The tape must have got twisted, man!

Sometimes, things just work out to provide the perfect story.

Back in 2012 – in the lead-up to Red Dwarf X – I wrote a series of articles detailing the edits UKTV had made to Red Dwarf repeats. One of the worst was in Series III – the seemingly random broadcast of the Remastered version of Marooned, and the only episode of the series where the Remastered edit was broadcast instead of the original. (While it was the first time we had discussed the issue, but it had been going on for years before this. We were too busy complaining about Gold blurring out Fletch sticking two fingers up in Porridge.)

It’s a subject we revisited last year – twice, in fact – and then again a couple of months back. And it’s at this point something rather interesting happened. All round good guy Graham Kibble-White put us in touch with Zoe Clapp – Chief Marketing & Communications Officer at UKTV. A few emails were exchanged back and forth between us all, and the problem was traced down to a simple error – when UKTV requested the tapes for Red Dwarf a few years back, they were accidentally supplied the Remastered version of Marooned in error. Zoe promised UKTV would hunt down the original version in time for the next repeat broadcast in September.

That repeat broadcast was on the 6th September on Dave, at 3:30am. And we can exclusively reveal that… every single member of G&T was asleep at the time. Hey, the resolution of this story might have been four years in the making, but I do like a nice little nap.

This is why we’re lucky we have you lot. So we can confirm through multiple reports that for the first time in years, it really was the original, proper version of Marooned which was broadcast on UKTV on the 6th. Not only that, but on-demand service UKTV Play also has the original version available for viewing. A stupendous moment in our own personal history, etc.

Huge thanks go to Graham Kibble-White, and especially Zoe Clapp. Sometimes we’re a little harsh to UKTV – what’s a fansite if we can’t sit and poke everyone with a sharp stick? – but I can’t say enough good things about a Chief Marketing & Communications Officer who will go out their way to not only investigate something like this, but actually care enough to get it fixed for the very next showing as soon as they’re aware of the issue. TV needs more people like that.

Now, has anyone got any ideas for other news stories we can sleep through? I was thinking North Korea bombing us to fuck might be a good one.