Sorry this news is a bit late; we couldn't afford to go to the SFX Event, or even buy SFX on the day of release. Wah. Anyway, as reported a while back, Chris Barrie hosted the SFX Reader Awards there on the 17th May, and by the magazine's own account, "'massive balls up' is an understatement." Apparently, "the entire video system conked out. It was bad enough that we couldn't show clips of the nominees; even worse, no-one got to see the acceptance speeches that were specially filmed for us...". Not that it mattered: "...it did give host Chris Barrie a chance to shine. He later told us he actually enjoyed the experience, ad-libbing his way through. He certainly earnt his money that night..." Excellent. Dave Golder (the editor) even thanks him for saving the ceremony, and "staying a gentlemen when he had every right to throw a star tantrum". For full coverage of it, buy SFX #106 (July 2003), out in shops now, which features a couple of great (but far too small) piccies of Chris himself. And best of all, no WRONG OPINIONS about Red Dwarf.

Read more →

Bring me that Red Dwarf news… erm… and her… slippers. Ahem. Our winged news monkeys have been extremely busy today; although after calling them that, I doubt they ever will be again. First off, we have details of the Memorabilia Fair, held on the 26th and 27th of July at the NEC Birmingham. Guests include Chris Barrie, Craig Charles (Saturday only), Hattie Hayridge, and Ian Symes. Perhaps it’s an opportunity for one of you to quiz them about the movie; although the reply will probably range from “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you anything about that” on Saturday morning, to “Fuck the fuck off” on Sunday afternoon.

Secondly, friend of the website Karl Eisenhauer has come up with some interesting news about Winchester Films, who are involved in producing the Red Dwarf movie. The outlook for them is either positive, or negative, depending on who you believe; but what is certain is that they certainly haven’t done well last financial year – they racked up a pre-tax loss of £11.2m, with a turnover of £5.1m. Ouch. Another little piece of news from Karl – Gerard Naprous is handling a chariot race in Chester; and he happens to be the guy who did all the horse handling for Gunmen of the Apocalypse (and, indeed, Phoenix Nights). Excellent.

Moving onto non-Dwarf news – specifically, Scrapheap Challenge news. Robert has just informed everyone on his Guestbook about the new series coming in September (for UK viewers; people in the US will have to wait until early 2004, when it airs as Junkyard Wars). There will be 16 episodes; 12 regular shows that are promised to be “amazing, dangerous and often frighteningly loud”, and 4 Scrappy Races, which features “5 teams and their insanely weird, but road going vehicles”. He plans to update his site soon with further details, so keep a look out for that.

Meanwhile, I think we’ve done enough work for ourselves today to blatantly crib from the excellent The Red Dwarf Zone. Firstly, they point out that you couldn’t actually order the Red Dwarf logos for your mobile phone when we posted the link, as the logo numbers for download were not yet on the site. Numbers have in fact been added now, but the phone number to order them doesn’t. Gah. No doubt it’ll be launched in the next few days. Next, as usual, they have a coup – they’ve noticed that Intro 2, the band which had Norm and Craig in their video for Clear, are doing a song for an upcoming film. The Red Dwarf movie, perhaps? Head over to RDZ and decide for yourself…

Finally, take a look at Big Blake, a Dwarf site that was recommended to us by Greg. Not a huge amount there, but there’s a nice section with some screengrabs of various appearances of the Dwarf cast on other shows, and apparantly there will be more stuff on it soon. Good luck; the more regularly-updated fansites, the better. Although Greg himself can piss off, because he’s off to watch Dwarf on a huge fuck-off plasma tv. Wah.

Don’t worry; we’ll grow out of it soon. Today, we have news of a rather interesting little project. The being known at Kry10 has suggested a rather good idea – setting up some form of chatroom dedicated to playing the Red Dwarf Roleplaying Game. If you’re interested, contact him at wbowns@blueyonder.co.uk. And if you have any Red Dwarf stuff you want to promote, or have seen any news we haven’t spotted, send us an e-mail at news@ganymede-titan.info.

Meanwhile, on the official site, the Red Dwarf mobile game Simulants’ Revenge appears to be still “Coming Soon”, despite it being past Monday 23rd June; the alleged launch date. The logo for it is still greyed out, and if you read the Instructions, and click on the Logos or Games links (which are supposed to give you a page telling you how to download the items on your phone), it gives you nothing – the links are currently dead. No doubt this is just a minor delay, however. Neither Ian or I have got access to a funky enough phone to play the game, so when it does arrive, if anyone wants to send us in a review (even if it’s just a short one) we’d be eternally grateful.

As for site news, we’ve taken down the Schedule section. We failed utterly. It was always out of date, and took far too much of our time that would be better spent doing other things on the site. However, you will have noticed above that we’ve added a little bit telling you the next UK showing of Dwarf; we’ll keep that up to date, promise. And we’ll tell you in the main news articles if we’ve spotted anything interesting coming up. Don’t miss the complete run of Series 2, starting Thursday 26th – yes, I know you all have the DVDs, but any excuse, eh? Content update later in the week; and we’ll update you before then if Simulants’ Revenge goes live.

UPDATE: Simulants’ Revenge is now up; and we should have a review of it in the next few days. Don’t forget the cool Logos as well – they look great fun, but again, some of them use the Re-mastered version of the ship, which is just awful. I’m getting seriously pissed off that nearly all mechandise includes this; it’s really, really, really bad, and it’s just not in the spirit of the original shows. Why change something that was so beautiful into the current monstrosity? Admittedly, the budget problems of VIII forced them to use the CGI version of the ship, but that doesn’t mean it has to be plastered all over merchandise…

What have we here? A new article? We really do spoil you. This one is about Smeg Ups, in all their various incarnations, and is well worth a read. Especially if you don’t like them, as you’re completely wrong. Bloody “almost amusing” my arse. Howarth and Lyons should be shot.

There’s also a plethora of minor site updates. The ATVRD section has had a spring clean; posts there have picked up a bit recently, so why not pop along and have a chat? The Links page has had yet another overhaul too, and the DVD and Movie FAQ has had another update.

On the news front, www.reddwarf.co.uk has had it’s usual Friday update – Ian’ll be here with his Newsround tomorrow, and we’ll have a further content update on Sunday. And yet again, RDZ notice something interesting; www.normanlovett.co.uk is now resolving; with a message that says it’ll launch at the end of June. If it’s anything like Robert’s site, we’re in for a treat.

First up, a bit of a scoop for G&T due to friend of the website Karl Eisenhauer. He noticed the thread "grav pool" on the Talkin' Smeg! messageboard, where the mysterious being known only as kate posted a message.

Read more →

News! Thanks to Austin Ross, who pointed out to us this Cult 100 article on the BBC Cult site. TV Zone has just concluded a three-month poll to find out the best 100 cult shows of all time. The full listing is in this month’s issue (#164), but the top twenty is there in the report; and Red Dwarf comes in at number 14. Charmedwould appear to be ahead, which is an abomination, but never mind – it’s a perfectly respectable position.

On site news, I finally broke our “update every day” policy after 37 days. Damn. Still, it was getting increasingly harder to do, and frankly the quality was deteriorating somewhat, to the point where I accidentally slag off other sites in order to fill a news item. Ahem. So, it’ll be less frequent in the future, although there will definitely be something every 2-3 days – and every day, if there is news to report. Anyway, today’s update is an article about the book Best of the Britcoms, giving the entry for Red Dwarf, and a review of the book. Ian’s Newsround is due tomorrow.