Red Dwarf: The BBC TV Soundtracks Review

We find ourselves in a new phase of the relationship between Red Dwarf and the BBC. In 1988-1999 they were happily married, in 2000-2007 they were going through divorce proceedings, and in 2008-2020 they were amicable but distant exes. Then in 2023 they must have bumped into each other at a bar, got deep into conversation over one too many Long Island iced teas, and woken up in the same Travelodge bed. Since then Red Dwarf has been eager to re-commit to the partnership, but the BBC have only been interested in hooking up every now and then to relive memories of better times. 

This new phase has yet to bring us any new episodes, but it has brought us new re-releases. First every canonical episode came to BBC iPlayer, then Series 1-IV were repeated on BBC Two, then we got the ‘Complete Series I-XIII’ Blu-ray box set, and now BBC Audio have brought us this: audio-only, digital-only releases of Series 1-VIII. Whether there’s any hope of ever moving back in together is unclear, but in the meantime, is the sex any good? Tortuous Metaphor mode cancel.

The Packaging

While these are digital only releases and thus have no literal packaging, the way the product is presented to the consumer is still worthy of appraisal.

It’s fine.

The covers are simple promotional shots of the “main” 4 Dwarfers against an outer space background, separated into hexagonal frames and accompanied by the modern sans serif logo. They’re nothing revolutionary, but they look good and they work. The promotional shots used are correct for their respective series groups, and the way the logos line up with the nebulae in the background is an especially nice touch. I’m personally disappointed that Norman Lovett, Hattie Hayridge and Chloë Annett are not represented anywhere on these covers – Norman Lovett was in as many episodes of Series 1-IV as Robert Llewellyn was! – but they get the job done.

The other “packaging”-esque aspect to these releases are the ways the episodes are broken down into chapters, and the titles given to those chapters. These soundtracks count each episode as its own chapter with no further divisions, so if you were hoping to quickly skip to specific parts of an episode in a similar vein to a DVD’s scene selection feature, then I’m afraid you’re out of luck.

Although it’s for the best that they didn’t do this, because depending on where you buy them, you may not see proper chapter titles at all. If you listen via Audible or Audiobooks.com, then each chapter will be an episode title, with the first episode of each series also including the series title. (E.g. “Series Four: Camille”.) Except for Back in the Red: Part II and Back in the Red: Part III, which are just labelled as “Part II” and “Part III”, for some reason.

Audible adds an iota of extra value by visibly nesting the later chapters of a given series within the first chapter, which looks right and wrong simultaneously, as well as nesting the later parts of Back in the Red and Pete within their first parts, which just looks wrong. I assume this is the kind of extra feature you can only afford if you avoid enough tax.

If you listen via Libro.fm, you will get no descriptive chapter titles at all, and just see “Track 1”, “Track 2” etc. This is far from a big deal – I’m sure any one of us would read “Series V-VIII Track 25” and think “Krytie TV!” in under a second – but being able to see the episode title regardless of your choice of platform would have been nice. Everand actually manages to one-up Libro.fm, by arrogantly labelling the first track of any release as “Introduction” and the second track as “Chapter 1”. I’ll let you work out how it labels the rest of the tracks yourself.

The platforms with generic chapter titles do have a distinct advantage over the platforms with unique chapter titles though – they don’t include a chapter called “Series Six: Back to Reality”. Whoops.

The Episodes

When these releases were first announced, the appeal was obvious. Red Dwarf is known for having excellent dialogue and music, so with the benefit of careful editing and the addition of new descriptive narration, the potential to transform the show into a great radio sitcom was huge. Unfortunately, we soon learned that the BBC were uninterested in realising that potential, and had settled for the cheaper and easier option of just releasing the raw episode audio. Great. Hopes dashed and expectations cratered, then, but did the show survive having its visual component removed? Are these soundtracks still worthwhile additions to your virtual shelves?

Things sound rough immediately with The End, where in the opening scene alone, it’s impossible to tell that Rimmer is berating Lister for confusing two identical pipe cleaners (or that he ultimately chooses the one he admonished Lister for handing him), and the listener has to guess that Lister is miming when Rimmer asks him a question right after telling him to be silent. The episode as a whole is still broadly comprehensible thanks to the general reliance on dialogue, but there continue to be scenes that are diminished or outright ruined by the lack of visuals. Rimmer’s exam scene is reduced to nothing but extended silence with the occasional paper ruffling sound effect, you don’t know that he’s being wheeled in on a stretcher in his next scene, and The Cat’s entrance is even more of a statement than it was originally. Most tragic of all, you can’t appreciate the hilarious coin prank that Lister plays on Petersen.

That’s how things are in Series 1, Episode 1, but things only trend downwards from there, as the show becomes more action-based and more ambitious with its visuals. Fancy a Future Echoes where you can’t see the echoes? What about an episode with 2 identical-sounding Rimmers, or one where Lister and Rimmer swap bodies, or one where Lister and Cat have a full conversation by typing at a keyboard while sitting in terrified silence? What about one where Captain Hollister goes completely nonverbal due to trauma and speaks exclusively via cue cards for the entirety of the final scene? OK, to be fair that last one was already bad, but suffice to say experiencing Red Dwarf without video really makes you appreciate just how much you take it for granted. 

The sense of time and place is often precarious in this medium. In early series the musical scene transitions are used generously, but when they aren’t used, it makes things all the more jarring. In Confidence & Paranoia, Lister starts muttering to himself about needing an umbrella mere moments after leaving the medical bay, giving the impression that he’s doing this in the corridor, not in his bed after a significant amount of time has passed. The same episode also highlights a recurring problem – not knowing who is meant to be present in a given scene until they either make a noise or someone else makes a noise about them. Rimmer is speaking to Paranoia and then starts yelling “Now! Stab him! Stab him! Stab him!” completely out of nowhere and to no-one in particular.

On the upside, listening to these soundtracks did make me appreciate the music and sound effects more than ever before. On a conscious level, I did already know that the instrumental version of ‘Tongue Tied’ continues playing in the background throughout the disco scene in Parallel Universe, but it’s never felt as prominent as it did here. With nothing to look at, the music of the show feels much more in focus, and for the most part succeeds in conveying the mood despite no longer having the lighting, set design and visual direction to complement it. 

I also found myself feeling grateful for every “tell, don’t show” moment, like in Terrorform, where The Cat somewhat awkwardly calls out the “huge great blood-sucking leech” on Lister’s neck, or in Meltdown, when Winnie-the-Pooh’s sad fate is told with a mixture of description by Lister and gunshot sound effects. Those moments fit so well they could have been written for radio. As an extra bonus, there are some scenes where your imagination can paint a more convincing picture than the show was originally able to. Rhyl Beach has never looked more like a Mediterranean paradise than in this release.

The experience takes its biggest single lurch downwards at the beginning of Series III. Backwards opens with 30 seconds of “STAR WARS”-STYLE MUSIC for no apparent reason, representing a serious missed opportunity for a narrator to read out the text crawl, but have their speech be sped up so much that you can’t understand it. Thereafter the episode depends on backwards-movement set pieces and subtitles to an extreme degree. The audience reacting to events you can’t see pulls you out of the experience in every episode, but the backwards eating and drinking at the beginning of the café scene is a perfect demonstration of it. That part of the scene isn’t important to the plot, and it isn’t mentioned or audibly reacted to by any of the characters. It would have been trivially easy to just cut the scene down so it starts later, and the episode would have only been improved by it, but they just… didn’t bother. All this combines to make Backwards the early nadir of this whole project.

The episode which immediately follows it, Marooned, provides a whiplash-inducing contrast by being the least diminished episode of them all, and combines with the action-heavy Polymorph after it to make Series III, Byte One a kind of reverse turd sandwich. This probably won’t be surprising to hear, but Marooned’s focus on dialogue between just 2 characters in a single location makes it almost ideal for a soundtrack-only presentation. It was a joy to listen to this all-time great episode without needing to rely so much on my memory of what was meant to be happening in each scene. 

Despite being the best episode though, Marooned was also the most frustrating episode to listen to, because it was the one that gave the clearest whisper of how good these soundtrack releases could have been. Cut out Lister’s exploration of outside the crashed Starbug, cut out the audience reacting to the image of Lister with a spoonful of dog food before Rimmer verbally confirms that he has it, and cut out Lister creating a false guitar out of Rimmer’s trunk, and the episode becomes close to perfect without any extra narration being necessary. Even the listener not being privy to Lister’s scheme isn’t necessarily an issue, because the way Rimmer fails to catch on and the way Lister reacts to him would tell the audience all they needed to know – it would just be at a different pace. I came away from this episode feeling legitimately upset, just thinking about how great these soundtracks might have turned out if an editor had been afforded the time, budget and free rein to abridge and rework all the episodes for the format. Would that have been enough to make these soundtracks essential purchases? Probably not quite, but it would have at least shifted them to the “highly recommended” tier.

It was at this point in my listen-through that I had a revelation: these soundtracks were specifically created from the DVD versions of the episodes. How do I know that? Because they left in the extra model shot at the end of Marooned! Editing out this completely vestigial wind-blowing sound after the ending theme should have been the easiest, most no-brainer decision possible, and they couldn’t even swing that. Although at this stage it’s hard to know if they actively decided against cutting it out or were simply unaware that this shot wasn’t always in the episode. Both explanations are eminently plausible.

And if that wasn’t confirmation enough, double confirmation was given by the time I finished Rimmerworld. The DVD version of Rimmerworld contains a noticeable audio glitch towards the end of the episode (during the line “The minute I got out, I’d be sold back immediately.”, if you’re curious). This was fixed for the Blu-ray version, and so it’s also fixed on iPlayer. Well, guess what’s back? It’s especially egregious, because the audio for these releases is, you know, the entire package, so choosing to use a source with objectively worse audio is downright incompetent. But hey, why bother using a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio track when it’s only going to get compressed for streaming and download anyway, and the lossy Dolby Digital track is right there? Who gives a smeg, right?

It’s emblematic of the general lack of polish and effort that permeates these releases. The lack of effort that led to the product description for both collections promising “Parallel universes, time travel, false memories, and virtual reality”. The lack of polish that led to Tikka to Ride fading out near the end of the closing theme instead of fully completing, to Danny John-Jules’ name being repeatedly misspelled (“Danny John Jules”, no hyphen), and to Hattie Hayridge and Norman Lovett being credited for the wrong series in the V-VIII collection (Hayridge plays Holly in Series VII and VIII only, and Lovett plays the role in all 4 series, apparently).

Oh, and Meltdown is missing its last 3 and a half minutes. The whole first collection just abruptly ends at the beginning of the climactic wax droid battle.

Yeah, when I said “it would be better if they edited the episodes for audio”, I meant things like cutting out the scenes where the Polymorph transforms on its own, or restoring “Chicken McNugget” to Kryten, not… this. I understand that mistakes happen, but I hope I’m not setting unreasonable quality assurance standards by thinking at least one person should have listened to the audio the whole way through before it got released – or at least have given the track durations a once-over. This is just embarrassing. 

I really like the ‘Elvis’ version of the ending theme, too.

The Credits

A major bugbear I have with these soundtracks is the way that the original cast and crew are credited – or to be more accurate, they way they aren’t. In an actual radio sitcom, the cast and crew would simply have their names read out while the theme song was playing, but these soundtracks contain no credits whatsoever. You can find some of the credits on the store pages for your audiobook platform of choice, but these are strictly limited to the writers, the directors and the principal cast. Ed Bye also gets a credit as a producer for Series I-IV, but this is seemingly just because he was pulling dual duty as both director and producer, because none of the other producers get acknowledged. Not even Rob and Doug.

There is a debate to be had about whether everyone in the cast and crew should be credited, or just those whose work can actually be heard. So I can at least understand why you might leave out, say, Bethan Jones or Peter Wragg, but to leave out the names of the supporting cast, the composer, and the sound supervisor, for example – whose contributions are the life rings holding these audio-only episodes narrowly above water – is unconscionable. Forget the product description, Howard Goodall probably deserves to have his name and picture on the front cover!

Not even the regular cast are fully safe from being snubbed by these releases. Chloë Annett isn’t credited anywhere, despite the fact that she features in more episodes of Series V-VIII than either Hattie Hayridge or Norman Lovett, both of whom do get credited (albeit incorrectly) in the product description.

But would it have been practical, given the scope of this project, to add proper credits for everyone? And isn’t it common for TV soundtrack type releases not to add this information anyway? Maybe not, and maybe so, but I don’t care. An audiobook which plays from beginning to end without once speaking the names of any of the people who made it is a disgrace.

In Conclusion

Despite BBC Audio’s best efforts, Red Dwarf Series 1-VIII has not been ruined by being carelessly soundtrack-ized. Even with all the issues that plague these releases, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still enjoy my time with them. Red Dwarf is one of the best sitcoms of all time; it’ll take a bit more than this to stop it from being fun, and I did appreciate the novelty and convenience of being able to listen to Balance of Power while at the gym, or White Hole while on the toilet. When you know these episodes inside and out already, you find yourself adjusting to the weirdness and letting your imagination fill in the gaps.

So does this mean that, in spite of everything, I actually recommend these soundtracks? Absolutely not. I can’t in good conscience recommend that even the most devoted Red Dwarf fan support a product this cheap, slapdash and ill-conceived. If this were a free podcast on BBC Sounds, that would be a different story, but as a full price commercial release? Red Dwarf deserves better than this. Fans of sci-fi comedy deserve better than this. Well, some of them. Well, one of them… maybe.

I will however make an exception for sightless blind people. If you’re already unable to experience the visual component of Red Dwarf, but are nonetheless invested in it, then these soundtracks likely represent the best way to hear the show – in terms of value and convenience – currently available. This fact is pathetic, considering that in a just timeline there’d be high quality audio descriptions for all of Red Dwarf on BBC iPlayer right now, but it is what it is. For anyone else who has a craving for aural Dwarf though, I’d suggest re-listening to the novel audiobooks (even the non-Chris Barrie ones), ripping the audio from the DVDs yourself, or playing Danny John-Jules’ Tongue Tied Pussy Mix on repeat until your appetite is sated.

These Series 1-VIII soundtracks may have been a bust, but what about what comes next? Will BBC Audio follow this up with more Red Dwarf TV soundtracks after taking stock of the feedback, and actually do the source material justice on the second go around? I don’t think they will, for one simple reason: Red Dwarf and its residents were in a pretty dire situation at the end of Series VIII, and if they were planning to resolve the cliffhanger, they surely would have included a “To be continued”. But I didn’t hear anything like that, did you?