Pete Tranter's Sister

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

I don’t see a thread about The Ten Percenters around here.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

I can’t see how it could’ve ended after VI with a neat or positive ending. There were books, out-take tapes, merchandise, conventions, all sorts that would that in a way, wouldn’t have allowed for Red Dwarf to simply snuff out for a number of years post-1993 bar Doug running in and doing a KLF, namely deleting the back catalogue and telling everyone to sod off.

Would be interesting though, I wonder what fandom would be like now if we had just six series and the odd bit of archive material along the way.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

I wrote this piece while I was in a shitty mood and the biggest injustice in my life or anyone else’s at that point was a fucking series of Red Dwarf.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Let’s not forget ‘The Blax & White Minstrel Show’ or ‘After Darx’.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Fucking ruined this thread.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Y’all been watching that Designated Survivor? It’s very good.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Alexei Sayle guest stars as Gelf Balowski and Lister spend twenty minutes calling Rimmer a virgin.

Come to think of it, Red Dwarf really is just The Young Ones in space.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

It wouldn’t have worked regardless, Dona was too petite for the shot and her hands are not of the same hue as Danny’s.

How distinctly unique and odd it is to discuss rushes from an episode of a cult sci-fi show made 28 years ago in a Manchester hotel.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Hey everyone! That chick who thinks she runs the fan club is posting!

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Good point really, the wind may have went out Doug’s sails if both Rob and himself decided to call it a day after Series VI.

We’d have vanilla DVD releases with virtually no special features and a foolhardy, limited scrap of fan websites reporting on the most bollocky associative minutae regarding the cast of the show in their post-Dwarf careers.

Wait a minute…

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

KyoSo – Finding errors even that anal cunt John Hoare has missed since 2016.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Oh go on then, I love Series VIII.

Anyone wanna match me?

Come on, who put Pete at No. 1 in the Silver Survey?

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

WHAT IS HAPPENING.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Brown Dwarf.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Three separate and entirely incompatible typefaces. This is what the end of the world looks like.

First draft of course, I’m still figuring out the blue gradient that isn’t a gradient effect streaming away from PJP.

Full-sized link

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Have a cop, old cock

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

I’ll be as honest as ‘Honest’ Bill Honesty here, the most honest man south of Honest-upon-Upton.

I really cannot stomach Series I. I tend to start at Kryten, race through to Blue, then do ten minutes of Nanarchy and end up at Series X.

I really do like Series I but it’s never been a must-watch for me unlike Kryten or Out of Time or Dimension Jump.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

A blacked-up Paul Ross for Cat.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Wait, no, I never thought about it fully.

Ah fuck it, Red Dwarf is a load of wank.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Kochanski and Lister married between VIII & BTE.

SOLVED, YOU CUNTS.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Better Than Life and Backwards are just fucking lovely.

If Doug decided to write an episode based purely on Ace circa the test flight, I would be so happy, he’s a diamond in it.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Yes.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

The Middle.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

I just don’t know you people anymore, prison’s changed you.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

They are…

– Doug Naylor receives a new leg which is hilariously racist

– Rimmer goes mad and starts hitting Starbug with a branch

– They all become Celebrities Disfigured

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

You know the rule, ID.

Doesn’t like VI? Get her fucking ditched.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Hmm, Back To Earth does play like a Children In Need special when you think about it, it’s one of the more harmless episodes of Red Dwarf.

I can almost hear the mixed-in laughter and cheers from the studio audience as the cast step onto the Coronation Street set then some audible grunts from various disabled members of the audience before the mixing desk quickly mutes them.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Twenty’s Plenty – The crew travel to an alternate dimension where all technology is gay and Kryten and Rimmer have to act camp in an overtly ’70s BBC sitcom-esque manner.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Austria, 1908, a young man is rejected from studying at the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

Japan, 1945, two atomic bombs are dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing an estimated 226,000 people, half of those deaths occur within the first twenty-four hours.

A chain of events occurred in between, but what happened, we’ll never know.

And now, stand by your pre-packaged croutons and wait for the signal to turn, it’s REEVES & MORTIMER.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

A reworked VII with newly shot models, edits for pacing and the odd duff gag, insertion of some vital deleted scenes or even single shots, a tweaked laughter track and going back to the original tapes and using the 50i look as with I to VI instead of the processed 25p version we got would actually bring VII right back up.

There’s nothing inherently bad with VII, it just needs a good polish for the 20th anniversary.

Tikka To Ride, Ouroboros, Blue, Beyond a Joke and Nanarchy are really funny. Now imagine them with some right good model work, a few edits made in hindsight and playing along at 50i.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

No.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Erskib.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

It works!

The BBC era DVD covers are too cluttered. Not that I’m bashing them, I love them but they need simplified.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

My unofficial blu-ray cover.

Full-sized link

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Amiga 2000 / 3000 keyboards in Holoship.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

That would make sense. In an alternate dimension, Holly brings back Kochanski instead of Rimmer. You could skip the whole Kochanski stowing the cat away and Lister becoming a hologram angle.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Yeah, and I remember once liking my ex who punched me in the stomach and then accused me of assaulting her.

But unlike that situation, Series VIII’s dad will never come round to my house and profusely apologise to my mum for his daughter’s behaviour and ask that the police don’t get involved.

That was a strange, sad time.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Percy, I was going to try and explain away your queries but I can’t.

Cat flies Starbug into the nanobot rebuild of Red Dwarf, some rather HILARIOUS off-screen escapades take place and ten years later, we watch Lister head towards the bunkroom with a bag of tomatoes and a sly grin on his mug. Series VIII is not part of continuity.

Are we all agreed?

All those in favour, say aye.

All those against, say ‘Sexual magnetism is essentially date-rape and that’s fucking lulzy. Oh boy, how I love dancing Blue Midgets that eat up 25% of the budget and more so, gimme some of those cheap, derisory plot elements that mean even the most well-intended episodes turn the cast into tedious and warped facsimilies of themselves’.

I – II – III – IV – V – VI – VII – BTE – X – XI – XII

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Cat’s wearing a mustard open collar with Andrea Pennell’s lumpy silvery heart choker. Lister’s get-up is pre-crumpled, pre-curried up and too recently laundered. Chris Barrie is… fucking Christ knows what’s going on there, he looks like a man who has just done a shart. Robert looks decidedly pissed off in both photographs and Chloe is grasping at her model experience and posing into the camera rather than aiming for a Kochanski vibe.

This is where the ruination began, this photograph decided the fate of Red Dwarf.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

The mystery deepens.

They all look so fucking awkward, did Doug drop his trousers behind the camera?

Full-sized link

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

I hope Andrew Ellard-ly contributed a single word.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

The gloves remind him of McGruder who, as we know, was the ship’s female boxing champion.

It raises the prospect that Rimmer wasn’t entirely the dominant partner in the bedroom and that said boxing gloves were involved in some sort of sordid game.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Tony Robinson in my memory seems to be the highlight of it all and I always thought King John was a big, smelly brute.

And of course, the theme tune, the only bit I remember I remember is…

Maaaaarionnnnnn, why don’t you… carry on… with a-what you’re doooooing… and a deedlely doo find a place with a what you’re grooving and a three four hiiiiideaway with a deeply dee final solutionnnnnnnn, oh Marrrrriiiooooonnn.

That’s ‘quite’ inaccurate, isn’t it.

Having looked it up, it’s bloody obvious now.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Looks like a very, very early test. Cat looks like he’s the manager of a Spanish wine bar, his costume doesn’t seem fitted and completed. They’re still figuring out Kochanski and rigged her up in a JMC uniform that was later abandoned as her main look throughout the series. It seems the only jacket they had for Chris was the soft-light version which looks very odd, either that they were trying out different colours under the new Series VII mood lighting. In fact, they all look eerily out of kilter, as if some fans won a competition to dress them up.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

‘You see, for me, everything’s semen’.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

That strange backwards laugh is the best in the episode, it sounds so strangely ’80s and of its time, it’s a right Essex giggle.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Yeah, that’s why although I love Series VI, I find it difficult to decipher where they wanted to try out running gags and where the writing perhaps wasn’t being attended to 100%.

You can see they were starting to do a few drafts but not obsessively re-write up to and into the recording or endlessly banter over the theme, dynamics and overall structure of the plot.

Then again, Out of Time was written on the hoof and turned out to be one of the best episodes out so I don’t know what to believe.

A Rob & Doug Series VII might’ve, MIGHT’VE had a right clunker or two but it would’ve been the case as with Parallel Universe, plenty of woofers but the overall story idea is a tad thin and bolted on.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Their fate will be in each other’s hands, to share, or to holo-shaft.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

The Series III DVD is a riot. The sets, lighting and overall look was already pushing the cameras and technology available at BBC Manchester to its limits, so whack on a few tape generations, encode it all 13 years later via MPEG-2 using an already well-used broadcast tape and smush three hours worth onto a single DVD and you have compression central.

Boy, what I could do with new, lossless, time-base corrected captures of the broadcast tapes, six months solid work and the maximum bitrate settings for blu-ray to send it out in.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

If we get documentaries anything near the level of ‘We’re Smegged’, it’s gonna be a fucking winner.

[Author]

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