Comedy, Chaos – and Cowboys!

[Jonsmad]

The second half of the book is long interviews, and I’ve read as far as Chris, Craig & Danny. 

 

Some of the DVD documentaries for Red Dwarf can be quite candid about production frustrations to full on nightmares & disasters. But those documentaries happened a decade or so after events. 

These book interviews are bitchy about various troubles and issues and are conducted during actual production on series VI. While no one is savaged directly in them, lots of gripes are aired. It’s totally news to me that The Cat  could have been written out of the show at this time when Red Dwarf & Holly were moved on from. Pay and budgets and organisation of the shots, actors feelings about repeating themselves etc all come to the surface, as they all fight for their characters and want more and better from various aspects.

This book earns its “chaos” title word by highlighting so many factors of where people’s opinions were ruffled about things. For sure they are tired from work when saying all this. (I was aware Chris had bitched in other sci fi magazines at this era)

I can see now why this candid approach wasn’t the book GNP wanted in the 90s. I don’t blame them. As a fan I don’t think I would have wanted a bitchy book out that close to transmission. I wasn’t ready to see the cracks behind the scenes of a show I loved so deeply. 

In these pages I don’t see a world where a – “What If” – united Rob & Doug could have carried on into series VIII together the following year, without time and money to sort a lot of things and longer time to come up with joint scripts that didn’t retread older episodes like VI did. 

It was frustrating as a fan, at the time that Red Dwarf VII was over a three year wait. But it feels inevitable reading this that a gap had to happen if a new series or chapter Was ever to be possible. 

 

[Jonsmad]

And the whole potential question of cast changes does explain even further why episode 6 was so late written. 

[si]

I knew nothing about it until I received it as a birthday present from my brother this week. Seems an interesting read, been a long time since I’ve read The Making of Red Dwarf. I once took that book and got it signed by Craig Charles when he was promoting his ‘Live on Earth’ stand-up video. I got that and a free LoE promotional poster signed at the event. Didn’t buy the video.

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