Wally Who?: A Belated Look & Listen Quickies Posted by John Hoare on 1st June 2017, 16:40 Over here at Ganymede & Titan, we like to think we bring a certain amount of professionalism to our reporting. We're happy to let you know then, that 1982 radio sitcom Wally Who? - penned by a certain Rob Grant and Doug Naylor - is currently being repeated every Wednesday on Radio 4 Extra, at 9:30am, 4:30pm, and 4:30am. Admittedly, this piece of reporting may have been more impressive if this run hadn't started on the 17th May, and if we hadn't missed the first three episodes. It may also have been more impressive if we hadn't started uploading and reviewing the series ourselves back in 2009, but stopped after the first episode. Mickey Mouse operation, etc. Read more →
# RED DWAAAAARRFF # News Posted by John Hoare on 17th May 2017, 08:58 You all remember the big news last year, don’t you? No, not Red Dwarf XI. It was that magical moment when Darrell pointed out on our forums that the opening theme to popular science fiction sitcom Red Dwarf bloody well has lyrics. All these months later, that fact still blows me away. (Here’s a great write-up of it by Mental Floss.) But aside from that initial thread, the only other thing we had to go on was this little acknowledgement from Howard Goodall: I am honoured & delighted my vo-coded message from the past has been cracked!???????????? https://t.co/1GZMzPgZ9C — Howard Goodall (@Howard_Goodall) October 22, 2016 Now, wouldn’t it be nice if, say, someone like Graham Kibble-White just happened to be doing an interview with Howard about one of his upcoming programmes, and asked him a little more about the subject? Oh, look what we’ve just been sent. What a coincidence. I know someone who does this Red Dwarf fan site, and they got excited, I think last year, because they’d been analysing the music… Right! And they had discovered there were vocals hidden in the music. Oh, it’s them who discovered it? Yeah, they then put it out on Twitter, and it was a huge story for Red Dwarf fans, yeah. Oh well, thank them for finding it. I mean, I hadn’t deliberately hidden it. It just happened to be there in the mix. It’s just that no one seemed to have noticed it! [Laughs] So it was a very nice discovery. Had you forgotten it was there yourself? No, I knew it was. I didn’t know that people hadn’t noticed it. So, that was the shock. I had assumed everybody knew it was there, but it was so long ago, it was 27 years or whatever, and so I thought no more of it. Then all these fans around the world were saying, ‘Oh my God, we’d never noticed it before’. To me, the surprise was it hadn’t been noticed before. Is that you singing? Is it on a vocoder? That’s me doing a vocoder, yeah. And do you mind if I pass this onto them? Not at all! Many thanks to Graham and Howard for the above. Now, I’m off to listen to QI theme again. I’m sure I can hear a bit where Howard calls Alan Davies a dickhead using morse code.
A Random Day on G&T: 10 Years On Quickies Posted by John Hoare on 23rd February 2017, 09:42 On the 23rd February 2007 - 10 years ago to the day - Ganymede & Titan published four articles. It perhaps seems odd to remember we used to be like this. After all, these days you're sometimes lucky if you get four updates a month. We were a rather different beast back then. True, we still did loads of in-depth articles, but we also prized ourselves on reporting every single bit of Red Dwarf-related news going. Fun though that might have been, it's the kind of thing that is entirely unsustainable now we have, y'know, proper jobs and stuff. We'd rather concentrate on giving you fewer, more substantial things to get your teeth into. Still, I thought it might be fun to take a look at what we were up to exactly ten years ago today. If you're lucky, you may just notice a few comments on one of my bugbears. But I think it's quite subtle. Read more →
Dave’s Red Dwarf XI Bank Holiday Monday Features Posted by John Hoare on 4th January 2017, 14:43 "Now on Dave, it's time to sit back and relax this Bank Holiday Monday, as we bring you an afternoon in the company of the finest smegheads out there - with the complete series of Red Dwarf XI." – Dave continuity announcement into Twentica, 2nd January 2017 Most people, when greeted with a continuity announcement like that, might think: "Oh, that's good, I get to half-watch all of Red Dwarf XI this afternoon whilst pretending to get some work done." Or perhaps: "I hate Red Dwarf, Red Dwarf is shit, I am going to turn over, I need to watch anything other than Red Dwarf because I don't like Red Dwarf." Us? We clap our hands in delight, as we indulge in one of our favourite pastimes: pre-watershed Red Dwarf edit spotting. Although perhaps to our surprise, only two of the six episodes had any alterations whatsoever: Twentica, Officer Rimmer, Krysis and Can of Worms got away cut-free. Let's take a look at what was changed... Read more →
The tape must have got twisted, man! Quickies Posted by John Hoare on 10th September 2016, 17:16 Sometimes, things just work out to provide the perfect story. Back in 2012 - in the lead-up to Red Dwarf X - I wrote a series of articles detailing the edits UKTV had made to Red Dwarf repeats. One of the worst was in Series III - the seemingly random broadcast of the Remastered version of Marooned, and the only episode of the series where the Remastered edit was broadcast instead of the original. (While it was the first time we had discussed the issue, but it had been going on for years before this. We were too busy complaining about Gold blurring out Fletch sticking two fingers up in Porridge.) Read more →
Hancock’s Half Hour: The Tycoon Features Posted by John Hoare on 3rd August 2016, 12:34 When people talk about antecedents to Red Dwarf, it's often science fiction which is endlessly referenced. Films like Dark Star, in terms of the situation and portraying working class people in space, or Alien, which amongst other things directly influenced many sets in the show, to Blade Runner, which... erm... I got nothing. When it comes to sitcoms, there's the classic "Steptoe and Son in space", which is often thrown around as an early concept for the show. Porridge is also mentioned, in terms of the claustrophobic trapped situation between characters which the show was trying to evoke. All of this is certainly true, but typically there's very little analysis beyond mentioning a TV show or film, along with a one line description. Recently, I've had the utter delight of watching Hancock's Half Hour for the first time. And the episode The Tycoon (TX: 13/11/59) has a number of remarkable similarities to the Dwarf episode Better Than Life, broadcast nearly thirty years later. Moreover, I don't just mean in terms of character work - the main plot beats of the episode are broadly identical, despite Better Than Life seemingly hanging off a science fiction idea which Hancock would find impossible to replicate. Rather than vague hand-waving or simplistic single line reductions, let's take a look at the episode in detail, shall we? Read more →
“We’ve found a stasis leak on Floor 16…” Features Posted by John Hoare on 26th July 2016, 14:23 Hanging around on a deep, dark, unloved corner of the internet is an old version of Ganymede & Titan. The reasons for this are long and complex, but essentially amount to laziness: during one of our relaunches many years ago, we didn't move all of our stuff over to the new version of the site. We thought until we did, the least we could do would be to leave all that stuff online. We never did get round to moving it, of course, which means you can insert a certain Mickey Mouse operation quote here at your leisure. But clicking around on that old version of the site can be fun, especially for old-time G&T visitors. And one page in particular fascinates me: our links page, last updated in mid-2004. It's an interesting snapshot of online Red Dwarf fandom at the time; a list of the sites we thought were important back then. 12 years later, how many of them are even still online, let alone important? I thought it'd be fun to go through the list and take a look at the fate of that slice of Dwarf fandom. And dare I say that it might shed a bit of light on the development of the web over the past decade? Tune in at the end to see whether I manage to tie that one up at all convincingly. So, let's start with... Read more →
Fool’s Gold Quickies Posted by John Hoare on 19th July 2016, 09:55 As we ramp up inevitably towards September, there's probably some news we should be reporting. Like, for instance, this early screening at Edinburgh of the first episode of XI on the 24th August. (With a strict embargo on spoilers, and it ruining the first watch of the show as a shared experience, it's not really worth it for us even if we could wheedle ourselves in.) Or as noticed in our forums, it seems the DVD for XI has a provisional release date of the 8th November in Region 1. (We deliberately haven't reported on Craig Charles's foot injury, because nobody needs a tedious stream of Thanks for the Memory quotes.) Anyway, we don't care about all that. What interests us is the repeats of Series III, which started on Gold last night. Which is perhaps a bit of an odd thing in itself. If UKTV are trying to cement Dwarf as a Dave show, how does it make sense to start a repeat run on Gold? If it confuses hardcore fans, however dumb we are, surely it's also confusing to the more casual viewer? I can't help but feel this repeat run would be far better suited to just being on Dave. Still, Dave, Gold, whatever - a repeat of Series III on a UKTV channel means only one thing: the never-ending game of Marooned Remastered. We previously reported on this last year - with the inevitable disappointment - but we've been talking about it for years. (Bonus points to anyone who can be arsed going through G&T's archives and finding out when we first talked about it.) Well, Marooned has its latest repeat showing tonight at 11:30pm, and whilst it's possible that the correct version of the episode may be shown, past experience shows that this is exceedingly unlikely. Which means more wailing from us, more gnashing of teeth, more abusing our genitals in dismay, and PRECISELY NOTHING CHANGING. Read more →
Nice Going On The Idiotic Gaffe Front, Sirs Features Posted by John Hoare on 17th April 2016, 17:45 The other day, I snapped. In our forums, there is a spoiler, which came about from a careless photo posted by a crew member. It's not a huge spoiler, maybe. I doubt many people will be upset reading it. But it's the latest in a long line of spoilers about the show posted online since the recordings started late last year. There's an interesting thing about these spoilers, mind. Nearly every single one them have come from the cast, crew, and - in one notable case - an executive at UKTV. The large audiences full of excitable fans who came to watch the shows have remained generally shtum. Read more →
Not A Good Day News Posted by John Hoare on 23rd March 2016, 07:06 With Dwarf understandably going quiet since the last audience recording, maybe it’s time to check in on the world of Brittas. When we last “reported” on things, a revival was “in development”. Let’s hear what Chris Barrie has to say: “Regarding the possible return of The Brittas Empire, which caused a moment or two of excitement last year, things have gone very quiet indeed – in fact totally silent. I believe a script was being developed with a view to recording a special or pilot at some stage. So if you are a journalist, don’t bother emailing me about an interview as I would prefer to wait until there is something concrete to talk about and that doesn’t look likely at the moment.” Oh. Cock it. Something to ponder: the BBC’s sitcom season this summer contains a number of revivals, which Brittas would have slipped neatly into. The fact that the project hasn’t managed to capitalise on this really isn’t promising, unfortunately. Continue reading →
