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I like the names. They feel earned.

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My theory is that it was re-recorded for stereo (Backwards being the first stereo episode), as I have never heard anything other than a mono mix of the 1987 recording (VII onwards has this version in mono with some extra stereo reverb). The series 1 & 2 music was mixed in stereo as the DVDs prove so it’s tempting to speculate about tapes going missing fairly early on.

It’s definitely the same session as the electric guitar theme as the reverby tambourine and sax triplets appear on both. Not sure if it’s the same backing track (key change means probably not) but they’d probably edit together well. It’ll have been recorded in Studio One at Angel in the last session of Dwarf music using hired musicians until the 1996 orchestra session for VII where they did Kennedy’s death, Ace Rimmer and Camelot.

On a similar tack there’s evidently no clean master of the original opening theme either. Not even one without the space atmos. I recently had a go at a proper virtual remix of the 87 theme in something closer to true stereo using frequency seperation which I might put online if I get chance. Got some nice space into the pipe organ and placed the cello away from the atmos FX. Quite pleased with it.

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Bloody hell, I was actually correct about something. What is this strange new feeling?

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Freeze-framing on Re-Dwarf and the text track on Remastered pretty much cover it.

Though again, I’d buy a book of those as well…

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Kids, whatever you do, Don’t Warrington.

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I was about to mention Remastered.

Ironically the series 1 remastering notes specifically mention dubbing out a (real) annoying laugher. And replacing her with a fake one…

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Would have been weirder to keep it silent I suppose.

X is sweetened a lot too but they seem to have used their own tracks to do it rather than tapes, so it sounds okay. I spotted lots of ambience anomalies when I unpicked the 5.1 mixes.

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Nah, you need a background of (or undiscovered aptitude for) heightened performance work to be good on Dwarf. It’s a show-off’s canvas.

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Didn’t Trojan have a taped screening during the Dear Dave session though?

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The Kryten audience are a bit raucous for me. There’s an series 2 episode of The Thin Blue Line where the audience are weirdly giddy as well.

Worst of all is the first Cabin Pressure Christmas special, from after Cumberbatch was famous but before they started filtering his fanbase out of the recordings. They literally ruin it, it’s unlistenable.

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The two guests I’d put long bets on completely blind are Kevin Eldon and Peter Serafinowicz, purely because it’d be weird if they weren’t in it like they’re in everything else (this is a good thing).

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There’s a Blackadder episode almost drowned out by the sound of Robbie Coltrane’s laugh. It’s the sole interesting thing revealed on Fry’s otherwise useless DVD commentaries.

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That’s a laugh you hear in quite a lot of mid-to-late-1990s BBC shows (definitely in VII as well, which undeniably swings quite heavily towards Flintstones territory in places), as the horrible practice of hybrid, ‘sweetened’ laugh tracks started to appear on things that really didn’t need it.

The sound of fake sweetened laughter really ruins one particular series of One Foot In The Grave if I recall (5, 6 or both). And I’m fairly certain the mystery laugher you mention is present.

Just thinking, it’d technically be possible to analyse a VII laugh track by transposing scenes from VII and Xtended against each other, matched up to the node and the broadcast one inverted against the Xtended. It would be very easy to tell which laughs were and weren’t real from the ambience. Actually doing such a thing would be half a day I’d never get back, but still, possibly interesting. Would also expose anything else altered in the dub between the laughter taping and broadcast.

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No-one didn’t get harmed by The Log.

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You watched it once? He *filmed* it twice.

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That’s probably enough to justify him refilming his standup video again.

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Someone with no sense of humour has ruined the “Danny John-Jules as ?” wonderfulness.

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Series VII would surely have had to have been done in blocks for Chris Barrie reasons alone (block 1 would have to have been Tikka/Clipper/prefilming for Blue & Ouroboros, and the last block seems to have been Duct Soup on its own), but surely it was still rehearsed, which would mean it was kept roughly to an episode order.

I would buy a book of series VII filming schedules. Not even remotely joking.

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Shit the bed, so they are. I’d never clicked that tab before, always assumed it was a link back to the previous menu. I’ve never got on with that drop-down navigation, which is a shame because all the text is book-quality.

I swear I spent ages looking for them earlier. Ah well, it was far from in vain, and there are still a few to pin down.

Permission to… poo myself, sir.

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I do wish they’d use the Piano Fantasy somewhere. Often wanted to set it to a load of model shot flybys and see what the effect would be.

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I admire its ambition – an adventure film for working class kids – and its cast, its production design, all the rest, and am genuinely a big Spielberg fan, a fan of video-age Hollywood and a big fan of older ‘family’ films in general. But I just can’t get past Sloth. There is zero excusing or getting round what that character is. It’s a bit of a scuzzy, seedy script that punches down generally, but that character pretty much embodies everything wrong with it. I know it tries to have its cake and eat it with his Boo Radley-style reveal/redemption, but there’s more blood on its hands than is washed away by that. It’s rare that I would actively think ‘I wouldn’t want my child seeing that’ about much at all, but I can’t deny that Goonies has gone on a vague blacklist in the back of my head.

You’re reading Gooniemede & Titan.

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As a kid watching Six Of The Best for the first time on the downstairs TV, my dad gasped in admonishment at “C.L.I.T.O.R.I.S.” and “twat”. The latter especially ironic as he is one.

It makes me laugh that while Marooned was classified too highly originally and had to be brought down nefariously in 2003, there’s no way in hell that Polymorph would make a PG now. In the UK, The Goonies jumped to a 12 for DVD, because the PG VHS had been a slightly trimmed version in order to stop it coming out as a 15. The “12” classification was a long, long time coming, wasn’t it?

I saw The Goonies again recently (as it came free with the cheapest way to buy the two Gremlins films on Bluray). It is a horrible piece of shit. And decidedly less suitable for kids than Polymorph.

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It’s just a side but has a forced perspective ‘top’ that’s actually very thin, like a giant fridge magnet.

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Ha. I didn’t include the end of Last Human in that.

It was basically a gag, but re: Backwards:
(i) following the Cat’s perspective, the woman Cat has sex with is unaware he has a barbed cat penis which will tear through her genitalia, which would define non-consensual activity;
(ii) following the logic of Backworld, she first screams for help, then the Cat begins by violently assaulting her, then has enthusiastic sex with her.

Hey, Red Dwarf fans, if the Cat goes regularly into a catatonic heat as per his species, a member of the ship’s number would have to awkwardly wank him off to stop his agony. If the author of Pink Dwarf is reading, have that one on me.

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Improbable but true, Doug Naylor confirmed it. Upscales aimed at the Japanese market. Given that Japan are an NTSC region this will be the first time full 576-height masters will have been used, and presumably also the first time the Japanese redubs based on the Remastered music-and-effects iso tracks will have been synched to the original TX pictures?

Nothing in it for the UK though, and as has been pointed out they’ll probably be slowed down for 60i. Bet it’s Christmas Day for Japanese fans though.

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Of course, they’re *all* white holes by the time I’ve finished with them, Stew.

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I discounted Back In The Red as it is only implied. Also didn’t count AR games or the offscreen sex in Parallel Universe. Or the vending machine in X. Oh yes, I thought this one through.

But you are correct, and there are two (arguably three if you count the ending) in Last Human, and one in Backwards. All are rapes. Oh, that wacky Red Dwarf!

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Dirty pop quiz – identify the three penetrative sex scenes in real, official Red Dwarf and where they are to be found.

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The writer’s not really called Dick Bush.

It’s a gestalt pseudonym, for Fat Dick and Hairy Bush.

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The series 5-8 DVDs have all the Dave Hollins sketches between them.

There are no commercial releases of the series as archivally its survival rate is very poor (four SoC eps over the two series) and most people’s copies are low quality, low bitrate things from the dawn of the internet – these were even used for the missing episodes on the Dwarf DVDs.

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I find it easiest to think of them in terms of the Mitch & Mickey plotline in A Mighty Wind. That’s pretty much exactly The Grant Naylor Story.

(I’m also being largely frivolous – I’d much rather them have rekindled their friendship, however long-distance, than their professional partnership, and that’s obviously what happened. But that didn’t make a bathetically funny last line to a limerick.)

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In ’07 those guys Doug and Rob
Reconvened to talk shop through their gob
For no reason then
They split up again
Which was really strange and no-one mentions it I mean it was genuinely quite confusing at the time and I still haven’t fathomed what the deal was and when was that Son Of Cliche reunion only cause he seems to have gone a bit disassociative with it all again and they don’t follow each other on Twitter I checked out of curiosity cause I’m a nosey knob.

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The years-long drought of RD merchandise is unfathomable. The audience that kept such industries going in the 90s has returned and is about ten times the size. There’s no reason why there shouldn’t be an onslaught of Forbidden Planet-friendly tat out there by this point. Even the basics are unavailable. Not even the regulation ubiquitous black logo mug!

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That is quoted from an interview with Danny by my mate Joel. As with when he interviewed Robert, I fed him most of his questions. Including:

“3. Push him about the live show because Robert Llewellyn was tellingly startled/nervous about it coming up when you asked it for me at MCM. And Danny John-Jules is biologically allergic to non-disclosure agreements. You might get a good exclusive.”

As it happens he got two as Danny mentioned the September broadcast plan for XI.

So yeah, I apparently storyline the news now.

For what it’s worth I’m unambiguously excited about the live show. The new phase of Dwarf seems tailor-made to aim at the gap between the casuals and the diehards, and a big tour fits perfectly into that space. I mean, I know it’s probably going to be Chris Barrie shouting “how the SMEG did Starbug land in the SMEGging Southampton TalkMobile Arena And Conference Centre?!” to Robert Llewellyn in a wrong-looking slip-on mask while Craig Charles pretends to get his lines wrong but I’d be a liar if I pretending I wasn’t already putting forty quid aside.

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