The G&T Review of the Year 2022

Hello everyone…

Much of my time at the moment is taken up with travelling all over the internet to promote The Coral Canvass, and quite frankly, I am really enjoying it. It’s great to see everyone voting, and it marks our first poll where you rate each episode out of ten instead of listing them all in order. I very much look forward to seeing more votes come in over the coming month.

Away from the happy, positive world of anniversary polls, you may have noticed that, as far as the ‘Red Dwarf’ picture is concerned, the legal battle for GNP continues to bore, while our incompetent (by design) production company is as usual hellbent on suing each other instead of making new episodes. This situation looks set to continue as the Grantists now have their man in place, a person utterly and totally suited to pushing on with the new world order’s so called ‘buttski’ programme to enslave humanity under never-ending spin-offs. Look, I know many of you must be thinking ‘Blimey, G&T has lost it big time!’, but believe me, once you can see it, you can’t unsee it! All rather worrying frankly…

Right, enough of that! But we must admit that things for Red Dwarf are looking as bleak as Chris Barrie’s YouTube history. It’s been a year of bugger all news. The only things we’ve covered have been tangentially related, such as The Nether Regions airing, Rob Paul and Ed doing a YouTube thing, and Grant Naylor’s early sitcom Wrinkles being repeated for the first time. It’s at this point that we’d normally turn to TOS to link to all of their news that we failed to cover, but, well…

Yeah, the biggest news story of the year was that after 21 years and 4 months, the weekly updates on reddwarf.co.uk ended on 25th February, and the site went offline soon afterwards. The good news is it returned in June, albeit as a static archive with no plans for regular updates. It’s been back for half a year, and while we’re grateful that the majority of its content is preserved, it’s a little frustrating that none of the many broken bits have been fixed in the last six months. Poor old Geek Chase, it deserved better than this. It’s a sad state of affairs, not least for what it indicates about the state of the property. The whole thing’s in mothballs, at least until the legal kerfuffle is over, and nobody knows how long that will take – there have been no updates on that since February 2021.

Still, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you? Or at the very least delve deeper and deeper into rabbit hole of Red Dwarf miscellany in an attempt to fill the void with interesting things to talk about. That’s what we’ve been largely concerning ourselves with in 2022, with our DwarfCasts continuing apace. Fewer this year than the last couple of lockdown-flavoured years, but still way more than we averaged before we started using them as group therapy sessions. This year saw the launch of two particularly nostalgic strands – The Smegazine Rack and Re-Disc-Overy – and they both have a loooong way to go before they’re complete.

In the wider world of internet culture, one of the biggest trends of the year was daily puzzle games that hook you in with streaks to beat and encourage you to share your results on social media. We capitalised on this trend with the launch of Smegle, a very fun and satisfying game, loosely based on the popular game show Catch Phrase, whereby Red Dwarf screenshots are revealed bit by bit until you identify the episode. Well, it was fun and satisfying until a couple of days ago when I lost my 146 day streak to a picture of Lister that I’d narrowed down to one of two episodes with only one guess left. Bastards.

In terms of our written features, it was an unusual year in that the best ones weren’t written by us, but provided by lovely members of our community – Dave with an analysis of class in Red Dwarf, and Flap Jack on the differences between versions of the novels and their abridged audiobooks. These were brilliant, and we welcome the development of our loyal readers slash listeners doing our work for us, so do get in touch if you have anything to get off your chest and we don’t hate you.

We did do a few bits ourselves, mind – a history of Red Dwarf on Mastermind, an hilarious April Fools about Big Finish doing Dwarf audios, and a back-slapping celebration of ourselves for our mind-boggling 20th anniversary. And in between updates, there was plenty of laughs to be had on our Forum which had another bumper year, with highlights including the meme thread, the daily Smegle chronicles, weekly threads for refreshing one’s memory ahead of the poll, and the ongoing drama over Chris Barrie’s website, incorporating a quest for sexy details.

Finally, as always seems to be the case these days, there was some very sad news to report too, as the world lost Philip J Reed, prolific writer, blogger, ALF archivist and former G&T team member. For someone that I never met, I’m only just realising what a big presence he was in my life, and I miss him terribly. I also miss Seb Patrick of course, and one of the highlights of my year personally was finally getting up to Liverpool for a celebration of his life, and to capture bits of it for posterity in DwarfCast form.

And so we look to the future, and in particular Red Dwarf‘s 35th anniversary. You have until the end of January to get your votes in for the Coral Canvass – we’ve already had more submissions than we got for the Silver Survey ten years ago, with a full month still to go. And make sure you keep Wednesday 15th February free – not only will we be publishing the results of the poll in the morning, but we’ll be going live in the evening for our quinquennial anniversary DwarfCast, which will be bigger and more ambitious than ever before.

We didn’t get as much done as we wanted to in 2022, but we’ll be doing our damnedest to catch up in 2023. Even after 20 years, pissing about with G&T is still my absolute favourite pastime, and I’d like to take this opportunity to once again thank Danny and Cappsy for being my brothers in bollocks, and to our wonderful community for making it such an utter joy. Happy New Year to you all, and here’s to another twelve months of wringing every last drop of entertainment from Red Dwarf‘s still-twitching corpse. Hurrah!