Me Own Stunts

[Me Own Stunts]

THE EPISODE WHERE EVERYONE IS TWO KRYTENS

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If Holly had stuck around for longer, the character could have been used more in this way and maybe we might have been spared a few of Kryten’s “best guesses.”

Really good point about Kryten’s “best guesses”.  Reliance on the psi-scan as well.

I’m guessing it all comes down to budget, and maybe they only felt self-conscious about Hattie not having lines because they were continually needing to justify to themselves whether the budget could afford to keep every cast member in play.  While I felt Hattie’s mere background presence was a core aspect of the show’s atmosphere, they probably didn’t have the luxury of thinking of it in those terms.

What if they’d had Holly on Kryten’s chest monitor thing, but atomically fused them as human beings like that in real life so they could legally pay them as only one actor.  Would it have been ok to constantly have Holly built into Kryten or would we have missed her being present on the ship’s wall-mounted televisions?

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Is there a way of editing posts after submitting them that doesn’t balls up the formatting?  Most vexing.

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Even when she’s just sitting there in the background listening in, nodding and glancing around, I love Hattie’s version of Holly.  It never occurred to me in series 5 that the writers couldn’t come up with things for her to say or do – even just being the basic interface between the crew and this massive, sprawling ship was amazing world-building.  That in itself was enough to differentiate her from Kryten, and I missed her a lot when they decided to drop her in series 6. 

Anyway.  Interaction between Kryten and Holly:  I always thought the moment when they first arrive on backwards Earth is very sweet.  It’s pretty much just Kryten monologuing about the tallness of trees, but I think it’s lovely and then shortly afterwards Kryten doesn’t do exposition yet so it’s Holly talking about backwards Earth.  It’s good!

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Sontaran Kryten?

Ah yeah, maybe that’s what was in my mind.

Squished Griff Rhys Jones is well worth remembering though from time to time.  He’d probably have been flatmates with Squiffy Kryten if things had worked out differently.

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I’m trying to remember what he reminds me of.  I’m not sure but it might be the squished Griff Rhys Jones that ends up peeled as a sticker in these brilliant opening titles.

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I love the look of Squiffy Kryten but I hope he doesn’t speak.

Also I hope that he was designed to look like that, and his overall shape is unrelated to the person inside.

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No:  fort eeth.  Eeth for fort.

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On the Bodysnatcher DVD commentary for Kryten, Ed Bye says something like they muted that syllable before broadcast because they assumed there would be a lawsuit if they didn’t, which sounds likely, but then he goes into some bollocks about actually if you say “chicken nuggets” then that’s the real one you can be sued for, which is why they changed it back to “chicken mcnuggets” for the remastered version.   

An absolute globule of arse. 

They are correct though that the remastered ending for Polymorph was shiter than the original, so swings and roundabouts.

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It was definitely censored for the first re-run on TV because I remember noticing it as a kid, the way Rimmer’s mouth moves but the ‘Mc’ part was clipped off. I didn’t know this was the reason why until you just mentioned it!

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Mac was the dark horse of the VIII commentaries. I wish they’d brought him in for I and II. 
I could also listen to Craig and Norman talk about anything really. 

One of my favourite parts of the series VIII documentary is when he points out how underbaked the mirror universe concept is by saying that when he was there he could play violin, because that’s the opposite of not being able to play violin.

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I absolutely adored Hayridge’s version of Holly, and the dynamic with her and Llewellyn in the cast was the first one I knew before the 1994 repeats.  I learned on the DVD commentaries that Rob and Doug were embarrassed that they couldn’t give her a bigger role, but I felt she was omnipresent on the ship and never really experienced her lack of lines as a lack of being there and being amazing.  I missed her so much in series 6.

Just having Holly humming away in the background in series 1-5 was amazing.  This life of the ship that had its roots in everything and its face on the screen patiently waiting to be involved in discussion.  I loved that.

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Nah, it’s newer than Indiana Jones plus the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull which everybody knows came out yesterday.

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Correct!

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I get the irritation from people who dislike the removal of Rimmer’s heroism – and I much prefer the original ending from that perspective – but actually just handwaving it away with a joke explanation of causality was surely the only way of actually getting out of it?

I’ll say it again:  if it had been retained in series 7’s resolution to the cliffhanger, Rimmer’s heroism was perfectly placed to set up the events of Stoke Me A Clipper.

Yeah, hand-waving it away is what series 11 had to do after Rimmer’s apparent character growth in The Beginning.  But when series 7 was being written, it was believed Chris Barrie was leaving the show and not coming back.  Perfect opportunity to take the series 6 cliffhanger, recognise Rimmer’s heroism, then address it again in Stoke.

Hey, also the whole “a sonic the hedgehog burst out of the computer game and become solid!”  “what do you mean solid?”  “SOLID IT BECAME SOLID AND MADE RIMMER GO CONFIDENT” scene wouldn’t have been needed, because those seeds of confidence would have already been there and could have been built on quite naturally. 

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I just started thinking about Barrie’s series 7 commentaries again and wanted to giggle to myself. 

His critical faculties suddenly left him when it came to his commentaries for series 8, though.
With Barrie criticising episodes of series 7, and Lovett criticising series 8, both seem to be largely wishing for more of their own performance, although I do feel Lovett wanted to comment more deeply on series 8’s shitness but felt he was outnumbered or wasn’t allowed.

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There’s that weird moment in the series 6 DVD documentary when Chris Barrie says something like “the one time in life you successfully make a toys r us gun painted grey look like it has some physical weight to it, and they go and cut it from the episode”. 

Did anyone ever say to him “Psst, Barrie mate; the scene is right there.  Look, you’re missing it!  Look at the television now – the scene is right there!!”

I like to think that believing it was cut was the catalyst for him leaving in series 7, and then seeing the scene included at the start of Tikka to Ride is what brought him back for series 8.

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Looking back. The cliffhanger does feel a little pointless. Rob and Doug did it for a hype factor. To get people talking. But when you realise how quickly it was resolved in Series 7. it almost seems like series 6 resolved itself but just didnt want to mention it.

But was there really anyway you could make that cliffhanger really carry any weight going forward?

I always believed that Doug Naylor misunderstood his own series 6 cliffhanger when he came to work on series 7.  The bit about them all dying wasn’t the main aspect for me (although that dramatic kick certainly elevated the episode) – it could only ever have been resolved with something a bit hand-wavy:  you either spend time showing/explaining the arbitrary reason for why they’re all back alive again, or you just accept that they are and move on with the new storylines of series 7.

But for me the core of the cliffhanger was that Rimmer had saved the day.  He had been selfless, brave and come to everyone’s rescue.  This is what I was interested in seeing resolved, and the way this was brushed aside in 1997 is what frustrated me so much about the start of series 7.  We had seen Rimmer save the day, and now we were being gaslit into a narrative that their future selves had done it actually.

How could the series 6 cliffhanger carry any weight going forward?  By acknowledging that Rimmer had saved the day, showing Rimmer’s raised confidence that he might have more potential than he’d ever known.  Then we have Stoke Me A Clipper and Ace Rimmer turns up.  Rimmer is still sceptical that he can become Ace, but having just saved the crew he has something to build on.

And then all they needed to do was make the rest of series 7 less shit and never make series 8, and we’d have been laughing.

The events of The Beginning revisit this ground and try to let Rimmer grow, but Doug doesn’t seem to know what to do with Rimmer-as-hero, preferring to reset the status quo at the start of series 11.  The one opportunity to do it right was to resolve the one Red Dwarf cliffhanger everyone cared about, when Chris Barrie was planning to leave the show for good.

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It looks very good.  And all the snapping sounds are very satisfying in that video.

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So what is it?

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> Yeah but he never tries to sexually assault her in the way that Lister does

This doesn’t mean he fancies her any less.

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Rhyl beach would have looked like paradise.

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Even if that wheel was spinning in front of Craig’s face the whole time?

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> This thread is very close to turning into We Say Bad Things About the Dave Era.

I know what you mean but it’s a mixture of balanced feelings on the Dave Era. A thread that rigidly shows only positive or negative feelings can be quite boring.

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The look of the classroom was never a problem to me. Why wouldn’t a learning environment in the future continue to look more or less like the classrooms we have today?

I was personally grateful for all the additional environments we saw in ‘The Beginning’. Series 10 generally felt too cramped to me, and not in a good, Series 1 way. Series 1 showed us a wide variety of spaces inside the ship, making it feel as vast as we were told, while in series 10 Red Dwarf itself felt like a tiny ship because we mostly saw only the living space, which combined living room, kitchen and bedroom into one space, a drive room that resembled a tiny cockpit, and a tiny bit of corridor that they kept obviously redressing in unimaginative ways.

So yeah, even on their own terms the classroom, the simulant ship and the model sequences all make The Beginning into a highlight of series 10 to me, not a weak link.

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> to be fair though, his actions in Out Of Time do affect his behaviour in VII. in Tikka To Ride he takes the whole time-travel venture rather seriously and is very responsible about it all- pointing out they shouldn’t use the time drive again, quietly reprimanding Lister when he messes up the timelines etc. he feels like a much more serious and leader-ey Rimmer than before in VII.

I feel like that was because the writers and Chris Barrie had respectively forgotten how to write and perform Rimmer, not because of a conscious decision to build on the series 6 cliffhanger. Plus Barrie was doing a more ‘dramatic’ performance due to the single camera / lack of live audience set-up.

In fact the Tikka to Ride resolution to the cliffhanger completely ignores Rimmer’s involvement in it. They don’t say “Rimmer did something that resulted in us being saved”; they say “our future selves killed us”. This is why I was so disappointed by the first scenes of series 7 – I felt Doug had completely misunderstood what the Out of Time cliffhanger was about. For me the cliffhanger wasn’t about how the crew were still alive – I was completely expecting this to be hand-waved. I was interested in what the cliffhanger would mean for Rimmer’s future. And this was ignored, but with very little extra effort they could have built on that cliffhanger properly and made the transition into Ace a part of that.

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I’ve said it before, but giving Rimmer brave moments at the end of a series is akin to the way Scrooge becomes a more generous person by the end of A Christmas Carol. It creates a feel-good ending, but it can’t really be followed up satisfyingly because nobody wants to see the ongoing adventures of brave Rimmer or generous Scrooge. But also nobody wants to see a sequel where Scrooge reverts back to being miserly. It creates an ‘end’, not a tantalising tease for what will happen next.

Which is why I think it would have been interesting at the start of series 11 to explore Rimmer’s misplaced notion that being more like Lister might make him happier.

Character stuff.

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Regarding Rimmer’s revelation in The Beginning, I think some character interest could have been derived from Rimmer attempting to self-identify as working class, and Lister rejecting that (in the same way he rejected Kryten’s dishonesty about being a true human in DNA). That would have been interesting because we’d have seen that actually Rimmer *does* silently and begrudgingly respect Lister in certain ways (his authenticity and his happiness), as briefly witnessed in Thanks For The Memory. And we would have seen that Rimmer’s neuroses can’t be magically erased just by understanding his biological father wasn’t Lecturer Rimmer.

The main problem I had with the end of series 10 is that, along with the end of series 6, it shows that there’s some desire from the writer(s) to push Rimmer towards bravery, albeit briefly, just to see what happens to him. But then in both instances it’s also obvious that there’s no depth to the tease. The best development should have been in series 7, where they could have linked Rimmer saving the crew in Out of Time to his decision to take on the mantle of Ace. But instead they buried the former strand, and the latter came out of nowhere.

I suspect there will be at least one more moment of Rimmer needing to discover his potential courage, selflessness and bravery, but it’s clear that there’s no natural step after this that Doug wants to commit to. Not that he particularly should, of course, but it means we’re slightly within Simpsons character-stasis territory whenever he ignores it entirely.

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Sorry Ian; I don’t know the reference.

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Accepting that continuing the collaboration with Grant would have resulted in completely different stories rather than the same episodes with slightly different content, there’s nevertheless a strong chance that an eighth series would have had the Red Dwarf crew returning to Red Dwarf, and found it populated by the old now-alive crew.

Where I think Grant would have differed would have been the idea of putting our crew into prison. Grant would have seen the obvious idea as the better one. Instead of a prison, put Lister back into the routines of the established Red Dwarf hierarchy, along with all the menial chores he had to do before the crew were wiped out. An infinitely more exciting idea. Rimmer would have been like the Me2 alternate version, not the pantomime Rimmer of series 8. And the rest of the crew would have been separated from Lister for longer, leaving him with only Rimmer for company. Kryten with his corrupted files repaired and put to cleaning toilets, but again without all the shitty pantomime and immediate restoration. Cat put into stasis or something.

Grant and Naylor both spoke of their regret that they never really explored the world of Red Dwarf before the crew was wiped out. The obvious opportunity of series 8 to rectify this would have been taken if Grant had been involved.

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Kochanski probably wouldn’t have been brought into series 7 for a start. Any other member of the dead Red Dwarf crew could have taken Rimmer’s place without creating the complex issue of Lister having his ideal woman right there. For the narrative purposes of series 7 and 8, Lister simply needed a female he vaguely fancied.

No Kochanski means no shrieking series 7 Kryten. Another issue solved.

Rob Grant means fewer crap jokes would have got into the episodes, as well as stories built on stronger ideas in the first place.

Just better, really.

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> And I swear I heard it in Bottom.

One Foot in the Grave too, I think.

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> or i’m misremembering and it’s just a crap joke, i don’t know

It’s that. Any number of things could have shown how the crew had drifted apart more over the years. The ironing sneezes scene doesn’t even do this particularly well, but it’s also painfully convoluted as a joke and performed very poorly. Craig Charles doing his cheeky “Am I pissing Rimmer off yet lol?” face, and Chris Barrie doing his “Urgh disgusting!” face are amongst the least realistic bits of acting in Back to Earth, probably only beaten to worst place by Kryten doing his “What are we going to do?” call-back to “You’re lying!” in the shop later. But the former examples stand out because they are in the first scene of the episode, which we were scrutinising especially closely because it was the first new Dwarf we’d seen in a decade.

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> testicle/tentacle

Blimey, really? I noticed that ‘testicle’ and ‘tentacle’ sounded vaguely similar when I was eight years old, and I couldn’t believe Doug Naylor thought it would sound fresh to any grown ups watching.

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> Is it fair to say the VIII audience are “sycophantic or raucous”? I imagine that any live audience sitcom seems funnier if you’re in the audience for it, and that that’s especially true of Red Dwarf.

Yes, they are sycophantic and raucous in series VIII. This is compared to previous series of Red Dwarf, so it’s not a criticism of sitcom audiences more generally.

The problem might lie with the direction. Compare it with what Andy De Emmony said about Emohawk: Polymorph 2 in the series VI documentary, when he was discussing how Dwayne and Ace’s entrances originally got ridiculously over the top reactions from the audience. De Emmony was concerned about how such a response would play to audiences at home, so he got the actors to retake their entrances until the audience reaction was more muted. This was the correct thing to do.

For series VIII, it seems no such care was taken, and what you get is the audience delighted to be watching the show live, which is fair enough, but their response is far too raucous and this feeds into how the actors perform. The cast start overegging everything and making their performances too big for telly, and the whole thing plays like Bottom Live or some other show that’s intended for a large theatre audience rather than television cameras. You end up with something that was probably wonderful on the night, but is unwatchable in the format that it was being made for.

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Ever since first broadcast I found it immeasurably better than series VIII, too. It was a relief that VIII wasn’t the last ever Red Dwarf anymore.

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I never hated Back to Earth, but it is flawed. It edges further towards drama than series VII, which seems a lot less comfortable in its skin, but still suffers from strange jokes being shoehorned in like the tomato sneezes stuff at the start of episode 1. At times it’s as if Doug would be happier writing more dramatic stuff, then panics when he remembers he’s supposed to be doing a comedy. All in all I think post-Rob Red Dwarf would benefit from more confidently losing the need for a gag every 30 seconds.

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Here you are: https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/news/3069/red_dwarf_series_13/

Also discussed is the suggestion that they are doing series 13 rather than both 13 and 14 because they want to do a live show at the O2 in between. For an idea of what Red Dwarf will be like when overacted for the sake of a sycophantic, raucous audience, please refer to series VIII.

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> But you’d have thought he at least subliminally knew as he had the idea to put them in wigs.

Maybe Kryten thought when they had become skeletons that they had just ‘gone grey’.

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Brexit Britain’s version of Esperanto.

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> Interesting how he had things to say about the quality of the writing in VI but not VIII. Arguably VIII is more original since I think his gripe with VI was the recycled material/running gags.

According to Doug in the series VII documentary, Chris Barrie wanted to leave after series VI because he couldn’t be arsed with all the effects shooting in Red Dwarf anymore, and wanted to enjoy more straightforward sitcom work like Brittas. Which would explain his preference for series VIII too, since it’s basically just a cheap and simple CBBC show isn’t it, set in the corridors of a LOLwacky!!!1 spaceship.

That said – everyone on the documentary for series VIII apart from Norman Lovett seems to think it’s a brilliant series. Robert Llewellyn calling it “distilled Dwarf” and all that. Doug Naylor, who was racked with anguish about the rubbery crocodile in ‘Stoke Me A Clipper’, seemingly had no problem whatsoever with the rubber and CGI dinosaur work in ‘Pete’. And nobody seemed to notice that the writing was utter guff (only that they ran over-length), or regret their decision to play all their characters with exaggerated cartoony movements and constant gurning.

It’s worth looking again at Chris Barrie’s contribution to the series VII commentaries, where he sits in during episodes in which he only appears briefly. In a nutshell: when he’s not a part of what’s going on, nothing seems to interest him. At first you think he’s criticising the quality of the writing, but then you realise he’s just not fussed about scenes and stories that lack his contribution.

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Quite why the overarching shitness of series 8 passed him by I don’t know, however.

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I think Chris Barrie doesn’t like the series 8 font because it is shit? That’d be my guess anyway.

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> The captain was Dennis the donut boy, after all.

Nope.

Wasn’t.

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> there have been at least two ever since the ship was introduced.

I’ve never doubted this. The presence of the number 1 and 2 on various model shots also conveyed that there were at least 2. I just never imagined that there was a much more vast supply, and that whenever they crashed a Starbug they simply abandoned it, got another Starbug off the rack and painted that replacement with STARBUG 1.

I think I just prefer the sense of continuity of them using mostly one Starbug, and that when it crashed they restored and repaired it offscreen. It’s not a big deal, but it’s what I assumed and took for granted. When there were loads of Starbugs and Blue Midgets at the end of series 8 I put it down to series 8 being shit.

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> it feels like they’re leaving them behind.

It never even crossed my mind that they were doing anything other than constantly reusing the same Starbug, repairing it offscreen when necessary.

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> Off the top of my head there’s Backwards, Marooned, Bodyswap, Terrorform, Out Of Time, Back In The Red Part One…

I thought we were seeing the same Starbug crashing each time, not new ones. There’s even a line about it crashing more times than a ZX81.

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> I’m not sure what’s worse about “rat-arsed”; the idea, the shit CGI, Norm’s delivery of the line or the reaction of the studio audience.

A little of each. For me I just don’t think “rat-arsed” is a very Holly-esque way of saying “drunk”. As with much of series 8 it doesn’t feel like the comedy is coming from the characters as it should; rather the characters are morphing around contrived scenarios that Doug deems to be hilarious.

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I personally don’t think it matters much if Holly doesn’t have many lines or direct involvement in the story. Others will disagree but for me what matters is the sense of this vast ship with Holly as an ever-present background ambience. Just having Holly there on background monitors reacting would be enough.

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