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Nothing to say BF wouldn’t have got an audience in if Doug or the cast had asked for it. I think he was absolutely mad to say no when he did. Loads of different things they could have done. Expanded universe spinoffs (Kochanski, Cat People, Ace Rimmer, pre-accident ship stories with side characters), novel adaptations, Chris Barrie readings of new short stories, full blown radio episodes… could even do ‘Red Dwarf Unplugged’ at last if they wanted. It would have made money, grown the audience and grown the brand.

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The only things immune from this, that sit in a kind of sacred safe zone, are shows where there would be negative consequences for the commissioner if they axed them. Whether that be unstoppable brand momentum where the show becomes more famous than the channel (Bake Off, Call The Midwife), long term contractual agreements that would be costly to break (Mrs Browns Boys or golden handcuffs deals that go wrong like when BBC1 signed Jim Davidson and couldn’t get rid), a show where its profits are big enough to prop up the channel financially (Doctor Who, Sherlock) or anticipated viewer pushback significant enough to create PR issues (any BBC or ITV soap). I don’t think Red Dwarf has ever been in that zone for Dave like it was for BBC2 in the 1990s. Taskmaster, if not for Avalon reasons than anything else, has probably gained immunity from this sort of thing, but Dwarf is easy meat.

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In anything else in the world, that would be insane. In UK telly, nobody wants to recommission the shows that their predecessors commissioned. This is clearly abhorrently stupid, but clean sweeps under a new broom have been the norm since the 80s at least. Whether it’s BBC One primetime or CBeebies, that’s what happens. Always. Axe happy.

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I don’t think Doug was driving the vans.

Seriously though, in the scheme of the DVD industry, even as it now stands, that release would be regarded as small fry by most criteria. Stuff is rebundled and repackaged and reversioned all the time. The process behind the RD Bluray box was no different to or more complicated than a film or an NTSC show being prepared for a PAL DVD, which happens every day. Even the compiling of the Bodysnatcher disc afresh from old assets would be second nature to even tiny boutique labels. Just because Doug’s ancient curse turned it all into a mountain doesn’t mean it wasn’t still a molehill. That’s not even a criticism, that’s just contextualising what that release was. It was a simple squeeze.

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Ben, read my posts again. Including the one where I specifically say I’m not bothered either way as to whether there’s a XIII or not and that I’m just listing the reasons why a XIII seems highly unlikely.

It’s not spreading toxicity to point out that every bridge Red Dwarf has crossed over the last 20 years has, for various reasons, burnt up behind it. The movie’s impossible, there’s no more money in the back catalogue, they’re never going to get a giant VFX team for free again, they can’t make a series alone again, they can’t make a series with Baby Cow again as their two chief allies have left, and they’re highly unlikely to make a new series for Dave again as the chiefs have changed, XII had noticeably muted promo and UKTV closed down the merch outlet.

At every juncture I’ve stressed that a live show *is* an open option available to them right now, as is Big Finish who are gagging to work with RD and could easily have done so for the 30th.

One thing I’ll pull you up on though – what part of the box set was “a big undertaking”? TOS might have done a good job at talking it up pre-release, and it might have taken forever to actually emerge, but in essence it was a very run-of-the-mill mastering project in order to gain shelf real-estate for BBCWW in a chain of shops that bellyflopped before they could buy it in. It certainly wasn’t ‘output’, and if a very simple repressing exercise can count as one it does kind of prove my point about how the brand has been laying inert for longer than would be practically expected by a channel or partner looking to co-produce a series XIII as a going concern.

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To be fair, I’m neither moaning here not acting in an entitled way, and I have already said in this thread that I’d be perfectly happy with XII and Skipper as an endpoint. I also fully acknowledged that more may have been going on behind the scenes than it appears. But the *brand* has definitely been neglected and all the clues are there that XIII is unlikely to happen, which I went through one by one. That’s all I said!

The whole Dave era has been a lovely, impossible extra life for Red Dwarf. But that *was* our bonus go, our flash of lightning, our get-out-of-jail-free card. We cashed it in and spent it already.

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During the 10 year hiatus, Red Dwarf was nurtured very well – in addition to the movie hype there were five years of high profile DVD releases with huge sales and high profiles. It was only really 2001 and 2008 where the brand wasn’t being aggressively pushed in some way, and they were mostly down to the movie stalling and merch fatigue, legitimate post-activity rests. When current TV shows take 9 or 18 months out, they’re still making sure all their plates are spinning. Even Fawlty Towers had high profile repeats, books and records in its gap.

Compare that to 2018, the brand-vital thirtieth anniversary year – where literally nothing happened at all. All that happened in 2017 was that XII aired and the DVD appeared in shops – it was all completed and signed off the year before. It wasn’t like 2018 was a rest year, because they’d technically already had one they could have strategically utilised. Regardless of anything that was happening behind the scenes, that’s a definite slipup in brand momentum, and one worryingly complacent about the ever-present nature of an aging fanbase. I don’t think Red Dwarf has infinite stamina, nor infinite luck, nor infinite charity from its fans, and it’s perhaps over-reliant on the continued existence of all three.

Since XII, nothing has happened. Nothing. I’m not counting the box set because its belated release was low-key to an almost homeopathic degree and even the most recent of its contents was 11 years old, and so that’s an incredibly long period of dormancy considering when XII would have been completed and picture-locked. We’re already back to the main news articles for any month being ‘Norman Lovett to headline anti-dandruff benefit gig in Colchester’ and ‘this week’s Radio Times features Red Dwarf at number 17 in its list of Top 20 Sci-Fi Sitcoms That Used To Be On BBC Two’. That’s not what happens when you’re waiting to go into pre-production on your next series. Your online shop doesn’t usually shut either.

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To be fair it was filmed over three years ago, and announced four years ago, two and a half years before it aired. It *is* very much a past tense thing and all momentum is definitely gone. That’s not a defeatist attitude, it’s just factual observation. TV might have got to a point recently where popular shows may not necessary air new series annually anymore, but they’re certainly not dormant for FOUR YEARS.

It’s also worth noting that we are now as far away from the XI/XII announcement as that was from the X announcement. If we’re heading into yet another potential announcement as speculated, I feel like the tour – which pre-dates XI as a project – is more likely. And perhaps more vital as a next step than ‘they’re back, again, again, again, again!’

It certainly shouldn’t be viewed as negativity or hyperbole for someone to agree that XIII is starting to stretch credibility as a plausible going concern. Because it obviously is, particularly in light of GNP’s consistently lax attitude towards organisational competency of late. To *believe*, not hope, otherwise might be borderline masochism.

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I kind of agree, but look at the first third of 2009. Death of hope to televised Red Dwarf within the space of about ten weeks.

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The full BBC Studios takeover of UKTV has gone ahead. Though awful news for television (it’s pretty much the final push for the BBC’s now irreversible journey of going fully privatised) it’s theoretically good news for Red Dwarf as it takes one finger out of the pie. If Worldwide judge Red Dwarf to be beneficially profitable out of the box then in theory there’s not a lot in the way of them commissioning more. In reality though there’s Doug Naylor and his being afflicted with an ancient curse which turns every advantage into a problem.

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I’d buy a Dave best of if we could get some commentaries and new extras. There are lots of unreleased deleted scenes and I’d kill for XI/XII outtake reels edited more like the X one rather than pissy little US-style web videos.

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Coogan essentially took over from Chris Barrie on Spitting Image. Due to Dwarf/Brittas demands there was a period where Coogan would sub for Barrie’s roles (literally doing impressions of his impressions) if he wasn’t present at recording sessions as was happening more and more often, although in the end Coogan didn’t stay that much longer after Barrie left.

Don’t think they were ever that matey outside of work though. We’d probably know if they were. In his book Coogan is slightly sniffy about his Spitting Image days, and is an absolute twat about Kate Robbins, who he doesn’t mention by name but reveals too much identifying information about to give her a fair shot at anonymity. It’s a good book as it’s very obviously not ghostwritten but it’s also weird. Couple of chapters written up Harvey Weinstein’s arse which can’t be dating well.

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Thought show 5 was rotten and full of pointless sledgehammer retreads of previous Partridge beats. Also, with Partridge’s weird relapse into unconfidence and out of character malapropisms I am convinced this was originally supposed to be show 3 and got pushed back into the death slot. The segment with Ruth was a de-escalation on the one in show 4 as well. Made no sense as show 5, and proved how ill-advised it was to do anything other than have a super-confident, on-the-ball Alan across all six.

It felt like it lasted an hour though. Why have the Gibbons brothers developed an obsession with Alan being hurt and injured? It’s a cruel and miserable running joke that is turning Alan back into the humiliated punchbag of IAP s2.

(Also – how unambitious do you have to be to film Parliament on greenscreen?!)

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In the UK at least, Jackson was full-on persona non grata from around the time of the Bashir documentary right up to the announcement of the O2 shows, and was then sanctified in death, though that’s kind of lost to time now. The mainstream stopped taking him seriously around Earth Song time. It was all cumulative, the child abuse allegations were only a small element – the Christ complex, the baby dangling, the surgery, the records themselves turning crap, and the sinister weirdness of his public appearances and interviews were much more instrumental in the wrecking of his image. People had been mocking him ever since the skin colour change but it really came to a head after the Brits/Jarvis incident as it instantly deflated the hypnotic bubble of PR gloss around him and the public mood really changed.

Another thing that’s forgotten – when he died there were a lot of editorials along the lines of ‘hang on, what about the child abuse?’ but there was a wide consensus response to them of ‘not now’. How different the world was ten years ago!

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Also, any grown adult should be allowed the opportunity to forgive or compartmentalise the misdeeds of any other grown adult as they please without further judgment on their characters. The way some media commentators have turned on Jackson’s fanbase you’d think they were the ones that fucked the kids.

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For what it’s worth I don’t think any Michael Jackson work should be suppressed, nor that of Gary Glitter, Rolf Harris, Roman Polanski, Jonathan King, Eric Gill, Caravaggio etc etc.

Not just because of art being separate from the creator (obvs), but because withdrawing them actively harms the lived experiences of those that have drawn comfort or pleasure from any of that work, allowing the perpetrators an undeserved veneer of reverse-psych attention and infamy and giving them a ‘taking their ball back in revenge’ moment of power.

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Louis Johnson is alleged to be the writer of both Beat It and Billie Jean. Musicologists have pointed to a suspicious amount of similarities with Brothers Johnson compositions and Jackson writing credits on Thriller. Quincy Jones was openly complicit in various other authorship/session credit scams, and the idea of Michael Jackson as overnight hit songwriter happens entirely during his reign. After he goes, the Michael Jackson who suddenly wrote all those hits on his own after relying entirely on contributors again suddenly becomes unable to do so without a massive salad of co-writers and remains that way permanently.

I don’t say this as an extension of the recentness, I am just very interested in the idea of ghosting in music, which is highly prevalent. And I find the idea that Jackson vocals were likely to have been ghosted while he was alive – due to a drug-fucked voice – utterly fascinating.

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Jackson didn’t write that, so it’s fine. Mind you, it’s highly probable from basic deduction that the vast majority of songs he did write were 100% ghostwritten anyway. And frankly, from looking into the yawning chasm between him using a soundalike for his Simpsons singing and being weirdly disingenuous about why in 1991, and the estate being caught out making fake posthumous tracks a couple of years ago, you start to wonder if the ghoulish fucker had anything to do with the *majority* of that music in the first place. There’s a weird anecdote in Guy Pratt’s book about the recording of the rhythm track to Earth Song where Jackson was hiding under the desk giggling but not contributing anything whatsoever. There are quite a few puzzle pieces that hint that virtually everything he ‘created’, at the very least during the last two decades of his life, was being secretly subcontracted out under NDAs but refunnelled publically to make him appear more of a Prince figure.

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I do think there should be a modest ticketing charge on more popular shows though for guaranteed entry. If not just to help amortise the costs of having studio audiences in UK comedy shows in the first place rather than producers and commissioners seeing them as an unhelpful encumberance.

I don’t think anybody would complain at £15-20 for a Dwarf recording ticket. It works for ISIHAC.

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Some shows have to overbook hugely because there is a high percentage of no-shows. Lots of people on the ticketing email lists apply for everything and then cherry pick when everything arrives.

What has probably happened here is that they didn’t expect the Dad’s Army recordings to be as popular as they have been based on educated guesswork from things like The Lost Sitcoms or Yes Minister.

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Partridge was at a character-consistent level of competency in show 3. I hadn’t really believed the ‘world’ of it until this one.

Still don’t think it’s particularly funny though. And I have zero interest in rewatching it.

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It’ll no doubt leave UK Netflix soon and jump to Britbox, as will a huge amount of material people won’t be prepared for losing all at once.

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Craig Charles was on Saturday Live twice, the lying bastard.

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The only thing wrong with Balance Of Power is that Future Echoes was misplaced ahead of it. It’s supposed to be The End part 2, and the premature ejaculation of Future Echoes robs Balance of its plangency.

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I voted it very highly in the Pearl Poll.

It works even better when you come back to it later after being aware of all the Beckett references, particularly Endgame and the Cat Priest being based on Hamm.

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Fuck me, this is getting grim.

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Also, unlike VHS, the vast majority of DVD titles have stayed consistently in print since release, some for up to 15 or even 20 years. Obviously there are plenty of exceptions, but most UK DVD titles ever released are still available affordably.

I do think there’ll be an availability crunch somewhere down the line, when a lot of people have dumped their collections into landfill and new releases have dried up – DVD will definitely become the vinyl of video for future generations though. Guaranteed.

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Well this thread certainly took a strange turn. Feels like we’re one post away from a Pepe the Frog avatar.

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Most DVDs have become like CDs, books and VHS now – virtually impossible to resell unless they’re long deleted, particularly sought after or scarce. CeX and MusicMagpie are pretty much full to capacity. 1p is the going rate now. Even games are starting to lose their ability to retain their value – stuff like first-party Nintendo games used to retain about 90% of their cover price for years and years. It’s the trade-in economy, it’s gone completely bust and brought everything down with it. Also other boom-and-bust failure stories like 3D, steelbooks etc, UHD is already stumbling, and newly-pressed vinyl won’t be far behind it. Nothing keeps its cover price anymore, so why not embrace this by treating it more roughly and doing what the hell you want with it. No-one’s paying you to ‘archive’ this stuff, it’s just disposable viewing copies that may well perish before you do anyway.

I’ve got about 3000 discs and still love and buy them (admittedly now more in the stockpiling sense), but have to acknowledge that 99% of them are worthless now, so I’m not bothered about the packaging. I do keep the sleeves and any nice booklets, but that’s mainly so I can rebox and pass any films onto charity shops or friends if I upgrade to Bluray (which I do still keep in their boxes at present but only because too many films are unrecognisable from their disc face alone). I bought a BR player in 2013 and back then it was still possible to get a few quid back for most films on DVD, particularly things like Disney. Unthinkable now. Weird times, but oddly cleansing ones.

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Take the boxes to the tip, put the discs in the large capacity wallets. You could lose years of your life ripping ISOs. It’s not the disc that eats the space, it’s everything else.

Oh, and sell anything that’s retained or gained value. While you can.

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Jonathan Pie was developed with the financial and editorial assistance of an international regime that empowers, funds and tacitly promotes concentration camps for gay men in Chechnya on a organised scale of ambition not seen since the Holocaust, and yet still the shitty fucking material is somehow *worse*.

But hey, if an ethically barren Lord Haw Haw tribute act reading out Brendan O’Neill columns whilst unconvincingly flapping his ear cartilage is your thing, be my guest.

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Bizarre to see it being criticised for its budget though. What more money did it need? It’s not like it’s full of spacewalk sequences that don’t hold up today or inadequately orchestrated motorbike chases.

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It’s not set in the ‘real world’ though. It’s silent comedy world, where there isn’t really any malevolence or evil.

I was abused and neglected quite badly as a child and if anything Mr Bean was one of the things that most got me through it. Never saw him as an ‘adult’, always an equal.

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That’s a really good book. Made, like Diary, by Robin Driscoll (that’s his handwriting that always deputises for Bean’s, even down to him being Bean’s hand double if he ever writes anything). Recall all the pages are photographed rather than scanned against a platen, which makes it all a bit murky and soft, almost punky looking. Must have taken months to put together.

There was a third book to go with Holiday but it was rotten and digitally designed (they’d even made Bean’s handwriting into a font, spoiling all the fun). I don’t think many people are aware of it.

There is also a brilliant scriptbook for the film with essays by Richard Curtis and Mel Smith, a filming diary by Robin Driscoll, lots of production photographs, unused script extracts, and the script for ‘The Restorer’, an unmade pre-Bean Atkinson TV script from the 80s which the film was adapted from.

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Forgot about the falling asleep!

Yes, there are two versions of Bean, UK and US, identical but for the turkey scene.

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They remounted very little of the series for the films, just the sickbag from Rides Again and the turkey on head from Merry Christmas for the first film (and the turkey on head scene is completely different for both the UK and US versions – the US version remounts it straighter as if happening for the first time, and the UK version is presented as if Bean is aware of the previous occasion), and the restaurant scene from Return Of for the second film. There were also two rare short films remaking the royal premiere and another I’ve forgotten. Everything else is unique.

All the celluloid footage in the TV series was directed by Paul Weiland, and I think it’s among the most beautifully directed television ever created. Steve Bendelack’s work on the second film feels of a piece with it. Shame if that never gets restored in HD, but the moment’s passed I think.

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It’s a Pink Panther reference.

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Why did RamesesNiblickTheThird combine two rival factions of the Labour Party into one though?

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To be honest, the media at large back then was still able to process the idea of children as something other as either nascent sexual beings or rape victims in waiting. Things like baby’s bottoms in nappy adverts etc were commonplace, because no sane person would automatically think of any other angle as we are radicalised to do now. Two decades of hysterical sickness later and children on TV are now just disposable props in a nihilistic nightmare which aims to somehow safeguard them by making it impossible to imagine them in any other context than as prey for sex criminals.

I’m not blaming you, it’s just this ruined fucking world, somehow simultaneously oversexualised to the point of constant danger and prudish to the point of desolation, quite literally throwing out the baby with the bathwater. To be honest I’d just like a small window of reality left where there isn’t an ever present cartoon icon of a sex offender’s tumescent dick in the corner of my vision, like an item in a fucking RPG.

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I’m going to really stick up for Mr Bean’s Holiday. Really interesting idea to do a ‘roots album’ version on Mr Bean, making it half post-war French silent comedy and half European art film. It’s beautifully directed and the score is delicious. That shot at the end where he walks blindly over obstacles towards the beach always makes me well up, it’s that perfectly realised a moment. It’s like the film’s tribute to the magic of early cinema suddenly comes full circle and supernaturally summons a glint of genuine old cinema magic itself, just for a second.

I think both Bean films are great in completely different ways (though the first has obvious pacing problems relating to an M&M sponsorship deal that got out of hand when it dictated what they keep and lose in the edit, meaning they lost 20 minutes of brilliant UK set stuff at the start and had to keep the ‘Dr Bean’ coda at a ridiculous length, pushing the ‘real’ Whistler ending to far too early in the film), and they really refreshed a character that had been running on empty for the last few, sub-CITV, TV outings (Do It Yourself was probably the last good one, and I often wondered if the video-only status of Hair By London was because it was both sub-par and cheap looking. Back To School is the absolute nadir – it’s just a mentally challenged man walking around being an evil shit to background characters that would be too broad for the Beano).

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10 years ago though. Not a lot in real terms but I’d be amazed if there’s a single person at Dave or UKTV now who was there when that happened. And again, that wouldn’t be relevant were it not telly, where everyone wants to come in with a new broom because they’re all paranoid. BBC Two were callously uninterested by VIII’s ratings record what, 7 years later?

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Taskmaster is probably deceptively expensive as it has 7 name leads at a time, and Avalon are notorious for playing financial hardball. But then again they don’t need any of their people for anywhere near as long and they get triple the finished screentime as Dwarf gets.

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Taskmaster is easy and quick to make too. Alex Horne and Tim Key write it, they do all the task inserts in mini blocks with a skeleton crew, edit the packages, shoot the live nights very close together, cut those and they’ve got ten hours of television which can be ready for TX very soon after the recordings.

Red Dwarf is a mixture of being genuinely more complicated to make than a regular sitcom and just being a deceptively ordinary sitcom to make that’s terminally prone to having its production overcomplicated by a kamikaze, self-sabotaging showrunner with a chronic resistance to the creative assistance of outsiders bordering on absolute madness and less of an aptitude for writing last minute script pages on the fly than he thinks he has.

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Ah, this will be why every factual CBeebies show lately seems to be made in the house style of Discovery Kids.

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Frank Turner’s favourite film is Morons From Outer Space. This is an actual fact.

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Twilight Zone reminds me that there needs to be a word for classic TV shows that are unarguably brilliant despite most of their episodes being unwatchably shit. Original Star Trek is the king of that, obviously.

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22 years of thinking fried eggs coated in cheese sounds really nice but my wise old arteries refusing to let me put this into practice.

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Comic Book Reader (or simply rename to .zip (for .cbz) or .rar (for .cbr) and unzip as a folder of JPEGs. Trade secrets I’m spoiling there).

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Apathy for my own apathy.

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This is a mad tangent, but I’ve just realised that the reason the GELF chase in Beyond A Joke remained in its model version for the show – rather than being replaced with CGI – could have been because they already had the How Do They Do That? cross-promotion lined up and couldn’t contradict it.

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