Comedy, Chaos – And Cowboys! The Red Dwarf Companion Review

Posted by Dave on 5th March 2025, 09:35

As a community, Red Dwarf fandom has always been pretty good at knowing when anything Dwarf-related is about to drop. We’re there for new episodes, whether they’re premiering on TV or showing up a week early on an app; we know when to expect new DVDs and Blu-Rays to drop (even if Play.com doesn’t exist any longer to get them to us days ahead of release); and we have a pretty good idea of any Red Dwarf books, badges, T-shirts, mugs, magazines, posters, models and figurines that are coming our way. (Ahhh, so you’re a keyring man!)

It was a surprise, then, to learn from thomasaevans in the G&T forums at the start of this year that BearManor Media was publishing a new Red Dwarf book, Comedy, Chaos - and Cowboys! The Red Dwarf Companion by Joe Nazzaro.

And not only that, but that this book would be a detailed account of the making of Red Dwarf Series VI, based on notes taken for the contemporary (well, 1994) book release The Making Of Red Dwarf.

And not only that, but that this new book was also already available to order and read immediately.

For whatever reason, this book had gone completely under the radar of most of us, with even the most enthusiastic Red Dwarf fans unaware that it was even on the horizon.

But is it worth your time and money? Let’s find out.

So What Is It?

Features

Posted by Dave on 25th May 2024, 14:10

Repetition, Running Gags and Callbacks in Red Dwarf

We're once again opening our doors to long term G&T regular Dave, bringing us his latest deep analysis of one of the show's core elements.

Like all sitcoms of a certain age, Red Dwarf has a tendency to repeat itself from time to time.

I’m not talking about in-the-moment repetition like the White Hole sequence that gives this article its title, or the Terrorform gag about Kryten’s short-term memory being erased – those are deliberate repeated phrases that give a single joke the necessary rhythm and cadence. I’m talking about episode-to-episode and series-to-series recurrences of the same ideas, jokes, lines and structures, and the way that these have accumulated as the show has gone on.

This Guy’s Pure Class

Features

Posted by Dave on 27th July 2022, 14:52

It's a rare, nay freak occurrence for us to publish guest articles, but when Dave Wallace got in touch with this effort, we made an exception for three reasons. 1) Dave is a long-standing and very funny member of the community, and it's the community that continues to make G&T worth visiting; 2) We're in one of our shit phases for written content at the moment; 3) It's really bloody good. Enjoy Dave's musings on one of Red Dwarf's most important but lesser documented themes.

Red Dwarf is a sitcom about a lot of things – space, science, weird cosmic phenomena, and the consequences of having a three-million-year old bum, a creature evolved from a cat and a hologram simulation of a long-dead jobsworth as the only sentient beings left in existence.

But strip away its sci-fi trappings, and at the heart of the show is a concept that’s as universal as it is timeless: class.