Am I the longest-lurking poster on any website, ever?

[Nick R]

Hello all! If I can distract everyone from the Berkeley Square stuff for a moment…

I’ve been visiting Ganymede and Titan for a very very long time – way back before the black site design, when it was a small collection of Simpsons Archive-esque episode capsules.

I commented on a couple of articles a few years ago as an unregistered guest, and I sometimes post on Noise to Signal. But it’s only now that I get round to registering here. I really don’t know why it’s taken me so long, as there have been lots of articles I’ve intended to comment on. But the proximity of Back to Earth has kicked me into action to register before it gets broadcast…

So, a summary of my history with Red Dwarf:

I can’t remember ever not being aware of That Programme With The Man With A H On His Head, but I only really started getting into it with the mid-90s repeats. I remember watching a couple of early episodes like “Confidence and Paranoia” during that repeat run, but I think it was only series I watched all the way through was VI. (At the time, I didn’t know that “Out of Time” was the last episode, so I was hoping the cliffhanger would be resolved next week. When “Dimension Jump” was shown instead, at first I wondered whether the opening scenes in Ace’s reality were part of some elaborate way of resolving the cliffhanger…)

Series VII was the first one I saw on its initial broadcast. OK, it’s time to come out and admit it: I really like series VII. It’s definitely not as good as the best of the earlier series, and Rimmer is missed (to put it mildly), but otherwise I’ve honestly never noticed that massive a drop in story or joke quality. I rewatched the Xtended episodes the other day, and I’m still of that opinion. I know, I’m weird. (Rewatching “Duct Soup”: I still think Kochanski vs the pipes is great, and so are most of the conversations in the vents. I like Kryten’s paranoid nightmare scene, but I’m not keen on the revelation that he was the saboteur.)

Maybe it’s rose-tinted specs, what with it being the first series I saw on first broadcast, at a time when I wasn’t familiar with many earlier episodes for comparison. Or maybe I’m just won over by jealous Kryten’s high-pitched “you’re lying!” voice. But then, I also like the Space Corps Survival Manual, so what would I know?

The time when I really, really started getting into the programme was Red Dwarf Night (I’m still irritated by the Universe Challenge-not-on-DVD situation!), and the associated broadcasts of the remastered early series. Around that time, I read all the novels (and got the first two abridged audiobooks), the Log No. 1996, the Soup script books and the Programme Guide. In fact, with no IV or V repeats around that time, the script books and Programme Guide were the first place I encountered some episodes. I eventually saw them them thanks to a schoolfriend whose brother had the VHS tapes. When I finally saw “Holoship”, I really missed Holly’s brilliant “polite delaying” scene I’d read about in Soup…

So when series VIII came along, my expectations were massively high – especially with that BBC trailer. And then it turned out to be a disappointment of Sonic 3D/Matrix Revolutions proportions. Even with Chris Barrie’s return, I genuinely can’t fathom those who think it was better than VII. “Cassandra” was good, as it was the episode which best-blended a decent science fiction story (which didn’t pop up out of nowhere, unlike Kochanski’s mirror universe proposal) with some good jokes. And “Back in the Red Part 1” was a promising start to the series – I appreciated its references to past episodes, and Kryten’s scene with the psychiatric counsellor was fun. But on the whole VIII was such a disappointment at the time I haven’t felt much desire to rewatch many of its episodes, and I still haven’t bought it on DVD, despite how great its extras are.

However, I did watch my recording of “Krytie TV” last week, for the first time since its first broadcast. It wasn’t quite as bad as I remembered it; the guitar strings conversation was funny, and so was the episode’s punchline that the appeal was about something that mundane. Having said that, one of my problems with the episode was that cleaning up Ackerman’s cabin before he gets back felt so low-stakes compared to perils such as, say, being stranded in an alternate timeline because the JFK assassination didn’t happen. In another comparison to “Tikka”, if you have to have a reprogrammed Kryten, that one is much funnier.

More positively, my favourite episodes tally pretty well with your top 51 list: Marooned, White Hole, Queeg, Quarantine, Dimension Jump, Thanks For The Memory, Gunmen of the Apocalypse. As for favourite scenes and quotes: the usual suspects, like “Taranshula”, “Passed away peacefully in his jeep”, “The king of the potato people won’t let me.”

“Absolutely brimming over with wrongability” is my default online forum response when someone posts something disagreeable. “It was me plan, I planned it” has been said a worrying number of times in real life, too…

As part of my Back to Earth hype-building preparations, I’m re-reading Backwards at the moment, for the first time in over ten years. Just as before, I really love the fleshing out of the Ace Rimmer backstory, such as the SF concept of the ship travelling through dimensions but all the scientists being eager to believe that they’ve cracked FTL or time travel. And the bit where Kryten’s prolonging his cowboy novel by reading fractions of a word each day is utter genius. I’m still not keen on Lister and Cat as Kevin and Perry, though. I’m about halfway through now, so I haven’t yet got to the cowboy bits where Rob Grant gets really sadistic… I remember the tortures he put them through being fairly disturbing when I first read it, but a couple of months ago I read Iain M Banks’s Consider Phlebas (highly recommended!), and Rob’s sadism surely can’t be as nasty as the “Eaters” sequence in that book…

Back to Earth is looking very promising! No idea how funny it’ll be, but the plot looks very interesting (which is more than I can say for most of VIII’s episodes). I don’t have a problem with the absence of a laugh track, as long as the episode is built from the ground up with that in mind, unlike VII Xtended. I’m disappointed that the synopses refer to Kochanski as being dead, rather than her story ending happily with a return to her own universe. :-( I haven’t seen The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse, so for me the metafictiony stuff (which sounds like it could be incredible) brings to mind the last episode of the ’90s Spider-Man cartoon where Peter Parker met Stan Lee.

So, that’s my intro post, at long last. I’ll finish by boasting that the tatty copy of Last Human I bought from a charity shop turned out to have Doug Naylor’s signature inside. :-D

Yeah, tl;dr. I know.

Topic

[si]

I’m re-reading Backwards as well!

Welcome to G&T. That is to say, you’re welcome to it.

[Carlito]

Hands up who likes Red Dwarf…

[Ian Symes]

I?ve been visiting Ganymede and Titan for a very very long time – way back before the black site design, when it was a small collection of Simpsons Archive-esque episode capsules.

Jesus. Half the G&T staff weren’t visiting the site back then…

[Danny Stephenson]

HAHA! It’s funny ’cause it’s true.

[si]

Believe it or not, I used to poke my nose in back then, too.

[Joey TORDFC]

>>Jesus. Half the G&T staff weren?t visiting the site back then?

I don’t think they were born, yet.

[Pete Part Three]

That was when G+T wasn’t on the internet. It was just Ian writing episode reviews on pieces of paper and taping them to lamp-posts.

Good times.

[Mr Flibble]

I reckon I showed up when the black redesign turned up and presumably John came and mentioned it on ATVRD.

[Nick R]

> I don?t think they were born, yet.

Eee, where’s my cane?

(I’m 23.)

[Author]

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