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And ‘Hudson’ is the butler in Upstairs Downstairs. Hence Butler’s name in Krysis continuing a running joke.

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Here’s a smartarsed one: “This is mutiny, Mr Queeg” is a paraphrase from Mutiny On The Bounty but Queeg is named after a character from The Caine Mutiny. Sensing a theme…

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I file it alongside Doug’s giddy, well meaning, ambitious but suicidally impractical indulgences, like semipro CGI, the RED camera, the forced perspective shot in BtE, a Jurassic Park dinosaur, Carbug, George Lucas style remastering, a professional monkey impersonator, the Dave-era model shoots etc. The novelties and toys that both help him cope with the stress of making the show and work as a nice hook for promotional interviews… but nearly always end up going very badly, eating too much time or wasting all the budget.

It probably all traces back to Gunmen. The first and only time such a flash of boyish gambling ever went to plan.

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Well, recently, great swathes of Twentica are a weirdly-timed parody of Star Trek: First Contact. And Krysis has that contentious homage to Bruce Almighty.

TV, but Gunmen Of The Apocalypse is an homage to the original Star Trek episode ‘A Piece Of The Action’. The TNG ep ‘A Fistful Of Datas’ is even closer to Gunmen and pre-dates Dwarf s6, but hadn’t officially premiered in the UK at that point. But let’s not start on the labyrinthine web of co-dependent plagiarism between Trek and Dwarf or otherwise Patrick Stewart will get his autocue out.

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I assumed it was entirely automated.

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I’m going to re-edit Legion to put the intro2 music video in and remove all the stuff with that green bastard.

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No dwarves in it neither.

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I had been wondering if they’d been up to something as the timing is very good.

Seems they’re going for a more traditional RND this year. 2015 was dire – about five actual sketches all night.

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(‘The End’ is also an episode title of The Goodies, Supernatural, Lost, Absolutely Fabulous and Curb Your Enthusiasm. If you’ve ever wondered.)

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Nice. The specific reason The Cartridge Family was dodged by Sky initially was uneasiness too soon after Dunblane. Ironically, they did broadcast a clip of its most contentious moment regardless as part of the X-Files episode ‘The End’ in which it can be clearly seen and heard on a TV screen.

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As somebody allergic to vinegar and all its repulsive citric-acidy brethren, it belongs in the bastard bin.

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Series 1 was actively blocked/embargoed for future use from 1988-1994. I often wonder about the exact reasons that Rob & Doug finally relented.

People point out how odd the scene in Cassandra is where Rimmer asks what Future Echoes are, but most viewers had only known for 5 years max…!

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If it was indeed Sat 10th when the rescheduled Pete Part Two repeat aired, it wouldn’t necessarily have made the listings – the following week’s listings (from 10/4) would have been published the Tuesday morning after the Sunday one was cancelled – if they hadn’t given it a slot immediately within 24 hours it would never have appeared in print at all.

This is the sort of thing we need INFAX for…

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I have an indelible memory that the Pete Part Two Sunday repeat was bumped for overrunning sport (either golf or snooker, but given that I loathe the former and like the latter my 1999 rage levels – still accessible – would probably point golfwards), and only actually got repeated AFTER Only The Good had already gone out, and the actual Pete Part Two repeat, similarly unscheduled, was on – at best recall – the Saturday after it, possibly after/around/instead of a Buzzcocks repeat? That definitely happened in some form/order but the specifics and how it could definitively correct what Genome says is eluding me. It’s definitely part of the reason that the Only The Good repeat had such a gap before it – they went out of synch.

Obviously, as Genome doesn’t include schedule changes I was trying to piece it all together for my earlier post… and I got even more confused, as there is NO scheduled sport that night (but then, I also remember being confused then as well because there was no indication why RD wasn’t on). Unless something overran to an unplanned extra day on 4/4? Way of checking papers for the 5th? Any “Man In Shit Jumper Wins Impromptu Golfing Festivities” headlines?

I need someone else or two to chime in here as I’m getting paranoid about my wonky, nearly-two-decade-old memories. It only affected me at all because I wasn’t at my own home when the original broadcast of Pete Part Two went out, hence I couldn’t stick it on the E240 in its rightful place.

God, do you remember the sheer *frequency* that golf and snooker would rip shades of shit out of the BBC Two schedules? In the days when Two still put out lots of comedy, that was an *endless* annoyance, completely lost to a history that will use Radio Times listings as a framework…

I am reliving this in such detail that I’m getting depressed about it. The pre-internet 2.0 world was shit, never let anyone say otherwise.

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Lovely work. My memories of the way the last two episodes of VIII were messed around with for overrunning sport don’t seem to chime with what Genome says (obviously last-minute cancellations wouldn’t appear), so now I am doubly confused and meaning to look into it…

Fond memories of that 2000 repeat run of IV that came out of nowhere – though I’d seen it once before on UK Gold, it was a surprise opportunity to get a really nice VHS copy.

Also remember being pissed off at the 2003 repeats as I’d just forked out £60 for a job lot of secondhand VHS to tide over the reigniting of my Dwarf obsession with the fact the end of the DVD release schedule seemed a mile away. And there they all were, on TV, tapeable…

More thoughts – were what happened to Craig Charles in 1994 to happen now, Red Dwarf would not only have been dead, you’d never have heard from it again. Exoneration or not.

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The difficulty level was more gamer-y at the start, but after feedback it seems that they realised it might have been a little bit out of whack with what the average audience for the game was after from a mobile tie-in title. For me personally, the softened difficulty curve has saved this one for me.

I’ve been a gamer since I was little and I’ve never understood the appeal of wilfully ‘difficult’/’hardcore’ games – I play them to escape the stress and anxiety of life, not to add to it. I’ve got a mate who’s a Rare superfan and virtually everything they’ve ever made descends into crazed masochism by the end (when I was young I had their Marble Madness and Digger on the NES and both were like psychological warfare within about 20 minutes). If a game ever tips over the line into taking the piss for me now, I just stop, I’m not a typical 101%-er like said mate is. I know there’s a decent market for these, and I like watching other people ace them, but I’m glad the Dwarf game has pulled away from that territory a bit.

The way around this might be to have, as previously mooted, different selectable difficulty levels. That way the gamers are satisfied but the casuals still get to see all the levels and jokes.

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http://blog.timespace.com/2016/12/artists-and-composers-reveal-their-top-5-plug-ins-of-2016/

In his own words…

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You can turn photos back into negatives. It used to be a thing you could get done.

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If the Smegazine was still going, that wig would have had its own strip spanning a dozen issues.

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Go ahead. Anything less dryly functional than ‘Ed Bye had developed a more cartoon-like post-production touch courtesy of making 18 episodes of Bottom in the years since he’d last made studio-audience Red Dwarf and the two had intermingled a bit in his head’ is welcome.

I wouldn’t feel embarrassed about pondering the small stuff though, I’ve spent months restraining myself from starting the thread “ONE OF THE SERIES IV MUSIC CUES HAS A WAVEFORM THAT LOOKS A BIT LIKE STARBUG”.

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If blue is the hard light costume colour, then that means that the soft light costume colour is ‘green or red or the clothes you died in or a cycling outfit or someone else’s admiral uniform or a grey T-shirt with a slogan on or a military general’s outfit or the uniform of a ship you wish to join’. That’s quite some system.

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You remember them, they toured with the Abnormal Platters, the Deformed Tremeloes and Freddie And The Fucked-Up Dreamers.

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They had a row while watching Strike It Lucky – after the first half with the contestants, Rob wanted to get on with writing but Doug wanted to watch part 2 with the game. “You’ve seen the good bit now, come on, you’ll be wanting to watch Soldier Soldier and World In Action then and we’ll get nothing done,” he was reported to have said. They haven’t spoken since – the Bodysnatcher project was achieved using puppetry, archive demo tapes and TV funnyman Kevin McNally.

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“KRYTIE TV: FROM A-Z”

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“HOW RED DWARF WAS SAVED FROM THE HIGHLY CORROSIVE MICRO-ORGANISM”

Cause everyone loves a running gag.

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It’s because it’s such an unique and isolated thing to ever have happened in comedy though.

Well except Linehan and Mathews.

And Marshall and Renwick.

And Idle and Innes.

And Cleese and Chapman.

And Cook and Moore.

And Lee and Herring.

And Smith and Jones.

And Adam and Joe.

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Better Than Life just became about eighty times more heartbreaking.

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It is Shitstirring 101 though, isn’t it.

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I’ll stick up for the unused words – the Goodall lyrics are deliberately naive, childlike and idiosyncratic, as they are based around Lister’s speech to Frankenstein which is also as such. Combining them with music that is a turbo-powered, sophisticated, well-produced classic pop parody is a deliberate clash designed to contrast the dreams versus reality of Lister’s Fiji plan. The watertight slickness of the finished song represents how Lister’s plan sounds in his own head. The unused verses present more of the same.

If the lyrics – used or unused – were self-consciously witty/clever it wouldn’t work as a piece.

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Charles Armitage is no longer involved directly, although I think he is still technically a director of Grant Naylor Productions. As of recently he no longer represents Doug or Chris Barrie or Howard Goodall.

That’s interesting. And, given that it connects to the financial and business affairs of wealthy well-connected people with their own personal lawyers, worthy of zero further discussion.

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Ian Hu and Mark Lambert. They did a lot of these knockoff themes at the time for Silva Screen Records, including an even dodgier disco version of Doctor Who with a spoons solo by Sylvester McCoy.

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I vividly remember the first time I heard that, browsing the racks at Andy’s Records. I nearly threw up in absolute, genuine disgust.

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I rescind this thread.

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Cruel irony in putting Spare Head Three on the spine of Just The Smegs.

Never forgiven.

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I want to work in a clock museum now. Nothing else is good enough.

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I had that same thought as well. It looks like they realised too late and swapped to black, but the fact that there’s loads of bluescreen shots with smoke on is as crazy as anything in We’re Smegged.

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Mounting pickups for XI stuck onto to XII records (probably 10 minutes’ worth total of XI actually shot in 2016) seem to be one of the reasons that XII fell slightly behind schedule, alongside Chris Barrie being sent home ill on the first prefilming day of ‘Everybody’s Kryten Lol’, so all their efforts seem to have been just to get all twelve scripts covered by wrap day. By the standards of any show other than Red Dwarf the last few weeks were evidently a bit hairy.

To add to your theory John, VIII and X both had reshoots after the series had been wrapped and edited, so it’s not unprecedented. They *did* do some ADR very late on and snip Twentica after screenings, so they were fine-tuning XI right to the bone. XII on the other hand looks like it has already been picture-locked and signed off now (presumably as the post-production block was for all twelve together), so I think any decision as to tweaking XII after XI transmission has been made for them. This already puts XII in a different category as it’s had much less luxury in front of the camera and a less reactive post-production period.

We’ll find out when they accidentally post a DVD of all six shows to everyone in the phone book on Wednesday.

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Here’s a good tip for Amazon orders you want to arrive early if you’re not a Prime member, which is what I did to nudge XI my way early – if the order’s going to be more expensive for them to send Royal Mail, they’ll always send it Prime couriered instead anyway for no extra charge. I’d had my eye on the lovely (and heavy) Art Of Aardman book for Christmas so ordered it together with XI and lo and behold they both turned up this morning.

So, if you want a pre-ordered disc early from Amazon, and you’re a cheapskate, add a heavy book you hadn’t got around to buying yet. PRIME HEIST.

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My apologies for doubting, neildo. It wasn’t personal – in fairness this is such a batshit insane thing to happen I found the very idea impossible to swallow.

Like the titles though. All very 2000AD.

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Oh my god… it’s real isn’t it. It’s the punchline to a three month long joke.

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If they ever look again at shopping round the comic book licence they were trying to float about ten years ago (still a shame that never really came to anything), it’s one for then, alongside the 4-part miniseries that fills in everything that happens between Parallel Universe and Backwards, and the one about the Cat Ark, and nice visualised versions of all the lore origin stories in the novels, and everything else the ship has completely sailed on showing on TV. Dealing with that stuff would be part of the burial process after the show officially ends.

Saying all that I still want a ‘what happened to Kochanski’ episode, however they want to do it. Chloe Annett is owed that moment.

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If it is true, and I’m sceptical of this whole thing, then that’s surely publically released information. It’s not like an unlinked website going online, they’ve printed it on card and sent it to people’s houses and town centres country-wide.

There comes a point where being a Red Dwarf fan honestly trying to follow GNP’s PR intentions in spite of their actions forces you into an exhausting roleplay reenactment of the complete Thick Of It box set, and if this is true (and though believable I’m still not sure it is), then that’s surely the threshold when no sane person would expect anyone to pretend that this hasn’t happened for three quarters of a year, and then feign theatrical surprise when the titles are announced next summer.

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Not as weird as the way he says “anybody”.

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Pete Part Two did have a repeat, but over a week later after Only The Good had already transmitted. Its Sunday repeat was cancelled for snooker, but they caught up the week after with repeats of the last two shows. It was really messy, and completely insane.

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I am completely powerless to resist. The FLAC option’s what’s doubly impressed me – even the stuff we’ve already got via AC3 rips has massively improved sonics on these releases.

Tonight, I’m going to get home, put the baby to bed, and then wallow in these like a pig. The whole working afternoon is a write-off.

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S-s-s-s-soundtracks…???!!!!

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This was so exciting when it first appeared, and a nice reminder of when the BBC bothered commissioning any proper comedy shows. I think it is indeed the final thing they shot with the BBC, although I think a Holly trail for UK Gold from the VIII shoot might have first aired after this did, if that makes it count as the last ‘new’ BBC Dwarf footage. But then there’s the DVDs so that argument follows that the unseen deleted scenes on the Bodysnatcher DVD were the last ‘new’ BBC Dwarf footage, in 2007. It’s probably simpler to say this promo was, really.

It’s also depressing how many people in it are now dead.

(Good spot on the Prince Among Men hair by the way!)

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No, there’s that Children in Need special where Arkwright and Victor fuck Lister over some bins.

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VIII has some stunning lighting and production design, and the videolook really brings that out. It’s what makes me wish they’d shot the new stuff 50p.

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My main point is that surely by now it’s time to stop seeing it as a pantomime villain and just enjoy the good in it and accept that it’s there, and not only that but lots of people like it. It’s ‘valid’. It’s nearly 20 years old for god’s sake.

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