And so we're going to take a look at every product or company name that's mentioned in dialogue throughout the 74 episodes, which has since fallen by the wayside. We'll note all the examples we could find, give a brief history, and outline its demise. Read more →
No sir, all thirteen! News Posted by Ian Symes on 19th June 2025, 16:44 With thanks to Dave for drawing our attention to this in our forum, a very interesting new release has appeared on the website of online retailer Zavvi. Hot on the heels of 2019’s Series I-VIII Bluray comes… the Series I-XIII Bluray! Yes, Series XIII… let the debate about how to number the various productions of the Dave era continue into a third glorious decade. We’re always wary about fully trusting the details listed by retailers this far in advance of a release, as plans can change, and even those that don’t change may have been misinterpreted at some stage. However, in the absence of any kind of official online presence for Red Dwarf, we’re very intrigued by the list of what’s included. As well as uniting the BBC and Dave eras of the show in a commercial release for the first time ever, we’re promised that Just The Smegs will be there too, which is great news. It felt like the one thing that was really lacking from the previous collection. No word on Beat The Geek, though. The small print specifies that there’ll be a whopping 32 discs, which indicates we’re getting the full extras package from the previous boxset and the individual releases. Two discs apiece for Series I-VI and BTE-XII makes 20, three each for VII and VIII brings us to 26, then single discs for Just The Smegs and The Promised Land equals 28. That leaves four discs remaining, which suggests The Bodysnatcher Collection may well be included in full this time, with the Re-Mastered episodes and all. We’d assume that the episodes themselves will be the remasters (with a small r) from the 2019 boxset, and that the old extras will be presented on clones of the original DVDs, as before. I’m also going to guess that there’ll be no new extras to speak off, but I’ll be more than happy to be proven wrong. Release is scheduled for 6th October, so we’re looking forward to learning more – and seeing the new artwork – between now and then. And we’ve got just under four months to learn to speak fluent Emglish.
Draft To Reality Features Posted by Ian Symes on 23rd May 2025, 12:52 It's the best episode of Red Dwarf of all time. Undefeated in all four of our anniversary polls so far, more often than not the winner of other wide-ranging surveys by the Smegazine and Better Than Life, and even given a special BBC2 repeat screening under the title The Best Ever Red Dwarf. It happened to be the first episode I ever saw, probably the one I've rewatched the most, and quite possibly the single piece of media in the entire history of human civilisation that I'm most familiar with. I could quote every line of dialogue word for word, perfectly duplicating the intonation. I can picture each and every visual effect in my mind's eye. It taught me the words "seppuku", "twonk" and "calamari". After 33 years, what more could we possibly learn about this episode? Well... I recently came into possession of a rather special script. Dated 1991. Series V. Show One. Draft One. Back To Reality. The very first draft of the very best episode of our favourite show. Only a small handful of deleted scenes are included on the DVD. A version of the script was released as part of the Primordial Soup book, but that was a much later draft, and doesn't contain anything that wasn't either in the episode or on the DVD. We know a lot about this episode, but we don't know how it started out, before it was honed to perfection. Let's do this. Read more →
G&TV Special: Swirly Thing Alert Features Posted by Ian Symes on 23rd April 2025, 12:15 Previously on G&TV, we looked at Smegheads in Seattle, a 1998 production by KCTS 9, Seattle's local PBS station. They'd arranged a visit from Craig Charles and Danny John-Jules, who came over to be interviewed, take part in pledge drives and meet the show's many fans in the north-west corner of the US / the south-west corner of Canada. But Smegheads in Seattle was actually the second such programme produced by the station, a sequel of sorts to 1997's Swirly Thing Alert, which featured much the same content but with Craig joined by Robert Llewellyn instead. Taking place over the 26th and 27th May to coincide with a Series VII marathon, highlights from the weekend's events were packaged together into a whopping two hour compilation. Both specials were originally posted to YouTube by a user named Harlz, but they seem to have deleted them both within the last year or so. So we're now hosting them on our own channel, as well as on the Internet Archive. And if you've not seen Swirly Thing Alert before, there is much to unpack. Join us below the embed for analysis and a watch-along guide to some of the highlights (and lowlights). Read more →
DwarfCast 176 – The Smegazine Rack – Issue #14 DwarfCasts Posted by Ian Symes on 3rd April 2025, 14:49 Subscribe to DwarfCasts: RSS • iTunes "Jane Killed Flick" It's the end of a relatively minor era, as we conclude our coverage of Volume 1 of the Red Dwarf Smegazine. Get ready for the cross-over event of the century, as one character from Back to Reality meets another character from Back to Reality, along with about fifty other comic strips of varying quality. We also uncover some scandalous censorship on the news pages, discuss Robert Llewellyn being sodomised by a rabbit, covet tiny cardboard models, deride one of the worst April Fools jokes of all time, and stalk a baby. It's quite the ride. We recommend reading along as you listen; you can find scans of the mag at archive.org or Stasis Leak. Read more →
Sin, sin, sin, sin, sin… oh, I’ve not sin that! News Posted by Jonathan Capps on 22nd March 2025, 22:07 Well, here’s one for all the fans who wanted Doug to write a new novel. Please, ignore that monkey’s paw curling its finger… Thank you to clem over on the forum for spotting that Doug Naylor will be releasing a new children’s book this September, entitled Sin Bin Island. At the end of each year, four pupils from Cyril Sniggs’s Correctional Orphanage for Wayward Boys and Girls are banished to Sin Bin Island, an eerie place surrounded by eel-infested waters. Legend has it, the island has a secret tunnel, used to smuggle magic into mainland England. But in over 300 years the tunnel has never been found. Nor has any of the magic. This year, all that’s going to change. How intriguing! We’ll have to wait until September to see if Cyril Sniggs’s controversial ‘abandon children on the secret magic eel island’ will pay off for the lad. The book is aimed at children 9 to 11, and as someone with a child who will be approaching that age range when this is released I’m really looking forward to seeing what Doug can bring to not quite young adults’ fiction. This definitely seems to be one of those books that will be on the darker side of things, possibly more in line with things like Lemmony Snicket that anything else, and I really do hope he’s able to bring some of the Naylor magic that a lot of us experienced as kids reading the Red Dwarf novels, but this time to the next (next) generation.
G&TV: Comic Relief Utterly Utterly Live Quickies Posted by Ian Symes on 21st March 2025, 12:46 2025 marks the fortieth anniversary of Comic Relief, the charity founded by Richard Curtis and Lenny Henry in the aftermath of Band Aid and Live Aid, to raise further funds for the victims of famine in Ethiopia. And today is Red Nose Day, the charity's now annual fundraising event in aid of various good causes throughout Africa and the UK. There was a time when this was unmissable television, with the greatest names in alternative comedy taking over BBC One for an evening of innovative, subversive and hilarious sketches and stand-up. Nowadays there's barely a comedian to be seen, with regular big name presenters introducing skits featuring reality stars and VTs about TV personalities taking on endurance events. And yet they seem to be raising more money than ever, with over £1.6 billion donated over the years, so it's hard to argue really. But it took a few years for the telethon format to be established, with the charity's early revenue streams coming from one-off live shows, books, singles, albums and videos. The very first Comic Relief event was held at the Shaftesbury Theatre in April 1986 - a star-studded stage show over three nights, recorded for later broadcast and home release. And the video of said event is what we're looking at today. I came across it recently and was shocked at just how many Dwarfy names were involved. The unmistakable voice of Chris Barrie is heard in a couple of Spitting Image skits, Howard Goodall is involved as part of Rowan Atkinson's live troupe, Mike Agnew was the production manager, the editor was Ed Wooden, the producer was Ed Bye, and Paul Jackson is credited as both a director and for co-ordinating the VHS release. Add in Lenny Henry, French & Saunders, Billy Connolly, Stephen Fry, the aforementioned Rowan Atkinson and the entire Young Ones cast to the mix, and this is truly a gathering of all the biggest legends of 1980s comedy, on both sides of the camera. Read more →
Comedy, Chaos – And Cowboys! The Red Dwarf Companion Review Reviews Posted by Dave on 5th March 2025, 09:35 As a community, Red Dwarf fandom has always been pretty good at knowing when anything Dwarf-related is about to drop. We’re there for new episodes, whether they’re premiering on TV or showing up a week early on an app; we know when to expect new DVDs and Blu-Rays to drop (even if Play.com doesn’t exist any longer to get them to us days ahead of release); and we have a pretty good idea of any Red Dwarf books, badges, T-shirts, mugs, magazines, posters, models and figurines that are coming our way. (Ahhh, so you’re a keyring man!) It was a surprise, then, to learn from thomasaevans in the G&T forums at the start of this year that BearManor Media was publishing a new Red Dwarf book, Comedy, Chaos - and Cowboys! The Red Dwarf Companion by Joe Nazzaro. And not only that, but that this book would be a detailed account of the making of Red Dwarf Series VI, based on notes taken for the contemporary (well, 1994) book release The Making Of Red Dwarf. And not only that, but that this new book was also already available to order and read immediately. For whatever reason, this book had gone completely under the radar of most of us, with even the most enthusiastic Red Dwarf fans unaware that it was even on the horizon. But is it worth your time and money? Let’s find out. Read more →
G&TV: Book ‘Em and Risk It (11/08/1983) Quickies Posted by Ian Symes on 13th February 2025, 09:53 From the Robert Llewellyn interview in Smegazine Vol. 1 Issue #13, as recently revisited by the DwarfCast Smegazine Rack: RL: But I've known Mac for years and years, in fact I did my first ever television work with him. It was in about 1980, I think, in some weird programme for Channel 4 - it was recorded before the channel started. TS: What was that? RL: Bookem and Riskit. It was a pretty appalling experience. It was the first time I'd done any telly and it was a bit of a shock - very different to Red Dwarf and very different to anything else I've done since. But it did get broadcast - once - I think it was on the third day Channel 4 went out, and it was watched by about 7 or 8 people over the whole country, including me. This sounds like a job for the potty-mouthed archivists! We immediately set out to track down any known recordings of this obscure and elusive pilot, utilising all our detective skills, industry contacts and technical wizardry... only to discover that our good friend Jonsmad had already sent us a link to it months ago. So... good. The upload comes via comedy writer Bill Matthews (creator of Never Mind The Buzzcocks and They Think It's All Over, fact fans), who was a very early adopter of VHS. The sound is horribly distorted at the start, but it sorts itself out around twenty minutes in. Read more →
