Doug had updated his Twitter

[loadoftottnumb]

https://twitter.com/dougrdnaylor/status/1670844370780667936?s=46&t=hK16mSlA7wC-Avokc1jP4A

I reckon it’s a new character called Frank. 

Topic

[Stephen Abootman]

Maybe they can squeeze some juicy info out of him: 

[Unrumble]

Maybe they can squeeze some juicy info out of him

[si]

He didn’t give us much chance to guess.

[Moonlight]

He didn’t give us much chance to guess.

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

But will there be sexy details? I think not!

In fact, if what we’ve got so far has been anything to go by, I’m expecting perplexy details.

[Stephen Abootman]

Chances of an info leak just improved:

[Moonlight]

Doug: There is currently no active plan for a new series.

Robert: But we are filming a special next month!

Doug: God dammit, Bobby. I had a whole reveal planned and you just ruined it.

Robert: We’re also doing a stage show.

Doug: For fuck’s sake…

[Stephen Abootman]

Started about 8.55am if anyone wants to listen back to it. Quite a general chat, ended with Doug being asked if there’d be a new series: “if I was a betting man, I’d say yes”.

[Dave]

A quick transcript of the interview:

Nick Robinson: Good morning to you both.

Doug & Rob: Good morning.

Nick: Doug, you must be incredibly pleased, I doubt if I’d interviewed you 35 years ago you would have thought the series would run this long and then be revived.

Doug: No. I would have thought anyone even suggesting such a thing was completely mad. Um, yeah, it’s extraordinary, it’s astonishing.

Nick: Try to explain why it’s worked.

Doug: Well, it’s easy to explain how it was a success at the beginning, because we were in the right place at the right time and we were fortunate to be there. BBC Manchester really got behind the show and we had six series and then we… sorry, eight series and then we came off air. And then I think it was 10, 12 years later, we got rebooted on Dave and that was much more of a risk.

Nick: I hesitate to say that there may be some listeners to Today who have never watched it, but the ratings are huge aren’t they, and the DVD sales and all the rest.

Doug: Yeah, I think it’s 12 million DVDs and we’re the highest rated comedy show on BBC2, and also the highest rated comedy show on Dave. Um, so I mean it’s astonishing.

Nick: Robert, when you were asked to play Kryten, did you think this’ll work?

Robert: No, I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard, and I thought this won’t last. I was in series III, so I’m still classified as the new boy, even though I’ve been doing it for about 35 years!

Nick: And can you ever escape it, are you Kryten forever?

Robert: I think I am Kryten forever, there’s nothing I can do, I think it’s much too late to try and become a leading romantic figure in film and television. But I’m very happy to be covered in rubber, I lost my dignity many decades ago. So no, but it’s been a fantastic experience to work with Doug and with the cast. I mean, we do, I think we would not still be talking to each other if we did not really get on, we are great friends and I think that does show in the series.

Doug: Yes, hugely.

Nick: Doug, was there resistance, because I can imagine a science-fiction comedy – of course, we’d had Hitchhiker’s, but I can imagine there was quite a degree of resistance.

Doug: I mean, huge resistance at first – I mean, we were very sort of “oh this is going to get on in five minutes”, because we really liked the pilot script, but in fact it was rejected by the BBC three times, and then it was just purely good luck that Peter Ridsdale-Scott at BBC Manchester was looking for something different, and he loved that pilot script and then commissioned a series. 

Nick: Maybe Robert, the key to a science-fiction comedy is sort of anything can happen? You can just ‘make something happen’ in a science-fiction series. It doesn’t have to be real.

Robert: Absolutely, it doesn’t have to be real. But what’s intriguing is that there’s actually a lot of the kind of background to the plots are based on, very broadly based on actual science, rather than completely, you know, it isn’t sort of total gobbledegook, it’s sort of semi-gobbledegook based on actual scientific discovery. And a lot of the stuff about space is quite plausible. And I think the fact that it’s – the thing I feel has kept it going this long is it’s never been fashionable, in the sense that it wasn’t fashionable when it started and it still isn’t fashionable now. And the one good thing about not being fashionable is, you don’t go out of fashion.

Nick: And was there any problem in reviving an old series? Because occasionally people in the past have said “oh we couldn’t say that now”, Doug?

Doug: No, we’ve never really had any problems with that, just what we’ve written has always been fine, and we’ve always been quite careful with what we write and the subject matter.

Nick: OK, ten seconds to tell us: will we get a new series?

Doug: If I was a betting man, I would say yes.

Nick: In other words, you’re writing it…

Robert: [laughs]

Doug: Well I hope so, I haven’t been fired yet.

Nick: Well that’s exciting news for fans of Red Dwarf, Doug Naylor there, is writing a new series, Robert Llewellyn – Kryten – still more work to do!

[Flap Jack]

Well that was an incredibly brief and surface level interview. Given the reason for the appearance was Red Dwarf coming to iPlayer, I expected there to be some discussion of how all the series including the Dave ones came to be on there, and if it means anything for the show’s future. (Ideally they’d ask why Back to Earth wasn’t on there too, but I wasn’t holding out hope.) Instead we just got your basic “a sci-fi… comedy? What’s that about?” bollocks. Oh well.

– In the introduction Nick Robinson was clearly reading from the same synopsis that was in the BBC press release – hence him making it sound like Kryten was there from the beginning – but I’ve no idea where he got “9 series on the BBC” from.

– Doug briefly says that they had 6 series on the BBC before correcting it to 8. Maybe he was instinctively going to talk about the hiatus and the Grant/Naylor split but realised he didn’t have time.

– Nick being a slimy fuck and trying to goad Doug into saying Red Dwarf is more difficult to write nowadays due to political correctness or cancel culture or wokeness or whatever. Happy that Doug deflected that shit.

– Bit strange in general to frame it as “Red Dwarf is back!”. My dude, they just put the episodes on a new streaming service, and it’s not like it was lost media beforehand, there’s no need to be actively misleading about it.

[Dave]

[RunawayTrain]

Nick: And was there any problem in reviving an old series? Because occasionally people in the past have said “oh we couldn’t say that now”, Doug? 

Doug: No, we’ve never really had any problems with that, just what we’ve written has always been fine, and we’ve always been quite careful with what we write and the subject matter.

… “always”, you say?

Still, to be fair the rest of Red Dwarf generally is inoffensive, and the cruder humour isn’t punching down or hurting marginalised people, it’s just a bit tasteless sometimes rather than anything deeply problematic.

Thanks for the transcript of the interview!  Interesting, coming at it from the angle of reviving RD.  Not sure if it’s a misunderstanding on the interviewer’s part, or perhaps an indication that Things are Happening behind the scenes.

[International Debris]

I’d imagine with the legal situation resolved, and the appearance of it all on iPlayer, GNP probably wanted to push the “we’re back!” angle to try and get as much media attention as possible.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

“if I was a betting man, I’d say yes”.

He said this about series 13 & 14 I believe whilst doing press for 12

[Flap Jack]

He said this about series 13 & 14 I believe whilst doing press for 12

And he was right. We got Series 13 (the AA ads) and then we got Series 14 (The Promised Land + The First Three Million Years). Here’s hoping he’s right again about Series 15.

[Formica]

I hope series 15 is more mobisodes (like series 9 was)

[loadoftottnumb]

They’re gonna put Back to Earth on iPlayer and call it series 15

[Moonlight]

They’re gonna put Hyperdrive on iPlayer and call it Series 16 and 17.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

[International Debris]

In ten years time, Big Finish will be doing a Hyperdrive series and have “From the Worlds of Red Dwarf” on the cover and everyone will go ballistic. 

[Rudolph]

[Stephen Abootman]

[Flap Jack]

A small announcement is coming later this afternoon.

2 hours later:

The Red Dwarf Twitter account is fucking dead.

Brilliant.

[Dave]

[Ian Symes]

What a crock of shit.

[Unrumble]

[International Debris]

“Not my choice!”

Good to see the new relationship with GNP is going well. 

[Dave]

Time to dig out all the TOS thread memes again.

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

[Ridley]

It’s called Ten now.

[Stephen Abootman]

[Jonathan Capps]

Far be it from me to cast aspersions, but this seems deeply incompetent.

[Ridley]

(by design?)

[Jonsmad]

Possible he might announce something at the Manchester con that the whole cast are at with him. 

[Frank Smeghammer]

Possible he might announce something at the Manchester con that the whole cast are at with him. 

I think the announcement he referred to was simply that they are all at a Manchester convention, as he tweeted that less than 2 hours after announcing an announcement

Gentlemen, may I be the first to say, this is all very crap

[Dave]

[GlenTokyo]

Yeah this is proper Mickey Mouse operation shit.

Say Dave commission a new series, the official account and the official website won’t say anything, you’re expected to go to find Doug Naylor on twitter for information. 

I get they’ve borked the website and that’d probably cost money to fix, but keeping a twitter account operational (outside of any future Musk issues) is such a low bar to clear. What possible reason could there be for that to be beyond GNP?

If they’ve lost the password or there are some other kind of access issues (previous admin caught in legal crossfire, account lost in process) then just make a new one, it’s not like the account was @RedDwarf. 

Utter shit.

[Flap Jack]

I think the announcement he referred to was simply that they are all at a
Manchester convention, as he tweeted that less than 2 hours after
announcing an announcement

It can’t be that. That was announced already. In fact just looking slightly down Doug’s feed I can see he retweeted someone reacting to that news 4 weeks ago.

Assuming that the RedDwarfHQ Twitter account becoming inactive was genuinely the announcement, and there isn’t another announcement he was made to delay, that is so baffling. Why would you trail bad news?!?!

I mean the announcement itself is baffling too. Fair enough if they can’t justify the expense of a full or even part time social media manager, but just occasionally logging into the Twitter account to post about only the most major news hardly seems like it would be that much of a burden. Did they lose access to it or something?

[GlenTokyo]

Oh and if it’s some sort of quaraling divorced couple shite, they’re old enough to rise above that surely. 

Just publicise both sides Red Dwarf projects equally and interact with fans. 

[International Debris]

“Involving new Red Dwarf shows with the Posse”

I mean, far be it from me to read something into the wording of a tweet, but I keep seeing some sort of buttski-related spin-off not involving the main cast and it’s caused some sort of clash involving the franchise’s official social media accounts.

I mean that’s probably complete bollocks, but the utter lack of clarity in terms of what the fuck is going on invites wild speculation. 

[Dave]

“Involving new Red Dwarf shows with the Posse”
I mean, far be it from me to read something into the wording of a tweet, but I keep seeing some sort of buttski-related spin-off not involving the main cast and it’s caused some sort of clash involving the franchise’s official social media accounts.
I mean that’s probably complete bollocks, but the utter lack of clarity in terms of what the fuck is going on invites wild speculation. 

I did have the same thought, it seems like a potentially significant qualification. 

[loadoftottnumb]

I think this was the announcement 

https://twitter.com/tordfc/status/1684502478253969408?s=46&t=hK16mSlA7wC-Avokc1jP4A

Back to Earth on iPlayer

[Frank Smeghammer]

[Rudolph]

[Flap Jack]

I think this was the announcement 

https://twitter.com/tordfc/status/1684502478253969408?s=46&t=hK16mSlA7wC-Avokc1jP4A

Back to Earth on iPlayer

I mean if Doug had said “A small announcement is coming an hour and a half ago. I’ll just pop into my time machine and log into The Official Red Dwarf Fan Club Twitter account to make it.”, then sure I guess.

As it was meant to be an afternoon announcement and it is now the evening, there are still a few possibilities, but they’re narrowing:

1. The official Twitter account dying was the announcement.

2. The Back to Earth iPlayer thing (or something else) was meant to be the announcement, but someone stopped him from making it, or he changed his mind for some reason.

3. When Doug said “the afternoon” he didn’t mean the afternoon in the UK, and he intends to wait for it to be 5:30pm in Hawaii (in 6 and a half hours) before he makes the announcement.

4. Doug decided to tweet out a completely random lie because he was bored.

[Stephen Abootman]

3. When Doug said “the afternoon” he didn’t mean the afternoon in the UK, and he intends to wait for it to be 5:30pm in Hawaii (in 6 and a half hours) before he makes the announcement. 

[Unrumble]

[GlenTokyo]

[Ian Symes]

Well, the memes and gifs have cheered me up, at least. 

[Frank Smeghammer]

[Author]

Replies