# RED DWAAAAARRFF # News Posted by John Hoare on 17th May 2017, 08:58 You all remember the big news last year, don’t you? No, not Red Dwarf XI. It was that magical moment when Darrell pointed out on our forums that the opening theme to popular science fiction sitcom Red Dwarf bloody well has lyrics. All these months later, that fact still blows me away. (Here’s a great write-up of it by Mental Floss.) But aside from that initial thread, the only other thing we had to go on was this little acknowledgement from Howard Goodall: I am honoured & delighted my vo-coded message from the past has been cracked!???????????? https://t.co/1GZMzPgZ9C — Howard Goodall (@Howard_Goodall) October 22, 2016 Now, wouldn’t it be nice if, say, someone like Graham Kibble-White just happened to be doing an interview with Howard about one of his upcoming programmes, and asked him a little more about the subject? Oh, look what we’ve just been sent. What a coincidence. I know someone who does this Red Dwarf fan site, and they got excited, I think last year, because they’d been analysing the music… Right! And they had discovered there were vocals hidden in the music. Oh, it’s them who discovered it? Yeah, they then put it out on Twitter, and it was a huge story for Red Dwarf fans, yeah. Oh well, thank them for finding it. I mean, I hadn’t deliberately hidden it. It just happened to be there in the mix. It’s just that no one seemed to have noticed it! [Laughs] So it was a very nice discovery. Had you forgotten it was there yourself? No, I knew it was. I didn’t know that people hadn’t noticed it. So, that was the shock. I had assumed everybody knew it was there, but it was so long ago, it was 27 years or whatever, and so I thought no more of it. Then all these fans around the world were saying, ‘Oh my God, we’d never noticed it before’. To me, the surprise was it hadn’t been noticed before. Is that you singing? Is it on a vocoder? That’s me doing a vocoder, yeah. And do you mind if I pass this onto them? Not at all! Many thanks to Graham and Howard for the above. Now, I’m off to listen to QI theme again. I’m sure I can hear a bit where Howard calls Alan Davies a dickhead using morse code.
Wonderful! And pretty much as I’d eventually come to assume. I’m still surprised I’m enough of a nerd to have been able to recognise his voice underneath the vocoder. He’s got very distinctive diction – I can always pick him out in the NTNOCN songs as well! The question is now – did he record that electropop version of the theme on ‘Archive Extras’ as a direct gag about this whole ridiculousness or was it an insane coincidence? (The other question is what the ecact answers were to the Rimmer Song quiz because it’s been annoying me since the autumn)
I finally got my husband to sit down with me and watch the new series the other night. Funny, that was the very thing I was thinking about during the intro!
That’s my twitter handle in Goodall’s tweet. A stupendous moment in my own personal history – and I only usually go on twitter to see what @mumoss is thinking about! What did your husband think of the series Blisschick?
Can I also say that the Goodall doc is pretty much the only thing I’m actually excited about for the Pepperversary.
Howard Goodall’s going to be on Sara Cox’s Radio 2 show tomorrow morning (she’s sitting in for Chris Evans). Indeed, Red Dwarf has just had a quick namecheck.
