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The not-we love VIII.

I mean, *I* like it, and a couple of episodes I REALLY like. Its relative divisiveness is massively overstated.

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But… Stasis Leak won’t make sense without The End or Balance Of Power, and The Beginning won’t make sense without, well, quite a big run-up.

To be honest, you might as well start with The End and Future Echoes. If they’re not quite sold, carry on through Six Of The Best until it clicks, and if they are just carry on episodically. If XI is anything, it’s fair to say it’s not really built for newcomers, and no-one fresh to RD is going to get much out of it.

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It’s in keeping with XI’s retro aesthetic that it throws back to the ‘classic’ shit Red Dwarf shop from ten years ago. Also, if it carries on like this, it’s going to continue XI’s theme of abrupt endings as well.

The fact everyone’s had so much shit trying to buy anything off it has been the sole reason I haven’t bothered (and I *really* want that JMC T-shirt). I held off as all the “shipping October” nonsense really threw me, but now it’s looking like they haven’t even got that as an excuse. The extortionate postage combined with absolutely top-whack prices isn’t much of a comfort either.

Can they not just ship it all to Forbidden Planet or something and let competent people sell it to us instead?

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XI and XII seem to be teal and orange respectively, the universally recognised palette of lazy grading.

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I can’t do the X/XI megamix thing before the has-to-be-first Give And Take must follow the has-to-be-last The Beginning and my head pops.

But if you must…

Trojan
Can Of Worms
Lemons
Officer Rimmer
Krysis
The Beginning

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Longman is removed from the GELF origin story.

It’s a minority view but I think the Last Human audiobook is brilliant. It’s really well acted – Charles doesn’t go for impressions but he gets everyone’s essence spot on, and there’s a sincerity to it which really matches the tone of the writing like Barrie matches the first two.

The most interesting abridgement in a RD audiobook is a clever edit in the Radio Show version of BTL which completely changes the manner of Lister’s death.

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I personally don’t think they’ll greenlight any more until they see how both series have done cumulatively from a distance. They’ll need to see if new RD has momentum outside being an occasional ‘event’, plus how well all the merchandise, repeats, game etc pan out across a year and a half.

If there’s a XIII on in 2018 I will be astonished. It’s worth not taking it for granted yet that there will be one at all – XII will be the first RD series not to be a notable novelty of the whole Dave era, and the show needs to prove its tenacity beyond big publicity campaigns for ‘comeback’ stunts. I genuinely hope that XII will be a big hitter, but there’s a small part of me worried because it’s sort of new ground, as yet untested in this climate. XII is the first series since the best part of forever that doesn’t have an angle to sell it on. “They’re back!!” has died a death now XI has aired…

XIII needs to have grander designs on the modern entertainment landscape or else it’s going to look like a spectacularly ordinary proposition.

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Strictly speaking the correct provenance is “FUCKING PENCIL”. Anything else an unacceptable corruption.

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For Christmas DVD purposes alone, I’d still put my money on September again. A lot of the XI publicity has centred around it being ‘event’ telly and you can’t do event telly twice in six months. Plus, the mobile game’s level release pattern seems to indicate a deliberate two-month-an-episode pacing leading up to XII a year later.

Saying that, the similarly double-banked Taskmaster has followed soon after itself, so what do I know.

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What amuses me is that Doug calls it ‘the pencil’ now hence the shortening for X… but that is 100% a G&T reference. There’s a theoretical argument that the fact it looks completely ridiculous now is entirely John Hoare’s fault, and the bemused shitstirrer in me would like to point out that this is DEFINITELY the case.

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WHAT IS HAPPENING

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Talkie AGA.

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“If you want me I’ll be in my quarters, covered in Frubes.”

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Nice. Always thought that there’s another untold story somewhere in that “turkey” incident.

Weird reminder of late-90s Carlton though – I had to spend several hours in the lobby of Carlton in late 1997 as my dad was appearing in the audience of some pseudo-The-Time-The-Place shit or other (he’d jump through fire every time Action Time’s contestant bookers rang him on the offchance he could get his face on the TV), and as there was a free hotel and chauffeured transport provided I’d been able to go as a +1, but it emerged that I wasn’t allowed in the studio audience. Anyway, an exhausting 3-4 hours sat in Carlton’s lobby without a book or even a screen of the studio feed to look at – the atmosphere in that fucking place still gives me the creeps now. People looking like death, people shouting and stressing out – not for one second did I feel safe and I couldn’t wait to get out of the shithole. Even now if I ever see the endcap I get the shivers.

It occurs to me now that it’s very possible David Cameron was sat elsewhere in the building. And a lot of things suddenly make sense.

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“I was in love once. A Game Boy Advance. People said, no, Holly, she’s not for you. She’s cheap, she’s stupid and you can’t see her screen in low lighting conditions.”

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“The only thing that keeps me going is the thought that we are over sixty billion miles away from the nearest Taybarns”

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They definitely are dropping frames, I’ve noticed it every time. There’s some interpolation artefacts as well like they’ve been speed-altered artificially.

The documentary very briefly shows Richard Naylor with a drone-mounted camera, so drone footage + deshaker processing + artificial motion slowdown = shit temporal resolution.

I said it in another thread, but if the model shots are going to look like this I’d rather they use CG. They just don’t look professional.

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“No one wants to know some stupid story about how you beat your cadet school training officer at Beat The Geek.”

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TAIWAN TONY B. LIARS

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“But where do all the Minidiscs go?”

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Timejpegs

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Library Music would be fun, mainly because it would be an infinite puzzle box of uber-niche interests.

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I only meant that as an inconsequentially mundane parody of the original post, but yeah, if you look at a spectral analysis they have a different audio quality to the main track (which I am 99.9% sure is off a domestic cassette), showing those clicks (which don’t appear in Parallel Universe) were done in a foley pass for Smeg Outs to cover that opening shot. The video features two different attempts at dubbing them onto two differently mastered versions of the source audio, one with some nice attack reverb (heard at the start of the video) and one dry (when Kryten introduces the long version). I haven’t checked which version turns up after the credits because I was going off the DVD. If only there was a fansite with a video file of that bit on a conveniently situated Downloads section in order to check. OH WELL.

I only noticed because I was trying to patch together the most complete, clean, hifi rip of the song possible with a view to attempting a fake stereo remix, which is pretty much impossible due to how muddy and noisy the source is with no proper bass or high end. Had to settle to doing my own mastering of a patchwork edit off the Series II bonus disc and Just The Smegs.

Two paragraphs on some clicking noises. I am truly using this lunch hour well.

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As a picture of the deeply strange impact and aftershock of all this, now it has settled, that YouTube upload of the phase-inverted theme has received over 55,000 extra hits in the 5 days since this thread appeared. For the record that’s around three times as many hits as each UKTV Play premiere of each XI episode has got in its pre-broadcast week (according to BARB), and approximately the entire on-demand requests for Twentica. (Although the interesting part of that is obviously how relatively low the UKTV Play ratings are compared to the Dave broadcasts, and another reminder of how unrepresentative fandom is. Or non-linear-TV advocates generally…)

It is fair to say then that a lot of people have had fun with this over the weekend (and another spike when all the office workers got bored on Monday), which has made me feel a lot better about my being dragged into it going really fucking weird. The best thing was that Howard Goodall got swamped with unsolicited mass adolation, which should be happening regardless, and it’s felt nice to know that I fired the starting pistol on a tiny, transient moment of Red Dwarf making people smile. To get a bit in-your-face about it, I like the idea that the ultimate domino effect of me being a giddy nerd on Friday night has likely been the brief cheering up or distraction of a stranger who, statistically speaking, might have needed it. If that sounds preposterously self-aggrandising, tough, I’m having that one. I’ve been on the other end enough to know that sometimes stupid little things like that can make a difference.

However, lest it go any further, re: my name appearing in places making me look like some megalomaniac Ian Levine style wannabe superfan figure trying to mark his territory – I am obviously not the first person to spot this in three decades. That makes no sense even as a concept. I’m probably not even the hundredth, or the thousandth. It was supposed to be a bit of fun.

Anyway, that’s nothing, the internet will soon really sway to the viral strains of The Fingerclicks At The Start Of Tongue Tied Were Only Dubbed On In 1995 For Smeg Outs.

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Rob, just swap Twentica for Worms on yours and you get mine.

I am fascinated that nearly everybody agrees with Give & Take as a show 1. It may be the first and only broad consensus ever formed on the subject of XI…

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There’s a very defined line which has always delineated G&T’s house-style mischief-making from unpleasant trolling, right from day one. With every new thread it’s getting harder to accept one for the other.

I don’t want to sound like a humourless prefect figure but it’s getting fairly destructive and like Si it is affecting how I use the site too.

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Samsara is the most ‘Episode 5’ episode of anything ever made. That’s not even necessarily a criticism of it. ‘Second to last’ is a genre unto itself.

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And here’s when Howard Goodall got carried away with the bio-printer.

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“Please turn me o-ver…!”

On the subject of hidden messages in Howard Goodall themes I’m presuming you all know about the Latin Mr Bean translations and that the opening/closing say different things, and that the choir also sing “end of part one” and “part two” in Latin?

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Graham Chapman.

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Four years have passed since X and I’ve done all my thinking about it so I’ll probably need the same distance from XI to compare them fairly.

I will say – there’s nothing in XI which has the ‘shit! It’s back!’ impact of Trojan (had Give & Take been first then that criticism might not have applied), the raucousness of Lemons, the watertight quality and genuine heart of The Beginning or the sheer consistency of the whole of X. I also don’t think XI is quite as tight script or performance wise as X, and XI has an episode and a half that I just don’t enjoy whereas I strongly like all six of X. Further, I also think the lighting, gloss and visual texture of XI on the whole doesn’t work half as well as X’s cosier, more traditionally sitcom look and that’s important to me as well (you just can’t have an audience, cinematic/artful lighting *and* 25p all at the same time – one of the three needs to go). Other elements mark off against XI as well, such as its bad sound mix and half-asleep audience, the ill-advised and ugly cod-Marooned shaky cam on Samsara, the insanely irritating transition shots between every scene with the same two music cues, half the episode endings being jarring, the odd bit of weird/jarring vision-mixing, its counter-intuitive episode sequencing which did genuine damage, and the complete ignoring of two huge story arcs from the previous Dave runs (which feels like an unforgivable selling out of an audience who have been deliberately courted to be invested in what happens next – even the VIII cliffhanger got a gag return which sutured the wound if nothing else, but dumping both the unresolved ‘search for Kochanski’ which they spent SEVEN CONSECUTIVE EPISODES setting up, *and* ‘Lister’s self-betterment’ plots for XI seemed as callous as it did messy).

All that said, right now I think XI is more interesting, more rewatchable, better crafted, more ambitious, braver, more varied, more confident, something I’m keener to rewatch, and at this exact moment in time preferable to X. It’ll be interesting to see which direction my opinions go in over time, whether up (VIII), down (VI) or surprisingly unchanged (VII/BTE/X). I think that because the majority of XI’s flaws come from genuine, hard-worked efforts coming unstuck, rather than creative neglect or avoidable pre-production problems, it’s much, much easier to forgive them. But if they film another block next year or 2018 I would like them to look closely again at what is and isn’t working, and strip back or rethink any elements which are creating problems. I’d hate for this to be considered a ship-shape, well-oiled Red Dwarf-making machine because I still don’t think it’s there yet – the irony this time being that I think they’re overthinking and over-making it in places rather than the other way around. Not enough instinct and intuition on screen.

One other point which I think is worth bringing up about XI because it was so surprising – the CGI shots looking better than the model shots. In fact, it hasn’t been commented on enough how solid and industry-standard the digital effects work has been throughout this series. I really didn’t expect XI to end up being an argument for Red Dwarf switching to an all-CGI production again, but if anything the finished model shots have really held the whole thing back visually in all their over-clean, wrong-illusion-of-scale plasticity (is it just me or did X’s look better?). Even the desert crash in Twentica looked like what it was, a plastic toy being pushed across a table. Maybe it’s just a digital/celluloid thing – when not exposed on the gritty magic of physical film and eccentric shutter speeds these things just aren’t holding up. Then again, all the stuff The Model Unit did in the Doctor Who anniversary special (and in unforgiving 3D too) looked *literally real* so maybe it’s just Pete Tyler that they need.

This post seems more negative than it’s meant to. All the above said, Red Dwarf is still my favourite TV show, so they’re clearly doing more things right than wrong and I’ve loved having XI around. It’s just impossible not to get forensic about it when you’re this personally invested in it and I don’t think any of my criticisms are coming from an unfair place, and when all the big problems come down to being tiny and easily fixable things, it’s all the more frustrating.

Actually, forget all the above – you know all it actually needs? A couple more industry stalwarts on the production team. I know this is at odds with the commendable nurturing-new-talent passions of the clan Naylor but they need more in the way of grumpy fuckers who already know all the recipes sat there. Look at how the prosthetics improved from X to XI because they did exactly this – they’d do well to employ another veteran or three next time, even if just to advise/mentor all the bright sparks.

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Mental Floss can stay.

For one exhausting year I used to co-run and co-edit a daily pop culture trivia/ephemera blog called Talk About The Passion with my old friend Ben (it was before clickbaity pop culture sites were that much of a commodity and pre-Twitter so it died on its arse, much like all the other stuff we spent years making and badly mistimed too early). Anyway, Mental Floss, along with QI, was the single biggest influence on it, so there’s a pleasing circularity to this.

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Alright, this is officially weird now. I wouldn’t mind so much but they’ve got it mixed up confusing the opening and closing songs (“underneath the lyrics”).

Still, the second time this year I have initiated a Red Dwarf news story. If I get three do I win something?

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https://youtu.be/_s6oIVm10N8 – yes, I went there.

Never mind that though, VALIDATION FROM ON HIGH!!

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It’s where the last pairs of “fun, fun” and “sun, sun” go in the end titles.

It’s clearest the fourth and final time as it’s least obscured by other instruments. Vocoders aren’t the best messengers of diction at the best of times but it’s definitely there.

The fact it’s buried so much yet would have been so fiddly and time-consuming to record hints to me that he may have originally intended it to be a bigger part of the piece. Either that or it was always meant to be a Ronnie Hazlehurst-style cryptic easter egg and we’ve just heard the punchline to a 27 year old joke.

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https://youtu.be/WvcaB0TWNLc

Aha!!! Massively more prominent in this YouTube video of a phase-inverted version with the centre channel frequencies cut.

I’m not going mad! Clear as day in that one!!!!

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A big chunk of the second half of the MoL game was recycled from an unfinished game based on Terry Gilliam’s ‘Animations Of Mortality’ book.

It wasn’t your PC by the way – that CD had a fatal, game-breaking glitch in it towards the end (as did the Grail game – wonder why 7th Level went under…). This being the days before updates and patches, that’s how it stayed. A shame because, as you say, it was good.

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Most things other than the leisure industry, to be honest.

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12-16 hours plus high stress/adrenaline though, it would kill you off pretty sharpish. It’s not as cushy a job as it’s made out to be.

Before I entered the relatively sane world of 9-to-5 I used to do a physical 12-or-more-hours-a-shift job where I was on my feet, running around and doing a lot of mic work and performance. It would catch up with me all the time through random vomiting or near-fainting. Last year I was ultimately hospitalised for three weeks because of it – adrenaline comedowns being indescribably agonising. I can imagine working on a fraught TV production is several times worse than that.

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Indeed, you’ve just dug your own grave by suggesting a Dwarf version of Frinkiac. If you start now we’ll throw you down some Quality Street at Christmas.

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Glad to hear you’re on the mend. I’ve been saving all my best anti-25p rants for when you’re back in business so we can do harmonies.

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I don’t think the Gunmen hype is unjustified – it’s thirty minutes of perfect television, a top-tenner, no question. I just wonder if its quality and status burdens the rest of the series, particularly retrospectively. And I speak as somebody who at one point used to watch the VI Byte Two VHS about once a week for a year, until I gave it away to a friend for his birthday (I thought I’d be fine because there would be a much better Remastered version out soon… don’t all laugh at once).

Another thing I’ve considered – my first exposure to anything from IV-VI was tape two of Six Of The Best, which was like a stock cube of perfect Red Dwarf. I got into RD with VII in 1997, when all twelve episode volumes were withdrawn (I still remember phoning up BBC Video directly just after VII went out and being told that the catalogue had been deleted – god, that was a heartbreaking moment), and although I’d managed to find the series 1 tapes easily, plus VI Byte Two, SotB, and the Smeg Ups/Outs, the rest of them got very hard to find very quickly. Within a year I’d seen II and III via the Remastered videos, but it was as late as mid-1999 that, courtesy of nipping into my grandparents’ house while they were out and watching their Sky (which I wasn’t able to video because their VCR setup was prehistoric), I actually managed to see those elusive twelve remaining IV-VI shows, which I’d read about and imagined for years via the scriptbooks, the Companion and the Programme Guide, plus seeing clips on the A-Z and trying to mentally reverse engineer stuff I’d seen on Smeg Ups. When they came around, not only did those shows have an impossible image to live up to, but they were separated a long way from the nostalgia of the ones I’d watched in an endless prepubescent loop, and I’ve never loved them like I did the others.

All of that rambling to make the small point that the way we all first saw the episodes then probably informs our current opinions about them.

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There’s possibly an argument that VI breaks the format more than any other series of Dwarf in terms of tone and style, so perhaps it stumbles sat in the middle of a complete rewatch where it wouldn’t viewed in isolation?

It’s that complete and sudden change in tone which knocked me back last time. The Blackadder similes, and the weekly runners, and the singled-out focus on big woofers. Every line either a setup or a gag. I found it *knackering* to get through and less funny for its incessant nature. All that plus visually there’s a claustrophobia that borders on the oppressive that you don’t get in VII.

Maybe me and VI need to have a reconciliation.

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Time hasn’t been as kind to VI as might have been expected and I’m curious as to why – once it was considered wall-to-wall gold. It being commercially unavailable in any form for an almost nine year stretch may must have had an impact somehow, as opinion’s gone the other way for the first series, which is exponentially more popular and respected year on year, and has been in print on home video almost unbroken since the veto was lifted. Could contagious and untenable hype around Gunmen have had a part to play too (Emmy, Making Of book, Six Of The Best, script in Son Of Soup, novelised in Backwards, repeated on Red Dwarf Night)?

Legion, Gunmen, and the last two minutes of Out Of Time have carried VI for a long time. (Mind you, I think V without Back To Reality or the first ten minutes of Terrorform would have its pants down too, or IV if it had to live or die on its first three episodes.) IV-VI have some amazing, perfect half-hours unsurpassed in the whole programme but they’re a turning point where you can’t always bet that you’re going to get a classic every week. I assume they got burnt out by trying to make six a year (plus two books and a US version), and from that interview you get the idea that’s not a million miles from what might have happened. Say what you like about VII but as an endeavour it appears to have had a decent night’s sleep and a serviceable breakfast.

It’s why I worry about the line-for-line script quality dropping slightly in the XI/XII block. In writing terms that’s four times the workload Doug would have had in the GN days. X may have had its production nightmares but for XI/XII they might’ve just moved onto the page rather than on the studio floor, and that could be down to burnout again. Nothing in X made me think ‘oof, just one more pass would have fixed that, Doug’ but every XI episode, even the two I’ve adored, have had chewy bits in there.

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That’s an amazing bit of history, really appreciate you posting that. Provides a lot of contextual meat to a few stories which now have become good-natured anecdotes.

I think he’s broadly correct about VI. Used to be a favourite, but on my last rewatch I found myself somewhat disillusioned with it, Out Of Time particularly (and I’m not the world’s biggest V fan either). If the VIII book intro is to be believed then neither Rob nor Doug were over the moon with it either.

I’m a contrary sod though so next time I watch them my opinion will probably change again. Currently I’m finding it hard to disagree too much with pissed off 1994 Chris Barrie.

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Best is Rimmer’s Ouroboros costume which comes free with a mystery pair of unidentified shoes. A true piece of Red Dwarf history.

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I assume that they would have paid off the ‘Lister bettering himself’ plot arc that disappears after Fathers & Suns.

Doug’ll say nothing yet as even if he doesn’t use the material on TV, there’s a scriptbook in them. Which is fair enough. It’s easy to imagine it being for the same reasons the movie scripts are still under lock and key. Actually, I wouldn’t be *completely* shocked if we get a Dave era scriptbook for the anniversary. Such an endeavour might fill in the gaps.

One thing I *have* wondered about the missing two-and-a-half X episodes – was Chloe Annett booked and paid off for three weeks’ work? Or did plans change earlier than that?

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The only thing wrong with VII is the fact it’s performed to an imaginary audience rather than more naturally, particularly as that audience are largely fake in the final dub. Would gave been better to keep it dry and give the performances a bit more pace. (And keep a bit more Howard Goodall in the edit too.)

Other than that I’ve always loved it, it’s one of my favourite series of the show and I like every episode. The stories are great, there’s tons of variety and texture and colour, the co-writers all work, it looks beautiful, and it’s got loads of brilliant set pieces. I also think some of the less successful parts of VIII would have come out better made the same way, the weirdness of say Only The Good or the second half of BITR would have been allowed to breathe more and there’d have been a lot more charm and coherence to the piece. You’d lose plenty as well but it’d probably change a lot of people’s opinions of VIII if they were to see it made the summer 1996 way.

I actually like nearly all of Red Dwarf though. I’m fairly egalitarian about the show and the few bits I don’t like are scattered evenly across the show’s history. There aren’t even any episodes I think are unilaterally bad, even my least favourites have a good first half or a killer five minutes in there.

(See, I’m nice sometimes.)

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They should never have done Maroon 7 & 8.

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Aw, he gets genuinely quite choked up in that bit doesn’t he. Legitimately heartbreaking.

[Author]

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