The Defunct Brands of Red Dwarf

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.

As we’re going through in the order they’re mentioned in the series, we start with one that’s debatable as to whether or not it is a “brand” per se, but that was so interesting that I couldn’t omit it…

Starlite Ballroom

Mentioned in: Future Echoes

The Starlite Ballroom mentioned by the Toaster before he launches into Fly Me To The Moon was a real place, located in Greenford, West London. Originally a cinema, it operated as a popular concert venue in the 1960s, before later becoming a bingo hall, then a snooker hall, then a derelict. It’s soon to be converted into flats, but in its heyday it hosted the likes of David Bowie, The Who, Cream and Pink Floyd. Speaking of whom… I’ve always assumed that “welcome to the Starlite Ballroom” was a specific reference to something that I wasn’t familiar with, but the only record I could find online, other than the Toaster himself, is in the introduction to Roger Waters’s 2022 release The Lockdown Sessions. He did play in the old venue nearly 60 years earlier, but there is the slightest possibility that he’s a Dwarf fan. Or, in universe, the Toaster is a big Roger Waters fan, and he was referencing this particular niche recording.

Norweb

Mentioned in: Me²

One of the most famous jokes in all of Red Dwarf, and one which originated in a Dave Hollins Space Cadet sketch, was out of date within a few short years. Norweb – or, as Holly says, the North Western Electricity Board – was one of fifteen local authorities created by the Electricity Act of 1947, introduced by the post-war Labour government to take Britain’s power supply out of the hands of profit-making private companies, and into public ownership. Unsurprisingly, it supplied electricity to the North West of England, although curiously the border fell within the relatively small distance between Manchester and Liverpool, meaning the latter was served by the Merseyside and North Wales board instead. So in order for Holly’s joke to hit home, that means Lister’s flat wasn’t in his home city; he may have crossed over into rival territory, in a reversal of the Mancunians Rob & Doug going to university in Liverpool.

Anyway, thanks to the Conservative government’s policy to take Britain’s power supply out of public ownership and into the hands of profit-making private companies, Norweb was privatised in 1990, and later bought by the similarly privatised North West Water. The merged company rebranded as United Utilities in 1996, and over the years the various components of the former Norweb business were sold off bit by bit, with the last scraps of the old branding finally being retired in 2001. United Utilities is now best known for being one of the worst offenders for dumping raw sewage directly into Britain’s waterways, while the former Norweb bits are now part of E.ON, one of the most expensive electricity suppliers in the country. Well done, everyone.

Brush-O-Matic

Mentioned in: Kryten

Here’s one that I had no idea was a brand name, but it turns out the Brush-O-Matic was a product made and sold by K-Tel from the 1970s onwards. You know those clothes brushes with the nylon heads, that only work in one direction but are much better than standard brushes or lint rollers? Your gran probably had one in the kitchen drawer. That’s the one. They’re also known as Miracle Brushes, and while this type of product is obviously still made today by other companies, the original is no longer sold. Indeed, K-Tel – once known for their then-innovative infomercials, which coined the phrase “As Seen on TV” – are no longer selling consumer goods, but instead are now a leading music licenser, supplying the entertainment industries with their exhaustive catalogue of 50s and 60s pop hits.

Berni Inn

Mentioned in: Better Than Life

What, you’ve never heard of Bernie Inn? He’s the biggest steak house proprietor in the world! Established in 1955 by Italian-British brothers Frank and Aldo Berni, the business quickly grew to become the largest restaurant chain outside of the US by the 1970s. It was famed for its no-nonsense fare, such as its staple three course set menu of prawn cocktail, steak and Black Forest gateaux, which came to be known as The Great British Meal. This somewhat traditionalist approach to dining fell out of favour in the 1980s, and made the chain a common target for comedy writers, hence its appearance in this list. But Holly needn’t have worried; as well as being 60 billion miles away, viewers were only seven years away from its demise. It was sold to Whitbread in 1995, who folded it into their Beefeater brand, which itself was originally set up as a rival to Berni Inn. A decade or so later, Whitbread sold most (but not all) of its Beefeater sites to Mitchells & Butler, who turned them into either Toby Carverys or Harvesters. Which means that the exact same individual restaurant may well have been the victim of a vicious Red Dwarf burn on two separate occasions.

Film Fun

Mentioned in: Better Than Life

Back in the early to mid 20th century, before the world was as connected as it is today, there were a number of curious coincidences in the publishing realm. For example, the comic character Dennis The Menace first appeared on the 12th March 1951. And that’s a true fact whether you’re currently picturing a spiky-haired British boy, or a blonde American kid. Similarly, there are actually two magazines that the Skutters could conceivably have piled up in their broom cupboard, one from either side of the Atlantic, both likely to feature John Wayne, and both out of print long before the reference in 1988’s Better Than Life. In Britain, it was a kids’ comic with strips and stories based on the big TV and movie stars of the day, running from 1920 until 1962, when it merged with its stablemate Buster (which itself packed up in 2000). Meanwhile the American magazine (1915-1942) was a much more adult affair, with articles about movies, biographies of the stars, and lots of pictures of scantily clad women. It was mostly the latter, from what I can tell, so maybe the Skutters are just a bit pervy.

E-type

Mentioned in: Better Than Life

And the record-breaking third defunct brand to be mentioned in the same episode is one that was already considered a well-loved classic in 1988. With a few exceptions that we’ll come to later, most of the real life car brands mentioned in the show are still going in one way or another, either because the show only specifies the manufacturer rather than the model (eg. “two badly parked Volkswagens” instead of “Volkswagen Beetles”), or the details are vague enough to apply to multiple things (eg. the “V8” in “Bentley V8 convertible” refers to the engine type, and Bentley are still making cars with V8 engines). But Rimmer’s fantasy car of choice had a relatively short production life, made by Jaguar in Coventry between 1961 and 1974. Of course, these days all Jaguars have been replaced by pink slabs of brutalist crap, which is apparently something to do with globalist psychopaths.

Topic

Mentioned in: Stasis Leak; Marooned

Once-popular products being discontinued is often big news, but sometimes they can pass by unnoticed. This entire article was written and published without the writer realising that Mars were no longer selling Topic bars, until Warbodog mentioned it in the comments. First introduced in France in 1962, it had a thick wedge of nougat with caramel – like a Mars bar, unless you’re in the US, where a Mars bar is something completely different involving almonds – with the addition of hazelnuts. In the UK, it was advertised with the slogan “A Hazelnut In Every Bite”, hence Rimmer receiving a nut-free one being an apt example of his woeful luck. It was a staple in the tuck shops and newsagents of Europe throughout its existence, and was a founding member of the Celebrations gang, which launched in 1997. However, it was dropped from the roster in 2006, which was perhaps a sign of things to come. The Topic was discontinued in 2021 with very little fanfare, joining Spira, Fuse and Time Out in the great confectioners in the sky.

TL;DR – It’s a food.

Sinclair ZX81

Mentioned in: Stasis Leak; Psirens

It was the computer that Holly once fell in love with, and which Starbug has crashed more times than. The brainchild of inventor and entrepreneur Sir Clive Sinclair, the ZX81 was introduced in 1981 as a relatively low cost home computer, costing between £50 and £70, the equivalent of £242 to £339 in today’s money. And it was a huge success, selling more than 1.5 million units in the UK alone, helping to revolutionise the public perception of computing – it was no longer the reserve of boffins in laboratories, it was something you could do at home. It was a phenomenon, although its deliberate inexpensiveness did give it certain limitations that were, once again, rich fodder for 1980s comedy writers. But even by the time of its first mention in the show, it had been superseded by the ZX Spectrum in 1982, which itself was replaced by the Sinclair QL in 1984.

The Sinclair brand itself received mixed fortunes over the years; for all its innovation and success in the computer market, it had its share of failures too, most notoriously the Sinclair C5 electric vehicle, which damn near bankrupted the company. The brand and its product range were sold to Alan Sugar’s Amstrad in 1986, and largely discontinued over the next few years. Sir Clive did retain his own R&D company, Sinclair Research, which he used to test and develop his various inventions. This too dwindled away alongside Sir Clive’s reputation, and by the turn of the century, he was reportedly the sole employee. The company presumably died with him in 2021, but thankfully history is now remembering him for the innovator and visionary that he was, a true hero of the computing revolution.

ICI

Mentioned in: Backwards

One of very few organisations that could have been mentioned in Backwards where the name is the same no matter which universe you’re in, ICI stood for Imperial Chemical Industries, one of Britain’s largest manufacturers. Founded in 1926 under the stewardship – genuinely – of The Right Honourable Lord Melchett, it produced plastics, polymers, paints, pharmaceuticals, fertilisers, insecticides, explosives and nuclear weapons. With manufacturing sites across the UK (the North East being the biggest chemical plant zone), turnover in the billions and a hugely visible brand, it would have been inconceivable in 1989 (or indeed 3991 on Backwards world) that ICI would disappear from view within twenty years. But in early 2008 (or late 8002), Dutch firm AkzoNobel paid £8billion to acquire the business and merge it into their own. However, the legacy of ICI is far reaching. In 1993, they separated out their pharmaceutical division into a separate business called Zeneca. This went on to merge with a company called Astra, and several years later they became very well known indeed. Perhaps the managing director they were recruiting in that year was responsible for the new business?

Lewis’s

Mentioned in: Marooned

Here’s an example of a brand that is technically still going, but in such a vastly different form that the reference in Red Dwarf no longer makes sense. Lewis’s was a famous and prestigious department store, founded in Liverpool in 1856 and quickly expanded into a nationwide chain. The Liverpool store remained the flagship, and it was there that they launched the world’s first Christmas grotto in 1879. It continued to expand into the 20th Century, even swallowing up Selfridges in 1952. Lewis’s was purchased by the Sears group in 1965, but then divested in 1988, and that’s where the trouble started. By 1991, they went into administration, with the majority of its stores either closing or being sold off and rebranded over the next few years, until only the original Liverpool location remained. They clung on until 2007, before finally going under for good.

However, the Lewis’s name was resurrected in the 2010s, when the rights were purchased by a new company trading as Lewis’s Home Retail Ltd. As the name suggests, it’s an online store, although there are a couple of physical shops in Essex. Nevertheless, it’s clearly a very different business model to the one Lister is referencing. You don’t get perfume counters on websites. Perhaps at some point between now and Lister’s time, things will go back to how they were – the Grade II listed Lewis’s Building in Liverpool is currently home to a handful of small businesses, but plans are afoot to transform the site into a multi-purpose retail and leisure facility, and one of the retail units may well have use for beautiful young fragrance vendors.

Quantel

Mentioned in: DNA

Ah, now this is one I do know. Those who had the displeasure of listening to our Smegazine Rack #13 DwarfCast will know about my fetish for old-school editing equipment, and Quantel were the grand masters. In 1975, they produced the world’s first digital framestore, which allowed programme-makers to use live picture-in-picture effects. In 1981, they released Paintbox, a graphics system that revolutionised television. Weather reports used to be just stickers on printed maps before Paintbox. Virtually all news graphics in the Western world, from the mid-80s right through to the 90s, were done on Paintbox. Dire Straits’ Money For Nothing video? Paintbox. It was even used for art and album covers, including Queen’s The Miracle and Nirvana’s Nevermind. No wonder Kryten was keen for his human eyes to have such capabilities.

The innovations kept coming, and in 1985, Quantel released the Harry, a fully integrated non-linear editing system. Real time digital editing was now possible for the first time, although with the technical limitations you’d expect from hardware at the time. Quantel dominated the market for a good two decades or so, but times changed. All their products were based around proprietary software and hardware, but people started to want software that could run on their existing systems, which new upstarts like Adobe and Avid were happy to provide. Nevertheless, the company never completely failed like many of the others we’ve examined, it was just merged and rebranded. Quantel instigated a takeover of fellow broadcast engineers Snell Limited in 2014, but decided to take their partner’s name, becoming Snell Advanced Media. This new company was then purchased by leading hardware manufacturers Grass Valley in 2020.

Trans-Am

Mentioned in: The Inquisitor

It wasn’t until researching this article that I realised I had no idea what a “Trans-Am” was, although I assumed it must be some sort of vehicle with a large wheel arch. Sure enough, it’s a variant on the Pontiac Firebird, with upgraded handling, suspension and horsepower, along with cosmetic modifications, including to the wheels. It was used for racing, and presumably also by small-penised men to attract girls. The Trans-Am variant was introduced in 1969 alongside the second generation of Firebirds, and kept going until the final Firebirds rolled off the production line in 2002. The name lives on, after it was licensed by General Motors to use on customised versions of their Chevrolet Camaros, but they no longer resemble Rimmer’s nostrils. There’s also a Trans-Am motor racing series, although this predates the car itself by three years.

Toast[ie] Toppers

Mentioned in: Demons & Angels

Interestingly, there has never been a product called “Toastie Toppers”, as mentioned by Kryten when inspecting the Low Crew’s quarters. However, Heinz famously had a variety called “Toast Toppers”. Is this one of those situations where a brand name is slightly changed in order to avoid potential legal disputes, or did they just get it wrong? Either way, the foodstuff in question is a small tin of spread, designed to go on toast and then popped under the grill to brown off. They came in Ham & Cheese, Chicken & Mushroom and Mushroom & Bacon variants. They were very tasty, from what I remember, but they did have a reputation for resembling vomit, putting them in the same bracket as Pot Noodle as a go-to bad food reference for comedy writers. Alas, the comedy writers won, and Heinz discontinued the range in 2014. People were not happy, and there is a still-active Facebook page vociferously demanding its return.

Little Chef

Mentioned in: Pete (Part One)

Some of us are still mourning the loss of this one. Little Chef was a chain of restaurants, established in 1958 by two Brits inspired by the American diners they visited on a trip to the US. You’d find them at the side of virtually ever major road in the country, as well as the majority of motorway service stations. At its peak in the late 1990s, there were 439 Little Chefs across the UK, their ubiquity partially thanks to swallowing up their main competition, Happy Eater. With this level of market share, plus the premium pricing adopted by any company whose customer base is tired motorists with absolutely no choice but to use their services, their reputation and popularity soon nose-dived. Branches started closing, and the company changed hands multiple times throughout the early 21st Century. They even brought in Heston Blumenthal to revolutionise the menu, but it was too late. The Little Chef waitresses came to a complete standstill less than twenty years after Holly’s joke, with the final restaurants closed in 2018. Now, the sites are mostly franchised coffee shops or fast food vendors, but the legacy lives on – in the late 1970s, the company opened a series of Little Chef Lodges, bringing budget hotels to the UK. Several takeovers later, they were sold off and rebranded as Travelodge.

Yellow Pages

Mentioned in: Only The Good…

It’s debatable whether this one should be included, as there are still companies called “Yellow Pages” dotted around the world. However, Red Dwarf was surely referring to the UK version, specifically the giant yellow telephone directory that lists local businesses, organised by category rather than alphabetically. The concept started in Chicago in 1886, before spreading first through the United States, then the world. It took until 1966 to reach these shores via the General Post Office, firstly in Brighton and then expanding throughout the UK from 1973. Every home in the country had copies shoved through their door once or twice a year throughout the 80s, 90s and 00s, and their legendary advertising gave us such classics as French Polishers, Mistletoe and, of course, J.R. Hartley. But you know what happened next – the internet. Luckily for the business, they were ahead of the curve, first launching their online directory as far back as 1996. Having gained independence from British Telecom in 2001, they’re still going as yell.com, with the company itself called Yell Group Limited. But the physical Yellow Pages ceased production in 2019, and there’s no longer a product or business with that name in the UK.

Jensen Interceptor

Mentioned in: Back To Earth (Part One)

On the surface, this is a pretty straightforward one – Rimmer’s reading a classic car mag, so he mentions a classic car, one which has long since been out of production. But there is one interesting twist, in that there were actually two completely different cars that shared the same name. The West Bromwich based manufacturer Jensen produced a mere 88 of the original Interceptor between 1950 and 1957, but they liked the name so much that they brought it back for an otherwise unrelated sports car from 1966 to 1976. You’d need a better classic car knowledge than me to know which one Rimmer is reading about. But did you know that of all the Jensen Interceptors ever built, only 23 had the manual four-speed gearbox? It’s amazing.

They Walk Among Us!

Mentioned in: Back To Earth (Part Two)

Very sadly, the location used for the comic shop in Back To Earth was no more within mere months of the episode airing. Run by husband and wife team Jon and Sabina Browne, they opened their independent store in Richmond in 1987. It had a number of locations within the same general area over the years, one of which was no stranger to cult comedies, having served as the Fantasy Bazaar, Tim Bisley’s place of work, in Spaced. They’d moved premises by the time Red Dwarf‘s location manager came calling – perhaps the previous landlord had said Hawk the Slayer was rubbish – but the pressures of operating a small indie business, with so much competition from the internet and larger chains a mere tube ride away, proved too much. The store closed five months after Back To Earth, in September 2009, and while the Brownes continued to operate online for a short while, that too has now shut down. On the plus side, the Red Lion Street site featured in the show is still a comic shop. Initially it became a new branch of Essex based indie ACE Comics, and is now the sole location for Raygun. It’s fantastic that the legacy of the original business is still evident in some way.

Dave

Mentioned in: Back to Earth (Part Two)

It was perhaps inevitable that the Back To Earth‘s meta-textual dialogue about the channel that brought Red Dwarf back from the dead would someday become outdated. UKTV have a long history of tinkering with their branding, with very mixed results. In the beginning, there was UK Gold, the satellite and cable channel launched in November 1992, carrying repeats of classic BBC and Thames Television programmes. As multi-channel television grew, so did UKTV, with a number of new channels launching around the time that the digital switchover began. One of these was UK Gold Classics, to which the oldest programmes from the archives were siphoned, leaving the main UK Gold free to show repeats of slightly more recent fare. This name lasted for about six months, from launch in October 1998 until April 1999 when it became UK Gold 2.

Four years later, the channel was relaunched as UK G², with the crazy superscript styling reflecting the new remit of becoming the network’s youth-focused offering, replacing Play UK as the home for comedy and other light-hearted programmes aimed at 18-34 year olds. This lasted from October 2003 all the way until March 2004, when it became the not at all cumbersome UKTV G2, incorporating the full name of its parent company and putting its 2 back into a more sensible vertical position. But then in August 2007, a huge rebrand came along, to coincide with the channel becoming free-to-air for the first time, and doubling down on their youthy, blokey remit. Calling a TV channel “Dave” certainly garnered a few sneers at the time (including from us), but in hindsight it was a genius piece of marketing, creating a truly unique brand that indelibly established the channel’s identity for a mass market.

So naturally, they’ve now changed it. All of UKTV’s channels have been rebranded to incorporate the new master brand of “U”, just as they all had “UKTV” in the names 20-odd years ago. So it’s now called U&Dave, which is definitely what everyone calls it. We give it two years max before they change it back.

Magic Marker

Mentioned in: Samsara

Well, I hardly need to tell you about this one. This is all common knowledge that everyone knows off the top of their head. Think of an inventor whose name begins with ‘R’ and you immediately think of Sidney Rosenthal, who introduced the world to the Magic Marker in the early 1950s. Here in the UK, we’d just call them marker pens or felt tips, but over in the States, “Magic Marker” has become a genericised trademark, ie a brand name that’s so synonymous with the product, it’s used to describe all products of that type. It’s like people who say “tannoy” when they mean “public address system”. Other genericised trademarks used in Red Dwarf include jacuzzi, zimmer and lycra, but all those companies are still going. Magic Marker, however, is officially no more – Rosenthal sold the rights to the name in the 1970s, and they ended up being owned by Binney & Smith, Crayola’s parent company. Crayola, of course, still make marker pens, but they no longer use the Magic Marker name.

Betamax

Mentioned in: Give & Take

In the late 1970s, the world of entertainment changed forever with the introduction of home video systems. Film and television were about to be revolutionised, with a bigger choice of viewing for audiences, the ability to archive programmes at home, and wider access to gore and pornography than ever before. Early adopters were faced with a choice between two rival formats – Sony’s Betamax, and JVC’s VHS. Both did ostensibly the same thing with very similar technologies, but there were key differences to take into account. Betamax boasted better picture quality, with a higher resolution than VHS. But on the other hand, early Beta tapes had a maximum capacity of around 60 minutes, while VHS could record for two hours. Another key factor was that Sony kept Betamax as a proprietary format, while JVC were happy to license their technology to all and sundry, giving customers much more choice, with options covering a wide price range.

Ultimately, VHS won. Betamax had launched a year earlier than its rival, but by 1980, VHS had won over 60% of the market in the US, which went up to 75% in 1981. By the end of the decade, even Sony had started manufacturing VHS recorders, although they also persisted with their own little format throughout the rest of the century. They finally stopped producing Betamax recorders in 2002, with blank cassettes following suit in 2016. The war between Betamax and VHS is referenced by Kryten in Give & Take, with both brands named in dialogue, but I’m not yet ready to admit that VHS is also a defunct brand. Alien: Romulus was released on the format as recently as December 2024, so it’s not 100% dead just yet.

BlackBerry

Mentioned in: Krysis

Kryten reels off a big list of brand names during his mid-life crisis, the majority of which – Hoover, Dyson, Hotpoint, Dustbuster – are alive and well. But the one casualty from this rant is by far the youngest. The first BlackBerry devices were made in 1999, and they were effectively very fancy pagers. As technology developed, they established themselves as the leading choice for business phones, with their focus on email on-the-go and their tiny physical keyboards making them the ideal device for Barry Homeowners everywhere. They even enjoyed a strong secondary market, with teenagers, riot organisers and drug dealers making use of the secure and encrypted BlackBerry Messenger. Alas, despite being the first in a number of fields, other companies came along and did it all much better, with iPhone and Android almost completely saturating the entire market within a few years. BlackBerry Limited still limps on as a software company, but it was specifically the devices that Kryten was referring to in the episode. They stopped making hardware in 2020, and discontinued their remaining web services in 2022.

Dictaphone

Mentioned in: Can of Worms

Do you use a dictaphone? No, I use my finger like everyone else. This is another genericised trademark, and one which originated with none other than Alexander Graham Bell, the man who probably didn’t invent the telephone. Following on from Edison’s development of the phonograph, Bell and his team took on the new technology, using wax cylinders as the recording medium for a revolutionary dictation machine. The name Dictaphone was trademarked in 1907, and the company continued as the leading manufacturer of such devices for much of the 20th Century, developing new versions of the product as technology developed. But eventually, they’d made so many advancements that it became easy for other companies to make their own dictation machines, and despite having become synonymous with the technology, a series of corporate takeovers and rebrandings took the name out of circulation. Having first been sold to Pitney Bowes in 1979, it changed hands multiple times over the next 40-odd years, eventually being swallowed up by Nuance Communications in 2006, which itself is now part of Microsoft.

And that’s it for now (unless there’s any I’ve missed, in which case do let me know in the comments), but of course the list can, and probably will, expand at any time. Who’s to say that Parker Knoll will still be making their sexy furniture in twenty years’ time? After Eights could be discontinued within the next few decades. Partick Thistle could go bust any minute. There’s an argument that the Red Dwarf Fan Club, as mentioned in Back To Earth, should already be on the list. The older Red Dwarf gets, the more its references will feel like products of its time, but thankfully there’s still so much that is utterly timeless about the plots, characters and jokes, that it will always attract new fans.