Does anybody have the full image of this?

[Bargain Bin Holly]

Its a publicity photo of Chris Barrie as Rimmer from Series 1, its part of three as I’ve found (One is common and can be found easy on the internet as well as in the episode Back to Earth Part One, the second is another rare one and has Rimmer wearing a Red Dwarf hat he never dons in the show, third being this one)

You can see it on this Radio Times newspaper dating to Series 1 as well.

Does anybody have the full photo?

Topic

[Ben Paddon]

Interestingly, that’s not the same photo! Though they definitely came from the same photo session. The photo in the paper shows Chris’ head at an ever-so-slightly different angle, and the light is catching the crease in his tie a little differently.

I’m sure I’ve seen the full version of this photo somewhere. Is it on the Series I DVD?

[Bargain Bin Holly]

I can’t tell, you might be right though, I’ve got a collection of different poses Chris was in during this photo shoot but only in bits and pieces.

Here’s the Rimmer hat photo

First full image I could find, but its in black and white, my bloody luck.

Btw, I suspect this photo shoot with Chris, Craig, and Claire Grogan was during/after the original assembly and not the broadcast first episode, but that’s just speculation.

[Ben Saunders]

Chris Barrie Wearing That Hat looks almost nothing like Chris Barrie

[Toxteth O-Grady]

I used to have a postcard that featured the first image in full, although I think the background had been cut out and replaced with a grey texture.
It was free at my local cinema, so (given that this was in 2002) I initially assumed it was to promote the then-upcoming Red Dwarf movie.

In fact, it was to promote the upcoming release of the first series on DVD.
To the right of Rimmer was the circular JMC logo with the mountains, and underneath read the MiB-inspired slogan “Protecting the Universe from the Scum of the Earth”.

[Moonlight]

That’s definitely his Original Assembly hairdo and not the one from the rest of Series 1.

[GlenTokyo]

Toxteth, I thought it was that one but its different. Same shoot though surely.

And for when that embed inevitably doesn’t work,

https://i.imgur.com/8nfdw4Rr.jpg

[Bargain Bin Holly]

Toxteth, I thought it was that one but its different. Same shoot though surely.

Luckily that shot (which, yeah, is probably from the same photo shoot in all likelihood) is widely available and I have the full one here.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

Probably should’ve posted a small version

[Toxteth O-Grady]

@GlenTokyo Ah, you’re right. They’re slightly different, but clearly taken within moments of each other.

Having not seen that postcard in 15 years I’m surprised how well I’ve remembered it!

[Lily]

>Probably should’ve posted a small version
Nothing wrong with seeing Chris in his full technicolour shiny glory.

Is that the hat tucked under the flappy bit on his left shoulder?

[bloodteller]

That hat is rubbish

[tombow]

I love how that TV listing gives Rimmer’s qualifications and keeps Cat a mystery.

[bloodteller]

The description of the episode in that same TV listing (cropped off in the picture) was rather excellent too, I thought.

“The mining ship Red Dwarf is an old tramp steamer, working around the moons of Saturn. It is five miles long and three miles wide, with a crew of 169. Within 24 hours, 168 of them will be dead.”

I mean bloody hell, that certainly grabs your attention, doesn’t it? If I was around in 1988 and saw that description, I’d definitely tune in out of curiousity as to what kind of show casually advertises that its first episode contains the death of over a hundred people.

[Dave]

I love that similar chapter ending in the first novel too.

[Ben Saunders]

That synopsis makes it sound like a sci-fi horror rather than a comedy, that really is great

[GlenTokyo]

I know you get shat on from a great height for suggesting such things around here, but Rob and Doug’s original conversational character humour, a few traditional ‘gags’ (Norweb, Dog’s Milk etc) with some pathos sci-fi show would have been a fantastic way for Red Dwarf to evolve. If only Craig had been able to do drama convincingly at the time. Chris certainly could, and does in those early episodes. Thanks For The Memory, Better than Life.

The concept of Red Dwarf is a great seed for many different kinds of shows to grow from.

[International Debris]

Oh yes, I don’t regret the fact that it became the show it did, but a series 1 & 2 style show throughout would have been wonderful. Something about the quiet loneliness of those early series is wonderful. There were hints of it in X at times, but nowhere near as well done.

[cwickham]

Although it is very odd that the Radio Times listing tells us all that soon everyone but Lister will be dead… but the broadcast trailers carefully avoided saying so.

[bloodteller]

>Something about the quiet loneliness of those early series is wonderful.

Oh yeah, absolutely. “I knew he was dead…I mean, they’re all dead, aren’t they?” and “It’s just me, you, the Cat and a load of stupid smegging rocks” are particular lines that always stood out to me as really emphasizing how lonely their predicament is. The universe is entirely empty other than them, all their loved ones and family have been dead for millenia, and they have no way of getting back home.

This is lost gradually over the course of the series- it’s still there somewhat in Series III, but then Series IV starts having them come across derelicts, and by VI they meet a new lifeform every week. So much for the universe being empty

[bloodteller]

Honestly it’s surprising it takes until Timeslides for Lister to get really depressed, considering how bleak things are looking for him in Series 1 and 2

[Lily]

Imagine if the movie had been in the style of 1&2. Two hours of bunkroom scenes about the futility of existence.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

I’m going to take a shot in the dark and say nobody has this image then

[Dave]

Imagine if the movie had been in the style of 1&2. Two hours of bunkroom scenes about the futility of existence.

We certainly don’t like British comedy writers poncing around in their black T-shirts filling everyone’s cinemas with their theories about the bleakness of existence and absurdity of the cosmos.

[International Debris]

The universe is entirely empty other than them, all their loved ones and family have been dead for millenia, and they have no way of getting back home.

Yes, and it’s treated with a lot more gravitas than “you’re missing your species again, aren’t you sir?”
I thought there was a touch of it in M-Corp, due to the themes of the episode. I really enjoyed that.

[bloodteller]

>Yes, and it’s treated with a lot more gravitas than “you’re missing your species again, aren’t you sir?”

Plus it’s harder to take the attempts at loneliness in the Dave era seriously, in my opinion- the revived crew from the end of VIII are still around, Kochanski’s still around, and even if somehow they were all dead,they meet a fuckton of humans in X-XII anyway.

I mean Lister moping in Dear Dave, come on. He met Irene E last week, she was human and he didn’t give a shit when she was brutally and unfairly killed, so he can’t be missing mankind that much.

[bloodteller]

Someone really should have pointed out to Lister that if he’s legitimately missing the human race that much, he could easily just use the Time Drive or the Timeslides or the Timewave or the Time Wand or the Quantum Rod or the Quantum Skipper or the Casket Of Chronos or the Rejuvination Shower or the Stasis Leak or the Stasis Booth to go back and visit them. He has all these getting-back-home/getting-my-species-back machines and doesn’t use any of them. Lister is a fucking idiot

[GlenTokyo]

See, if they hadn’t ruined Hollister in VIII and turned him into an idiot, I’d say he could have got the crew back to Earth with good leadership. Who knows though, they could’ve managed it anyway, I mean they invented the Matter Paddle, I’m sure a Holly that’s not senile plus their scientists could probably get them back in time and back at Earth.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

In Dave era’s defense they don’t really push the isolation element apart from a select few examples in Dear Dave and M-Corp (and there it wasn’t as explicit).

The isolation concept went away anyways by Series II; after that they were either exploring derelict spaceships or encountering another species, rarely they were having an episode where they didn’t do something like this in III-VI apart from Marooned or White Hole.

Series VII was the last full series I feel that actually centered on isolation, yeah they met Kochanski and were attacked by GELFs sometimes; but there were multiple times where the crew were stuck onboard Starbug for the majority of the episode (Blue, Duct Soup, Nanarchy).

In Dave era’s defense btw, Back to Earth was one of the most effective times I felt the show conveyed isolation and abandonment especially in Part One.

[flanl3]

I think Dave knows he could go back, and started by denying but is slowly learning that his old Earth is neither the place he belongs nor the place he wamts to be anymore. And if that doesn’t bring the loneliness thread full circle, I don’t know what will.

[International Debris]

It’s been said before, but the idea that he’d go “y’know what, I’d rather be stuck in deep space with three people, one of whom I don’t particularly like, than actually try finding the human race again” is just madness.

[Dax101]

Dave era Dwarf does feel abit populated. i think we seen more human guest characters in the dave era than any all of Series 1-7 combined.

Not only that but i think the dispensing machines and other appliances that talk can take that away the loneliness factor. especially in high doses of dependency.

[Lily]

>i think we seen more human guest characters in the dave era than any all of Series 1-7 combined.

I make it 7 episodes with humans (with a pretty loose definition) in Dave era (8 if you include BtE as a single thing).

Roughly 15 episodes with humans in 1-7. Series 1 naturally has a low count, but surprisingly series 4 only had 1 human episode.

The rest averaged 2-3 human episodes per series, which is about the same as the Dave average.

You can find my working here : https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rRpqgawRF0aIx1mBOfLV_L0zf9pKVE8YMD1yOlTLiAM/edit?usp=sharing

[Ridley]

Generally, I think, Lister should only be able to hold a full conversation with Rimmer but it’s a lot of work.

Cat’s too self-absorbed
Kryten’s too deferential
And so on

[flanl3]

It’s been said before, but the idea that he’d go “y’know what, I’d rather be stuck in deep space with three people, one of whom I don’t particularly like, than actually try finding the human race again” is just madness.

Even if he does somewhat want to go back, he doesn’t really belong there anymore, wouldn’t fit in, and just plain isn’t ready as a person.

[Flap Jack]

I too am seriously annoyed at the show when:

• An entertaining variety of stuff happens in a series.
• Character development occurs.
• An episode happens which isn’t primarily about how sad and lonely Lister is all the time.
• There’s technically an opportunity to do an episode which would either immediately end the show or make every episode that comes after it overwhelmingly glum, and Doug doesn’t take it.

[Dax101]

>I make it 7 episodes with humans (with a pretty loose definition) in Dave era (8 if you include BtE as a single thing).

Maybe using the word Human was wrong. i meant characters that had some humanity to them that allowed the universe to feel more social and busy.

While you could say Professor Edgington and Professor Telford were Human characters that had to be killed off to keep Lister as the last human being alive, you also get characters like Rogue who turns up at Red Dwarf like their next door neighbor but don’t count as human characters.

I think thats why most of the time in the Rob-era when they did find guest character they were often villains so you still felt like the Dwarfers had no friends in the universe and were alone.

[Lily]

>characters that had some humanity to them that allowed the universe to feel more social and busy.

OK, yeah I can totally agree with you there. There does seem to be less villains around and those that are, seem to get dealt with overly quickly and easily.

[bloodteller]

The villains (and other characters) in the Dave era are silly comedy villains too, whereas in 1-8 the villains were more or less taken seriously.

And I think it’s been said before, but the seriousness of the villains in the classic era helped make the world of Red Dwarf feel more real- it felt as if the main characters were the silly ones and a bunch of misfits, and everyone else was normal. In the Dave era everyone is an idiot or a maniac or a vehicle for social satire, which breaks the illusion that the show is taking place in a believable world.

[bloodteller]

M-Corp especially-there’s no gravity to the reveal that M-Corp took over the entire world and enslaved billions. And later Kryten manages to easily defeat this world-conquering mega corporation within about 20 seconds of meeting them. I guess everyone on Earth in the 26th century was a fucking moron, then? It just doesn’t feel real, wheras 1-8 managed to convince me that its own story and its own world were things that existed, rather than a bunch of actors on a studio set.

[International Debris]

Yes, it’s that ending which stops M-Corp being fantastic for me.

The different between guests, antagonists, etc. in 1-8 Dwarf vs Dave Dwarf is less to do with the numbers, and more about where they come from, I think. Earlier episodes had much more emphasis on guests who were in some way related to the crew: Confidence & Paranoia, Me², Better Than Life, Queeg, Parallel Universe, DNA, Dimension Jump, Terrorform, Demons & Angels, Back to Reality, Rimmerworld, Out of Time and Stoke Me a Clipper all have plenty of extra characters who only exist because the main characters interacted with a certain sci-fi event or concept that created, or brought them to, these alternate versions and fictional characters. Even then, the few genuinely external characters they encountered were often as not mindless predators (Polymorph, Emohawk, Psirens) or only in the episode for a few minutes (Justice, Quarantine, Rimmerworld).

In contrast, almost all the Dave episodes have them interacting with characters who are simply out in space, often for an entire episode. This is felt doubly so when every episode in XI features significant guest characters, and XII begins with Cured with five guests, followed by Siliconia and Twentica, in which they counter large, highly populated spaceships two weeks in a row.

You can obviously give in-universe reasons for all this (they’re getting closer to Earth, they specifically went looking for Butler, etc.), but the overall effect is the same: the show feels more populated, and thus somewhat less about the main characters. It’s only just struck me that I love the final three episodes of XII, and they’re the ones without any truly external characters. Only Aniter in M-Corp comes close, and even she is simply an extension of the software now aboard Red Dwarf.

[International Debris]

I guess everyone on Earth in the 26th century was a fucking moron, then?

Actually, thinking about it, didn’t they apply a thinking tax to stop people being able to do anything about them?

[Dax101]

Id kinda wish that Doug hadn’t said to had such a huge impact on earth since it just felt like Doug was describing how the human race fell and that was probably social satire or commentary he was getting at, but sometimes mystery is alot better than having a predicting the future message.

It should just have been a company that existed and went bust sometime later because it is clearly useless, stupid and not very safe.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

Ignoring the fact you gits just hijacked my thread; I think its welcomed that newer episodes start revealing more stuff that were a mystery to us, and even than M-Corp does really do that if you think about it.

Yeah, they bought Earth, but we were already aware humans had expanded across the solar system as this point; who says many people lived on Earth beyond what Better Than Life (the novel) said about only the poor, scared, and stupid?

In contrast, almost all the Dave episodes have them interacting with characters who are simply out in space, often for an entire episode. This is felt doubly so when every episode in XI features significant guest characters

Well that’s kinda a blanket statement in my opinion, episodes like Samsara, Give & Take, Officer Rimmer and Can of Worms have significant guest characters but none that substantially take away from the aspect of them being in a mostly uninhabited region of space.

Samsara has two characters alive but they were in deep sleep onboard an escape pod from presumably millions of years prior, which has been made entirely possible since The End; Give & Take only has two guest characters and they are just droids; Officer Rimmer they only meet a completely abandoned Space Corps ship that has to manufacture a new crewman, and that’s the only guest in the episode outside of a lady on television; and Can of Worms they only meet a Mercenoid and a felis sapien (Polymorph), both a droid and a GELF.

So XI doesn’t have anything particularly out of the norm for Red Dwarf beyond going into another dimension to meet a lot of people in Twentica similar to Stasis Leak, Backwards or Lemons. I think its more XII that does the more populated space thing, and even then I think it doesn’t do anything particularly bad with it lest I repeat everything thats been said about Timewave again.

[Dax101]

[Dax101]

>I think its welcomed that newer episodes start revealing more stuff that were a mystery to us, and even than M-Corp does really do that if you think about it.

They say that if you give a character what they always wanted then there is nothing to chase or move towards.

Kinda the same with mysteries.

[Bargain Bin Holly]

Ah splendid, pray tell how’d you acquire these? Have you got anymore?

[Dax101]

I found them on tumblr. There were other images but those are the only poses of that version I could find.

[bloodteller]

>Yeah, they bought Earth, but we were already aware humans had expanded across the solar system as this point; who says many people lived on Earth beyond what Better Than Life (the novel) said about only the poor, scared, and stupid?

True, but it’s a bit of a letdown to have the fate of the Earth A. not be very interesting B. revealed for basically no reason in a dialogue scene and C. be that it was taken over by a company that Kryten can destroy in 10 seconds flat.

What was the point of revealing M-Corp to have owned Earth anyway? It just sets them up to be incredibly powerful and dangerous, which just causes further letdown in their abrupt and stupid defeat at the end. Compared to the rather clever and satisfying ending of Fathers And Suns in which similar ideas are used (using an AI’s logic against itself) the climax of M-Corp just comes across as a rushed imitation.

[flanl3]

I mean, to be fair, it’s just said that M-Corp owned Earth, not that that was the downfall of Earth, right? It could have been just a period of history where they eventually fought back and won their freedom after many brave souls gave their lives to the think tax trying to figure out how to defeat them.

[International Debris]

Give & Take only has two guest characters and they are just droids

I don’t think you can really discount mechanical characters as ‘just droids’, given that one of the show’s main characters is one. I’d say they are just as valid as organic characters in the Red Dwarf universe.

So XI doesn’t have anything particularly out of the norm for Red Dwarf

Other than every single episode featuring an outside guest character. It’s the only series (barring 8, of course), which doesn’t feature a single episode that’s purely the main 4 / 5 characters.

I’m not passing judgement on how successful the guest appearances are, or how they fit into the fictional universe, I’m just shedding possible light on this perception that the Dave era is more heavily populated.

[Author]

Replies