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This is getting a bit uncomfortable now. Alex, you’re being a creep.

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G&T finally gets its Me2 Moment.

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I’m so glad he came back.

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I think there’s more of a line in the sand between III and IV than there is between II and III. I think people think about the set too much.

IV and V are a slightly different show. VI is another again although I tend to file it alongside those previous two. VII/VIII is its own era, embodying Remastered and Red Dwarf Night, there’s the wilderness/DVD era, then Back To Earth/X, then Baby Cow years.

I think I’m saying that if this was written now, it might go on a bit.

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Less facetiously, I agree, it’s clearly The Beginning. The whole thing is a masterclass in closure. It’s probably the nearest thing we’re ever going to get to a true finale.

Actually quite astonishing to think just how much permanent character development the main cast have had in the Dave era. For anything you might throw at its gag quality or storytelling coherence, at its best it’s served the characters in a way that hasn’t been done since the BBC Manchester years.

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M-Corp. Not my fault they showed it fifth.

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Rob’s dildo somehow always gets horribly mutilated halfway through.

Doug’s dildo is pretty good but needs someone else to give it a polish when he’s finished.

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I misread “Dude” as “Doug” then and thought ‘well that wasn’t the announcement I was expecting’.

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It looked better in the AA ad, let’s not forget that makeups are normally refined over several series and Millennium have only worked on one plus an advert 3 years later.

I think it’s also a lighting thing. The characters are lit very differently these days, there are a lot less shadows and half-light on faces, so there are less chances for the angles on Kryten’s mask to highlight/lowlight themselves. VII was very bright on faces too as part of its comic book aesthetic, and it’s notable that this is when the mask edges were highlighted to compensate. For the series where it looks best, it’s regularly dipping into the shadows and is rarely lit full-on.

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I didn’t try it, I could taste it just from hearing others taste it. Like a sensory contagion.

Teetotalism has its upsides, clearly.

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Armitage Shanks.

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And repeated apologies for the huge error I made in assuming that a comedy team that announces plans to go on tour might actually do that within five bastard years of saying so. I’ve learned my lesson now.

The lesson I am currently learning btw is remaining credulous at the idea that the four main cast members of Red Dwarf are triple-A-listers in such high demand that it’s nigh-on impossible to book them through for six weeks and requires a triage period of several years. Like they’re the Beatles in 1976.

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You know guys, I’m starting to think I may have been right all along.

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I was just pointing out that Red Dwarf is heading for its longest active production inertia in its history, is all. Will XII>XIII have as long a TX gap as X>XI did? No, probably not, and I wasn’t talking about that, evidenced by the fact that I NEVER MENTIONED IT. But I haven’t a clue why what I thought was an interesting fact about production downtime is so contentious. The people who make Red Dwarf on the ground have once again not been making Red Dwarf for a notable length of time that’s worth remarking on, not just in Red Dwarf terms but given that across similar lengths of time in the past, other TV shows have been axed outright, left dormant and then revived afresh with brand new production teams. And god knows how many different Spider-Mans that equates to.

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Apologies for my pessimistic use of facts, dates and information.

Hey folks, Red Dwarf XIII is on tonight! And afterwards a randomly chosen member of the cast will turn up to your front door and wank you off! Merry Christmas!

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Not true about XII. Post-production was still blocked through though as the whole schedule is, they wouldn’t have had a year’s break based on the TX plan (particularly as XII was potentially considered for TX earlier in 2017 at one point, and it was also mooted that episodes could potentially jump between XI and XII).

They completed them all together as a 12 part series in 2016 and just sat six of them on the shelf for longer. They might well have done small scale fiddling later on (episode titles etc, the Twentica pruning) but that would have required a specific unlock, been limited to minor reversioning tweaks (aka, someone joked about in an episode is killed before transmission), and not been part of the formal post-production process.

Also why I specifically used the word “production” – aka filming. Active production requires cameras to be shooting, and I don’t think wrap-to-first-shot roll time is an unreasonable way of marking activity.

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Crunched the numbers on this further. 1386 days between the taping of The Beginning and the taping of Give & Take. 1386 days after the taping of Skipper is Christmas Day this year. So yeah, if no RD shoots between now and Christmas, the gap between XII and XIII will be the longest production hiatus the show’s ever had outside of the VIII>BtE cancellation inertia, and the longest *active* production hiatus in the show’s history.

FWIW the gap between taping on VI and VII was between 1131 and 1161 days. VIII to BtE was 3715, minus however longer it took to shoot the guerilla reshoot for the Only The Good ending.

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If XIII only films late winter/spring (or later) it’s got a good chance of topping four years since tools were last downed, marking the second longest production hiatus the series has ever had.

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Although valuable (£60-80), that probably would be one of the cases where there is a stupidly high price set by a bot. Or a twat.

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Only problem with closed listings is that it doesn’t include accepted offers, which is a huge part of the eBay process now, so that is doubtless confusing things. Actual auctions are quite rare, I only really use them for 99p starts as bait for valuable items these days – then you can wait for offers and pick one you’re happy with. My Corgi stuff for example display on the site as ending at 99p, when that was the only bid before someone came in with an offer of £40.

eBay has changed a lot over the years but the Offers system has finally made it viable and usable again, particularly as Marketplace is a horrendous write off (whole categories you can’t sell in, having to wait 6-8 weeks for payment, ridiculous fee percentages). It’s just a shame that so many things have lost their value these days. Unless you’re selling something genuinely rare/deleted/out-of-print that has an active fanbase, or are willing to underprice something desirable for a quick sale, or it’s a very stable microeconomy like Lego, most of the market has been stolen by automated outlets for ‘we buy your shit for pennies’ services. But it saved my life this year.

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But those Corgi toys do genuinely sell for a fucking fortune – it’s not just overoptimistic sellers. They are actually moving at that price. Someone gave me £40 for my Starbug and Red Dwarf the other month on there, without the stands and without the box. Alongside Bodysnatcher they’re the most desirable Dwarf thing to sell on eBay, as they encompass two intersecting collector bases.

Signed books are bad sellers generally. It’s not really a currency like it used to be even 10-15 years ago – the only autographs that move are (a) by the long dead or (b) frameable display pieces like prints/photographs/small posters. Signed books are usually on by-now very tanned paper and undisplayable without destroying. GlenTokyo – you wouldn’t sell that on eBay for any more than a tenner, and even then it would sit there for a long time. You might get more at a con for it at a push but it’s not what moves these days.

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Does he mean start filming early spring do you think?
Then again, this seems to be from the same AA interview pool as all the other pieces from two months ago. It seems impossible that they’re filming anything in 2019 now.

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“Red Dwarf actor Robert Llewellyn, 63, is best known for his portrayal of mehcnoio Kryten in the long-running sci-fi series.”

Love that mehcnoio.

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I taped-to-keep this run at the time, and I am 100% certain that my tapes were in order. Saying that, they were across two E180s with four shows on each, so I could have been pernickety enough to re-arrange them. Maybe this was even why they were spread so wastefully…

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It’s gone weirdly quiet again, hasn’t it. Bearing in mind it’s August now and the latest audience tapings could begin for the dates as mooted is the second week of of November. The ticketing process for big scripted shows, in my experience, normally gives at least 2-3 months leeway, for balloting, admin, postage etc. These supposed Nov/Dec recordings are looking highly unlikely unless they announce something in the next couple of weeks.

Is the TV ad still running? The radio one still is I think. Are they not showing the second TV one? I don’t think I’ve seen an advert break in years.

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Trojan had a lot of postproduction in 1080 to paint out camera faults. I don’t think any Dave Dwarf has masters in excess of 1080i, and it’s unclear how much rushes/raw stuff gets archived these days – with no physical medium to transfer to and high wrangling/preservation costs, it’s possible that no true RAW footage has been archived.

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Annoyingly I can’t find the link and I am now realising it was a conversation between insidery types on a private FB group that I cannot copy publically from. Essentially the point was that The Firm were broadly the same team as used on JAMs sessions (people such as Brian O’Shaughnessy – and the KLF despite the self-mythologising did have a fair few people around them), and Bill Drummond was part of Star Trekkin’ (and did the Scotty voice). A lot of their legend is a bit of a con trick – they were very much of the 70s superproducer school of doing lots of wildcard projects under fake names then ‘unmasking’ themselves as the one or two that worked. (And Doctorin’ The Tardis isn’t samples by the way – it’s all reperformed.)

I do stand by having zero time for the KLF though. They represented the ultimate music industry example of the plague of art-school Thatcherism around at the time – insincere cake-and-eat-it crap terrified to just be pop or bubblegum on its own merits and made all the more unbearable by all the retrospective mythologising and attempts to fake a conceptual continuity that was never there.

As for the cult thing – a friend of mine is well into their stuff and goes to all of these regular meetings and events of theirs they now do. From the incredibly detailed writeups he puts online they sound *exactly* like a cult. (I don’t think he thinks that but I bloody do.) They seem to have them all doing unpaid labour for them half the time (via grand ‘instructions’) and they’ve got some of them to pledge their corpses when they die so they can cremate them and use the ashes in projects. That’s a cult.

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I want to write the proper answer this post deserves but am occupado. I shall give a proper reply when I get chance!

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I didn’t know until I read recently that it had personnel connections with Star Trekkin’ by “The Firm”. All from elements of the same collective, making cynical novelty records with a Thatcherite zeal but shot through with an affected sneer of wankiness. More or less the same studio band on both, including Bill “and chief amongst the rabbits, here’s bloody Thumper” Drummond.

The KLF are now, as far as I can ascertain, basically literal cult leaders now. Without any apparent irony.

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Come on Si, stop keeping the answer to yourself.

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FWIW, no, Star Trek was never “a left-wing show” either, and for similar reasons. It has nominally progressive anti-war ideals, yes, but its abolition of capitalism was always more of an idea than it ever was an ideal, and like Doctor Who its prominent left-leaning episodes are more than balanced out by the opposite. It’s a show about American patriotism, except in space.

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Doctor Who has always been very progressive and very left.

I think that this is a retrospective and irresponsible myth, to be honest, that is becoming a bit of a ubiquitous received opinion. There are times when it *was* overtly leftist, but probably more times when it was overtly conservative and plenty of times when it sat in the middle. Politically it was a real chocolate box which is about correct for what the show should be. It’s never stood consistently on any soapbox, even in the Cartmel years – maybe the gay lib themes of the RTD era (but I’d argue that’s not necessarily a left-wing issue – our side’s saviour complex and imagined monopoly on emancipation is a disagreeable burden to carry) perhaps?

The modern show only gets toecurlingly embarrassing when it goes cringingly on the nose about current politics (“massive weapons of destruction”, the ISIS/Zygons trainwreck and its abominable quote-me-quote-me speech – the Belgrano stuff in Christmas Invasion is quite good, mind). It’s *not* a political format, by design or by execution, and those that write it as though it is are rather building up their part. The odd reference to a crap PM or allegory to something out of the headlines doesn’t make it a left-wing show any more than a handful of original songs over 56 years makes it a musical.

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It’s for the canoes.

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“We can also expect to see some guest characters and perhaps some canoes from famous faces.”

Okay.

In other news I’m finally starting to believe XIII is a thing (yeah shut up), and that it’s been kept on the downlow because its announcement, and the media campaign around it, is part of their deal with AA. This way there ends up being a plug for the AA in all the articles. And we don’t know what the plan is for the second TV ad yet.

This co-promotion deal and plan seems to be at the heart of *everything* that’s been weird, suspicious, ominous and unfathomable about the show and the radio silence around it over the past year. All I can say is hey – the truth genuinely was less likely than the ‘Movie all over again’ fuckup I would have bet hard cash on.

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The audience applauding Kramer’s arrival at thw door literally lasts about two or three episodes before Larry David puts a stop to it so it can’t have been that difficult a hurdle.

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A wizard did it.

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I can confirm from a reliable source that this is not happening.

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I’ve not *not* thawed, but I still think not getting a recommission within 12 months of XII is a very big deal that no-one’s really processed. We did literally get axed, in a way that’s different from the ‘Dave want more, but we need to go back to the drawing board’ limbos of BtE and X. And we did lose the two biggest reasons XI/XII happened at all in the shape of Normal and Waddell. That’s a lot of injuries. I think my rationale in being so downbeat is correct even if my interpretation might be seen as excessive. (And I do think I’m right about the merch situation and botched anniversary too…)

I’ll be honest though, I was amazed when XI and XII got announced. For a while, X seemed like a pipe dream. I just can’t get the blank horror of 2008 out of my head, that’s what it is. It was the biggest ‘please clear out your lockers, lads’ we’ve ever had, and it remains my internal default for how to view RD production activity. On top of that the Movie stuff has trained me to assume everything is a bluff, wishful thinking and/or a downright lie. I’m always gobsmacked and delighted when new Red Dwarf makes it to screen at all.

And we all get surprised when something as ordinary as an ad on the tube appears, as though it shouldn’t really be there at all somehow and it’s some kind of backhanded trick. We’re all to some extent radicalised against expecting high competency from GNP. I think I’m just being a bit rawer in my relationship to this.

Best analogy is, even now we’re like a really shit football team that very rarely wins or scores. The times we win are joyous occasions, but expecting to lose is the healthiest way of getting through a Saturday afternoon.

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Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered coming back.

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?

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(I will happily concede that both the BBC buyout of UKTV and the exposure from the AA ad make XIII more likely to happen, but that doesn’t change the fact that RD is not only not actively within a rolling commission, but enough time has passed since XII wrapped to effectively give XIII the pitch status of a ‘revival’ rather than a continuation.)

I want series 13. Don’t get me wrong on this. I just don’t see it.

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And we also had readthrough photos, pictures of Robert being lifecast, a preorder Amazon page for the tie-in book, and a teaser poster, on top of everything that what we’re getting now about XIII is echoing. They were always “in pre-production” or “about to start shooting.” For about 5 years.

I’ve been burned before. I have no shame in staying pessimistic on this. To be proven wrong will be all the more pleasing if I am, but I couldn’t be more sceptical right now. Maybe some fans are too young to have fully lived through the full 3D heartbreak of the broken Movie promises, or have forgotten it

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Well, that’s kind of what a confirmation is.

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Of course I want it to happen. I just don’t think it’s the certain bet everybody else does. The commission is not confirmed, therefore it’s still a *proposal* for a thirteenth series. That’s not negativity, it’s just perspective.

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Oh fuck off you tedious cunt.

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They used to say things like this during the Movie years though. They were always about to start filming.

Six months for preproduction and shooting of an FX-heavy audience sitcom, with no standing sets, and without a formal commission or any cast seeing scripts yet… someone’s on the shonk.

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Ah, rival versions!

The SFX one was at least picture-cleared I’m assuming, and had the Times New Roman RD logo on it. Think it was from between BtE and X. I wonder where it went actually…

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Wasn’t that free with an SFX special about British sci-fi? About 10 years ago?

I only mention it as I have that somewhere as well and that’s where it came from.

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I can’t wait to see the angry middle aged one who swears creatively, the harangued older one who doesn’t do much but gets dragged along, the naive younger one who doesn’t have a personality but usually connects the subplots at the end, and two tutting women with no funny lines to say who are just Dorothy and Deborah from Men Behaving Badly but power-dressed. With starfields behind the windows.

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I didn’t know until relatively recently that “Coke Adds Life” was a real 1970s slogan, thinking it to be a satirical invention of Grant Naylor’s lovingly overcranked by one degree of dystopia. Fat chance.

[Author]

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