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It’d be interesting to see what peak ratings a BBC2 Dwarf return would get. Probably around 4-5 million I’d say, then it would drop to 3 for the second episode (not because the first was crap but because it was plugged). If the hyped-as-hell Gervais can only get around 3 million for Extras then this seems realistic enough. There’s no way Dwarf’s fanbase would push the figure up to 7 or 8 million again. People are too obsessed with their phones to watch TV anymore. And I have officially turned into an old man by saying that.

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III is a bloody amazing series, though perhaps not my favourite. I (currently) rate the series’ in this order –

II
V
III
I
IV
VI
VIII
VII

Perhaps III it’s the most consistently good of all 8 series’. I prefer V even though it’s a little inconsistent in comparison. Surprisingly (maybe) Back To Reality is one of my least favourite episodes from V. I prefer The Last Day and Timeslides to Marooned and Polymorph. It makes me think, which are the episodes that are generally seen to be the best? At one time I thought it was obvious, but when you realise there’s people who prefer some VII and VIII episodes to stuff like Meltdown and Demons & Angels…you’ve got to wonder.

We need ratings for all 52 episodes.

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> ?once again, you?ve made me look a complete idiot in front of REAL people? Thank you so much??

That’s the perfect line to say to your girlfriend after a night out.

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> ?Hey, you monkeys eat off the floor? ain?t you got no style or sophistication??

Thankyou for bringing Red Dwarf back into this thread!

Incidentally, don’t assume I actually condone the training of monkeys for use in monkey theatre. Training them to play tennis though is a worthwhile and considerably rewarding pastime. Also, teaching them to wank you off (someone really did that, I remember reading about it). Anyway, Red Dwarf…

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The ‘meccano gimboid’ line in that extended part makes me laugh a lot, which is more than can be said for the rest of VII. The way Chris says it and Robert’s reaction to it is what always made Dwarf great.

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100% canon. Although some really dumb people don’t consider anything post-VI to be canon.

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> I want to know the story behind the avatar

Here partway down.

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> I don?t need to believe that Kryten rebuilt Starbug?s interior over 200 years to enjoy Series VI

You also don’t need to believe in the Tooth Fairy to find money under your pillow, but it makes it all that more satisfying.

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> I vaguely remember you doing – but can?t remember what?

It was probably ‘overmydeadbody’ which I used to use on various forums. ‘performingmonkey’ is a stupid pseudonym I’ve used for recordings/writings that I don’t want my actual name on.

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I see it as the natural development of the character. Where they went in III, particularly Marooned, is a progression from series 2 episodes like Thanks For The Memory where we see more of Rimmer and Lister’s characters. Making him more of an arse in series IV was a good idea though, and obviously a conscious decision with the first two episodes set to be Meltdown and Dimension Jump. He needed to be a less-sympathetic character for those episodes to work.

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I was just trying to be funny and failing miserably as always, making myself out to be someone who sucks at life. Now, unless my girlfriend’s real first name is ‘Life’, I know I don’t suck at it.

Incidentally, I’ve just realised, this very moment, I kid you not, how simply idiotic it is that my name is ‘performingmonkey’. I mean, how sad’s that?

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> we know that other holograms have it by default, just look at the interview scene for dead crew members.

It’s simply to emphasise that they’re Rimmer’s replacements.

> So what is it; a generic hologram uniform stating status of being a projection; a higher, perhaps ceremonial space core officer?s uniform?

D’you know, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass.

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> Dark ages? Are you being serious?

Serious? Do you mean Sirius Black?

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You realise you just shagged yourself, Austin.

And damn I just fucked you! Me no like this game……….

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I best get in while there’s a member of the opposite sex above me. And yes I certainly would. With Mr Hoare sat in the corner taking notes.

Bwahahaha!!!!

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Probably VIII would have fucking been set in the fucking Dark Ages or some shit.

> the boys from the dwarf would indeed find their mothership

Don’t know about a mothership, maybe a motherfucker. That would have been better.

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> I forgot about the Ellard rebuttal

I think I’ve just found a name for my new band – The Ellard Rebuttal!

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> What were they thinking including that line in, it?s about as funny as a Men behaving badly episode.

Yeah, I think it’s time we faced facts – Rob and Doug obviously couldn’t write for toffee. Simon Nye pissed all over them (now THAT would make an interesting television show…).

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> I concur.

You’re brimming over with wrongability.

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The ‘plan’ stuff makes me cringe a little, but fucking hell I think we can forgive them for it seeing as it’s in the first episode. I think the problem is it’s one of those moments where they make Lister seem genuinely stupid and thus annoying. Thank god Rob and Doug got over that hurdle

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> ?Your type isn?t Kochanski, Listy. It?s someone called ?Tiffany?. It?s
someone who drinks Campari and soda and wears orange crotchless panties;
someone who thinks Deely-boppers are funny; someone who says ?sumfink?
instead of something.? This is great writing

It’s all right but, like most of the later series’ jokes, it’s over-egged. The first line (which is definitely funny, especially said by Chris) is enough, or perhaps the second line too, but there’s absolutely no need for ‘Deely-boppers’ and ‘sumfink’. I’m convinced that copious script editing could have seriously improved VII & VIII episodes. Of course, once I’d finished with them the episodes would only be 5 minutes long, which kind of poses a different problem…

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I think the sets managed to match each series perfectly. Sure, the sheer greyness of the series 1 sets and the, let’s face it, crapness of the props don’t make the show particularly appealing to a viewer, but the strength of the show shines through in that you soon get sucked in and forget about these things. The episodes worked very much like dialogue-driven two/three-handers which could have been performed on a stage with a black cloth background and it would still have been great.

The funniest sets are in series 2 where it’s basically the grey 1 sets but with various bits of COLOUR (in capital letters) thrown on. Also, the Observation Dome set…classic. It reminds you of dodgy ’80s BBC chroma key, which can only be a good thing.

What you have to keep reminding yourself is that this is a SITCOM! The sets were amazing for a sitcom, especially when they brought the corridor in (which to me never seems like they’re running up and down the same one)

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> I?d have advised splitting the episode -do a ?Kochanski arrives? plot and a ?Lister discovers his past? plot.

YES! The Lister stuff is dealt with in such a slap-dash fashion, it could have made a great episode if it had been focussed on and reworked a little. It would have made a better series 2 or 3 episode when character stuff actually mattered. OK OK there’s character stuff in VII but it doesn’t feel natural enough for me. That’s one reason I love the early series’, particularly series 2 where there are a lot more character gags and development. I’ll never stop banging on about series 2. It’s easily my favourite.

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Well, they don’t want to bang on too much about the fact that Rimmer killed all those people. We are meant to laugh at him after all. Name me another comedy character who has that many deaths under his belt…oh yes, a certain leisure centre manager springs to mind, and what do you know he’s played by the same actor! Surely only Schwarzenegger has been responsible for more onscreen deaths!

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I’m not a fan of the whole Lister-is-his-own-father loop thing. The episode does very little for me. Duct Soup is a lot better, despite the annoying Kochanski stuff and the fact that the whole thing hinges on Kryten being jealous of her. The worst thing is the lack of the laughter track in the Xtended version. It’s particularly disturbing when Kryten is doing what I like to call the Miss Piggy voice. When he does it and there’s no laughter it just seems so…wrong.

I’ll say it again, I don’t know WHAT the audiences for the VII/VIII episodes were on. Nitrous oxide must have been pumped into the studio. Surely they must do this for the recording of something like My Hero.

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> and John Culshaw is SO annoying

Yeah, really he only does about two good impressions, Tom Baker and Patrick Moore. Oh, and the Ozzy Osbourne one. OK, his Gervais one is alright too, but it’s not hard to do, it’s grinning all the time like a monkey (I know monkeys don’t neccessarily grin but…you know what I mean) and saying ‘yeah, I’m Ricky Gervais, obviously, yeah’. The impression isn’t even of Gervais, it’s of Gervais in character. His Blair is just a sort of camp voice with the Blair mannerisms. His Bush is just a generic American accent.

And yes, Dead Ringers is written so BADLY. Can anyone actually write for shit anymore? BBC comedy shows are filled with episode after episode of mediocre to shit writing. My guess is that the second series of Saxondale will be the only BBC comedy this year that actually comes close to being good. Sadly, I don’t hold out much hope for the Peter Serafanowicz show, or the Omid Djalili (damn these comedian/actors and their hard-to-spell names!) sketch show for that matter, but I’ll certainly give them a chance.

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I know that I could watch all the episodes from series’ 1-5 over and over again and enjoy them every single time. The same applies for choice episodes in VI (Rimmerworld does my head in apart from one line, you can probably guess which). But I can hardly get through VII/VIII episodes without wishing I’d decided to put something else on. At least now we’ve got the commentaries, which are much more interesting and funny to listen to than the dialogue.

Pete Pt. 2? Mac is good in it. There’s no way it’s the worst episode of Dwarf. I fucking despise Nanarchy, and that’s swearing. The individual episodes of BITR are also worse.

Problems first arose in VI IMO. The show became too self-aware in VI. This happened no doubt due to the popularity of the show blowing up. You can’t go off doing U.S. pilots and then come back and write/produce the show the same way (it happens loads when writers, instead of just writing their show as they normally do, start writing in a way that they think the audience perceives the show to be. RULE NO. 1 for writers – do NOT pander to the audience. The ultimate example of this, IMHO, is Return Of The Jedi.).

The change from Back To Reality to Psirens is actually quite staggering. To me, the start of Psirens feels like a reboot for a bigger, dumber audience. The series is a parody of itself in places. The saving grace, of course, is the out-and-out classic Gunmen.

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> Does this make me stupid?

Very.

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The main difference with series 1 is the production and the fact that no-one really knew the characters or show format by then (by ‘no-one’ I mean audience, cast AND writers) although as the production went on you can tell things slotted into place, Future Echoes being a prime example (despite it being episode 2 it was shot later in the production, was it not? and it’s balance of humour and sci-fi is pretty much bang on). And this surely must explain why a lot of The End was of a much better quality than Balance Of Power and Waiting For God, considering what we know about the reshoots.

By the way, I only mentioned Ideal because it’s Vegas slobbing around his flat, probably how Lister would have been if he’d not been on the Dwarf. As for him being unlikeable, surely Lister COULD have been downright unlikeable. The cheekiness that Craig brings to it makes you side with Lister in the first series against the stuck-up Rimmer, but if it had been done wrong he could have been plain annoying, and then you’ve got two annoying characters, an annoying ship’s computer, a crazy Cat man that often only feels like a bit-player. Craig’s Lister playing off Chris’s Rimmer is the main thing that kept the show together in the first series. A 40-odd-year-old slob at that point would have been shit. Now Craig will HAVE to be a 40-odd-year-old slob if the movie happens!

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The Rose Time Vortex stuff is so tame compared with the Dark Materials ripoff in Doomsday and everyone thinking one word in Last Of The Time Lords. The moment that defines Russell T Davies’s reign surely is the Doctor floating through the air saying ‘I’m so sorry’. It seems to me Russell is actually saying he’s sorry to the audience! It’s like ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry I couldn’t come up with anything else, don’t hit me!’

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I often find myself turning the contrast and brightness down on my monitor to save my eyes.

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> Paul Alexander is wrong about Men Behaving Badly. I reckon the last few series were the best.

The last series was a piece of shit, as were the last special episodes. There comes a point where a show is far too self-aware due to it being immersed in public conciousness.

If you watch Ideal you’ll know that Johnny Vegas would have made a decent Lister

> People don?t stop being funny as soon as they hit 40.

True, but that isn’t the reason to be concerned about the cast’s age. OK, it wouldn’t matter one jot for a series, but for the film definitely, especially considering it was supposedly going to retell the crew being wiped out, stasis, Cat etc. With them all being (let’s face it) middle-aged….right, Harrison Ford is mid-60s and he still looks like Indiana Jones and is making the fourth Indy film. So it isn’t impossible. But he, like Stallone as Rocky Balboa, is a classic film character.

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Everyone should just forget about ‘what’s an iguana?’ It’s clearly the worst line in all 52 episodes.

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I always thought that one way of doing the movie and fitting it in with series continuity would be to have a young cast to start with up to the everybody’s dead scene and meeting Rimmer and the Cat (this would only be the first 10 minutes of the film), then cutting forward 20 years or something and have the proper cast.

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You accidentally devolve Cat with the Time Wand. Pay ?20 for milk and Whiskas supplies.

You left a light on…3 million years ago. Pay all your money to Norweb.

You sell your photograph of Chloe Annett’s foaming twat. Collect ?200.

By the way, does anyone else hate it when people insist on playing stupid made-up rules in Monopoly? Like, if you land directly on Go you get ?400 instead of ?200. And I can’t count on both hands the number of arguments that have cropped up over whether you can collect rent when you’re in jail and buy property when others decline to when they land on it. What about the supposed ‘short game’ where all the cards are dealt out at the beginning. It just leads to loads of mad deals in order to get sets. You can also always guarantee that someone will smash the board up when they get bored.

I once saw a game being played with real money. They used the game notes but the deal was that you gambled your starting money, which is ?1500 (I’m not joking, they actually did play with that amount of their own money). There was a time limit of 3 hours. My cousin lost fifteen-hundred fucking quid, the idiot twat. Some other guy walked away with around ?6000.

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If you don’t own the DVDs you’re not a fan, end of.

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They’ve already got to know each other so there won’t be like an annoying/hate relationship going on. However, I get the feeling that she might be dragged reluctantly into an adventure because at the end of TRB she obviously didn’t want to be part of that world. Unless they get trapped AWAY from Earth, or at least early 21st Century Earth (several fanboys may openly weep with joy at that prospect) why wouldn’t he just drop her off again?

I like the idea that SHE was the one that picked up the ring and is now posessed by The Master (or she’s become The Rani). That would merit bringing her back. It would be unexpected for her to turn out evil. It’d also explain why Martha needs to come back into it at all, she could be the one to figure out Donna’s evil (I’m sure you all CAN’T WAIT for the episode she returns and we get loads of jealous bitching like in School Reunion except this time it will be littered with Catherine Tate catchphrases, when Martha sees the Doctor’s taken another companion so quickly she’ll be like ‘what a fuckin’ liberty!’ the Doctor will say ‘well if it bothers you so much…’ and she’ll say ‘Look at my face, I AIN’T BOVVERED!!’ Or she’ll say she’s been hanging out with the Face of Boe (i.e. Jack in Torchwood) and the Doctor will say ‘Face…bovvered?’

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I think you might be better off having the property as various locations/ships seen in the series rather than just confined to the Dwarf. Community Chest cards could be called Garbage Pod and Chance could be Future Echoes (the idea being that you pay for stuff that happens to you in the future, e.g. you end up as a brain in a jar pay ?200 medical bill) actually that’s a bit crap but you could have a laugh thinking up the cards.

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The thing is, on something like Voyager, or any Trek series, it’s understandable that the infamous reset button would have to be pressed regularly. Otherwise you just couldn’t get through a 20+ episode season with the same sets and contracted cast. But on Who it’s easier for big changes to be made without the show dying.

Unfortunately, Russell keeps writing himself into a corner with these big *OMG look millions of Insert Enemies!* moments, because we already know that the reset button HAS to be pushed because we know he won’t leave the Earth in a fucked up state. If it happened on another planet, for example, there would be no problem with leaving it devastated. Moffat proved that you can do an ‘everybody lives!’ ending without it feeling like a flimsy reset button moment.

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Right right I KNOW that deus ex machina is where something in the story just appears out of nowhere as a get-out clause. I should have said reset button, I always just lump the two together. Maybe an example of Who using a deus ex machina is in the Cybermen 2-parter where the Doctor gets out of the cliffhanger by conveniently being able to blast the Cybes with the Tardis power cell, something pretty much out of the blue.

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I didn’t like Bad Wolf at first (mainly because Big Brother, Trinny and Susannah etc. were pretty fucking jarring to be in the series) but now it’s one of my favourites. Eccleston is just brilliant in it, as is Barrowman (pity Russell couldn’t think of anything for Jack to do in his series 3 episodes, apart from bringing about the Deus Ex Machina time reverse ending that is (and the stupid FUCKING reveal of who/what he becomes…). Also, Lynda-with-a-‘y’…why do the gorgeous ones always have to die??

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The fact is that if there was a new series/special and it was plugged a little people would definitely watch it even if they weren’t big Dwarf fans. Bodysnatcher, however, is something pretty-much for fans only. I know people that like Dwarf and have watched the episodes on DVD but couldn’t give two stool samples about the extras.

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That would be an amazing DVD. Animated would certainly be a big deal, but storyboarded would be absolutely fine, especially with a full cast recording (if the guys can get together in a room with Ed for SOMETHING then I’m sure they’d be up for that, that’s if that wasn’t what they were actually doing….*deludes self knowing full well Andrew said it had nothing to do with GNP*)

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Yeah, I suppose that The Master is like Zaphod Beeblebrox in that looking into the Vortex makes him think of himself as the most important being in the universe.

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> dredged the depths for the extras

That makes it sounds like the extras are a bit desperate, which they AREN’T! Surely they’re the best set of extras we’ve ever had. Rob and Doug commentary? The End assembly? Proper series 1 and 2 docos? Bodysnatcher? Does anyone have a bucket so I can unleash copious quantities of creamy ejaculate?

As for the post-DVD comedown. Remind yourself that all good things must come to an end and we must think ourselves EXTREMELY LUCKY that such amazing effort was put into the DVDs in the first place. Also, Doug has said he isn’t done with Red Dwarf yet, so perhaps we may yet be blessed with a television comeback of some sort.

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Has teh Ellard ever explained about this book? Was it going to be about the making of the movie?

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‘Talons’ is bloody brilliant, definitely in the top five classics I’ve seen. It’s the ultimate period Who story IMO.

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No.

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I…AM…TEH MASTER

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I know people are raving about the episode but, despite it being good, I don’t think it beat Moffat’s previous efforts. Saying that, it proves that a ‘Doctor-lite’ episode can be as brilliant as they come rather than just a filler (I liked Love & Monsters but this was much better).

Sally Sparrow…yet another in a long line of, let’s face it, AMAZING girls to grace new Who episodes and who you wished were permanent fixtures.

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