Fly! Fly! Fly!

Bring me that Red Dwarf news… erm… and her… slippers. Ahem. Our winged news monkeys have been extremely busy today; although after calling them that, I doubt they ever will be again. First off, we have details of the Memorabilia Fair, held on the 26th and 27th of July at the NEC Birmingham. Guests include Chris Barrie, Craig Charles (Saturday only), Hattie Hayridge, and Ian Symes. Perhaps it’s an opportunity for one of you to quiz them about the movie; although the reply will probably range from “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you anything about that” on Saturday morning, to “Fuck the fuck off” on Sunday afternoon.

Secondly, friend of the website Karl Eisenhauer has come up with some interesting news about Winchester Films, who are involved in producing the Red Dwarf movie. The outlook for them is either positive, or negative, depending on who you believe; but what is certain is that they certainly haven’t done well last financial year – they racked up a pre-tax loss of £11.2m, with a turnover of £5.1m. Ouch. Another little piece of news from Karl – Gerard Naprous is handling a chariot race in Chester; and he happens to be the guy who did all the horse handling for Gunmen of the Apocalypse (and, indeed, Phoenix Nights). Excellent.

Moving onto non-Dwarf news – specifically, Scrapheap Challenge news. Robert has just informed everyone on his Guestbook about the new series coming in September (for UK viewers; people in the US will have to wait until early 2004, when it airs as Junkyard Wars). There will be 16 episodes; 12 regular shows that are promised to be “amazing, dangerous and often frighteningly loud”, and 4 Scrappy Races, which features “5 teams and their insanely weird, but road going vehicles”. He plans to update his site soon with further details, so keep a look out for that.

Meanwhile, I think we’ve done enough work for ourselves today to blatantly crib from the excellent The Red Dwarf Zone. Firstly, they point out that you couldn’t actually order the Red Dwarf logos for your mobile phone when we posted the link, as the logo numbers for download were not yet on the site. Numbers have in fact been added now, but the phone number to order them doesn’t. Gah. No doubt it’ll be launched in the next few days. Next, as usual, they have a coup – they’ve noticed that Intro 2, the band which had Norm and Craig in their video for Clear, are doing a song for an upcoming film. The Red Dwarf movie, perhaps? Head over to RDZ and decide for yourself…

Finally, take a look at Big Blake, a Dwarf site that was recommended to us by Greg. Not a huge amount there, but there’s a nice section with some screengrabs of various appearances of the Dwarf cast on other shows, and apparantly there will be more stuff on it soon. Good luck; the more regularly-updated fansites, the better. Although Greg himself can piss off, because he’s off to watch Dwarf on a huge fuck-off plasma tv. Wah.