Pete Tranter's Sister

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Well there was a war on, you have to do something with your nights if you have flat feet.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

To be fair, I’m hoping they cancel it.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

I tried watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture the other day as well, it’s so bloody drawn out.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Terry Wogan’s deceased todger.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Pendo’s Coffee & Cottaging Cock.

Sorry.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

No.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

XIII and XIV – Autumn 2018 and 19?

Chris will be 59 in 2019, Craig 55, Danny 59 and Robert 63.

If Doug plans to make two more and call it a day, I’m thinking he won’t leave them out in deep space forever. We may see the return of an overall arc with the slime coming home and multi-part episodes leading up to a grand finale but considering how well XI and XII have been received by fans who saw the recordings, I’m not worried about allusion to VIII and the wacky prison shenanigans!!!!1!1!!!111

I do love VIII but they’re like pantomime characters all the way through it, their personalities turned up several notches.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

John, excellent observations and commentaries as usual.

I must ask, do you have an interest in teletext? There’s a great resurgence in the medium, spearheaded by the aptly named Teefax, built around the Raspberry Pi and able to be viewed through a bog-standard CRT for that authentic don’t sit too close to the telly atmosphere.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

It’s a shame Noel is a bit mental now.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Doctor Who was starting to feel like a VHS manual recital during the Matt Smith era and as much as I love Peter Capaldi, I can’t bring myself to watch it.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Iain Legion.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Arrived on time and in condition described. Recommended seller.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Shameless fan-wankery but rather entertaining.

3/10

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

I downloaded the photos, it cost me nothing then.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Pendo’s Coffee Cock On Tour.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

A few reasons why XIII might just happen and sooner than we think.

– A two series / twelve episode announcement always goes down well with overseas sales and syndication. Gives broadcasters confidence that the show is not only a viable return financially but continues to be a strong ratings winner.

– Streaming. As polarising as the issue of week-early online viewing is, it will allow Red Dwarf to position itself as a relevant and important show within the growing number of online streaming services.

– Red Dwarf always does good DVD and blu-ray sales, especially as people are aware of the quality and quantity of special features to be had.

– The cast are available, especially Craig Charles who before was constricted by Corrie.

– Doug seems to be very happy writing the further adventures of the SS Howard Rimmer and is getting a knack for it after 28 years.

– There seems to be a conscious effort to ground the show in the ‘robust’ era of III to VI and why not, there are a thousand stories left to tell and as the crew grow older, there are new perspectives and sides to the characters to be found.

– Model shots! Fucking lots and lots of model shots. Lovely, lovely model shots. Let’s just have 10 minute panoramic sweeps of Red Dwarf and be done with it.

I have a suspicion that they may utilise the I and II intro for at least an episode or two of the new series. The model unit are utilising motion control again so get Craig suited up, roller dripping with red paint and re-do the intro for the third time but now, finally as it was intended.

Also, if there is no overhead fly-by in the end credits, I’ll be having words.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

I can’t bear the commentaries at times, between Norman Lovett whinging and Danny John-Jules talking shite, it can be hard work.

I’d give anything for Series I to VI commentaries with Ed, Paul, Rob and Doug.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

The irony, speaking from my own perspective, is that there really is so much you can do with knackered masters.

A friend of mine has a bundle of 1″ C-type reels with various music promos on them and boy, once you put the work in, you can really make something wonderful out of it all on blu-ray and from there, high-bitrate online video.

Blu-ray has the resolution, frame-rate, audio and colour capabilities to allow standard definition footage to, in a way, make the most of itself. SD video at that point is not encumbered by an SD format to be played over. It doesn’t have to deal with interlacing, compression codecs that are 20 years old and relatively low capacity discs to contain itself on. Blu-ray and conversion to what is an HD format allows for much, much more freedom and ability.

The remasters, when you look at them from a purely visual point of view, were a valiant effort up to a point. They were stripping back the murkiness of the original colour scheme, boosting it all up and trying to bring some life into the first two series. But, like any idea that’s ran with, they ran and ran and they lost focus of what was there and good and great to begin with. They tore away alternating fields to half the effective frame-rate from 50 fps to 25 fps, bringing it more into line with film at 24 fps. They added a very strange, early-era digital grain filter to try and knock some of the video look out of it all but it just doesn’t work and it especially doesn’t work with digital encoding, it smears and just looks like shit. In addition, the picture ratio has been cropped to 14:9 to nod and wink at widescreen presentation and it introduces us to the land of cropped heads and eerily too close close-ups.

I swore I wasn’t going to go off on another whinge about the remasters but alas.

Anyway, the remasters showed what could be done with the series from a visual standpoint. The colour grading is admittedly great, flawed but a real change for the better and I love how it looks at times. There’s life to the first two series, deep blues and reds and greens, the skin-tones aren’t overly saturated and fundamentally, it also shows how much you can extract and utilise from SD analogue video, no matter the source. There is always a way to make the best of what is there.

It’s been nearly 20 years since the remasters appeared and 15 since Red Dwarf made its debut on DVD. In the right hands, with the right love, care and attention, the first six series of Red Dwarf could fucking shine on blu-ray. Go back to the original masters, transfer them in as best as can be achieved and don’t treat them just as an upscale to satisfy the requirements for blu-ray, but treat them as a precious find, the source from which you can create vibrant and colourful new masters which will take pride of place not just on blu-ray, but online and on the telly.

But they won’t, so fuck it.

On a related note, if anyone has a copy of pretty much any episode or episodes from the first six series which haven’t been derived from either the DVD or a consumer recording source (VHS, Betamax etc…) I would be QUITE interested in obtaining that for purposes of what would essentially be a fan restoration.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Any and all frame-rate conversion to this day is an eternal clusterfuck of dodgy looking motion interpolation and blending. There’s no getting around it, over it, under it or compromising with it.

The cleanest route would be to deinterlace and upscale the original 576/50i video to 1080/50p for the PAL markets then convert from there to 1080/59.94p for the NTSC markets.

But I think they’re gonna go for the ‘why fucking bother’ route which is to deinterlace the video, upscale it then interlace it again to produce 1080/50i PAL and 1080/59.94i NTSC blu-rays.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Right, I’m throwing down the gauntlet, then picking it up again and waving it around haphazardly.

I’m gonna finish off my high definition version of ‘The End’ and put it up against the official blu-ray for all of you to compare. I’m betting a copy of Series I that my edition is preferred. If it’s not, I’ll happily raffle off that copy to a member of this forum.

Now, if the Japanese blu-ray contains the remastered editions, fair enough, there’s not much I can do about that but I think time has shown that the world prefers the original broadcast editions and as such, they will be pressed onto the discs.

Considering that the Naylor’s are waist-deep into the post-production of Series XI and XII, the new blu-rays will likely take the form of upscales with minimal alteration and correction but there is room for so much more without any need to go into the realm of the remasters.

So, that’s your lot.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

It’s official, the Japanese think Series VI is fucking shite.

With episodes like Region, Limmerworld and Porrymorph, how can they?

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Oh for fuck sake, I dunno how I bollocked up quotes there but clearly, I bollocked up quotes mightily.

Bollocks.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

I meant in a more obtuse sense, for example, going back to the studio rushes and re-editing from there. It’ll ensure there are zero drops in tape generation as shots, fades and effects would now be composited digitally and as a result, the final master of each episode will be as clean and clear as one can hope for when utilising SD video. Of course, upon thinking about it, even that is dodgy as there’s a very low chance of those analogue-era effects and so on being accessible again, let alone being able to reconstruct an accurate soundtrack. Remastered didn’t have to worry about such concerns, but we know how that turned out, didn’t we? DIDN’T WE.

Alas, the best we can hope for is a comprehensive hose down, polish and silk capping of the original broadcast masters.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Let’s play ‘who fucked up somewhere’ for the 683rd time.

I think this is an error. Every so often rogue pages go up for updated boxsets, single disc editions and so on and its usually an over-eager member of some admin team down the line at the end of a particularly mumbly game of Chinese, Asian and Southern Hemisphere whispers.

But if it isn’t, why on Earth put out blu-rays of Red Dwarf?

Series I to VI do not upscale well and I’ve tried my level best with the DVDs. In fact, nothing upscales well, you can’t make new information out of nothing.

However, what you can do, and I’ve alluded to this before in previous topics is push standard definition video to its fullest capability on blu-ray.

You can de-interlace the video and present those 50 interlaced fields as 50 full, progressive frames. Upscale to 720 or 1080p and de-noise when and where necessary. Trim out the black bars on all 4 sides to utilise the entire viewing area. Colour correct and bring back some detail lost in the darkness and glare to a reasonable extent. You can be sure that blu-ray compression doesn’t get in the way of the image onscreen as sometimes seen in DVDs with heavy compression to fit all of the episodes onto one disc.

There’s always the Star Trek – The Next Generation route which is to utlilise the original footage and re-cut the episodes. Having watched a fair few of them, it’s genuinely night and day when you put the SD and HD transfers side by side.

There’s all of that and so much more you can do with standard definition footage in the realm of blu-ray but ultimately, I know they won’t. If these are upscales, then there’ll be upscales and nothing more.

I really should release the tests I made for The End. I had it looking like the remasters but without the fucking shite they put in, cut out and just tweaked for tweaking’s sake.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

It was a campaign to issue on the spot fines to the homeless, single mothers and immigrants, ACTUALLY.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Magic, magic ‘E’

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

GO BACK TO YOUR OWN FUCKING COUNTRY WHERE THEY HAVE THEIR OWN FUCKING DIMENSION JUMPS AND STOP ATTENDING OURS.

These kinda people clog up our annual conventions, pre-order our, OUR FUCKING LIMITED EDITION RED DWARF BLU-RAY STEELBOOKS and hassle ordinary, decent guest stars with relevant, meaningful questions and for autographs AND IT’S NOT FUCKING ON.

BACK YOU GO, YOU POSSIBLY SLAVIC CUNT.

Well, see you at DJ 19.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

I GOT BBC THREE TAKEN OFF THE AIR.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Are you now or have you at any time been a practising homosexual?

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Alexei Sayle makes a guest appearance as the creator of Better Than Life.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Can you hear the regionals sing, nooooo, nooooo

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

I’ve became a low rent Iain Lee.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

House of Fools was fucking shite.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Ruby Wax and Ed Bye guest star as two rutting Pleasure GELFs in their natural form to a nauseous but curious audience.

The audience wants to look away, but they can’t.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

There’s a good novella waiting to be written about the hours and days immediately after the accident and the moments before Lister was taken out of stasis.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Doug Naylor receives a new leg which is hilariously racist.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

I was going to reply with more questions as the art and methods of television broadcasting genuinely interest me. Then I had a glance over your Twitter and saw a picture of Cleo Rocos.

One thing lead to the other, now I have two dozen photos of Cleo Rocos saved onto my hard drive.

Cleo Rocos.

What a fucking honey.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Ban this sick filth.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

It didn’t have a chorus though.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Look mother, a reply.

—

Thanks for contacting us regarding BBC Three’s ‘The Totally Senseless Game Show’ broadcast 11th August 2015.

We understand you feel the quality of the programme is extremely poor and that it very much lowers the standard of our overall output.

We’re naturally very sorry when we hear that members of our audience do not like our programmes or services. We try very hard to produce a wide range of high quality programmes and services which we hope will appeal to our audiences.

There will always be some programmes that do not appeal to some people and this is the nature of broadcasting whereby we are serving many different people with many different expectations and we regret on this occasion you felt the need to complain.

We do hope you’ll be happier with future output.

Thank you again for contacting us, we value your feedback. All complaints are sent to senior management every morning and we included your points in this overnight report.

These reports are among the most widely read sources of feedback in the BBC and ensures that your complaint has been seen by the right people quickly. This helps inform their decisions about current and future programmes.

Kind regards

—

That’s me told.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Sigh, Kochanski looks bloody lovely in her sketch. Grogan that is.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

John, is there any way that the whole process of putting a channel on-air could be streamlined?

It still all seems so manually driven. Pushing the right buttons and pulling the right levers, dialling in fades and doing count-ins and manually going to VT and all that.

Is there not a way to set up scripts so that it removes the need to oversee the little details and as a result, not only push programmes onto the air with microsecond precision but remove the element of human error when, for example, cutting to adverts and in and out of live broadcasts?

And if not, why not?

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Having seen his royalty money consistently dwindle through the years, Rob Grant returns to Red Dwarf and promptly shits himself onset, blaming the breakup of his marriage and weight troubles.

Doug Naylor slips in the unsurprisingly large mound of faeces and this incident becomes a solid twenty minute section in the making of documentary for Series XII.

Of course, Robert Llewellyn tweets about it beforehand, spoiling it for everyone because he can’t fucking help himself.

Craig Charles starts smoking crack again to forget the smell and because he really loves crack.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

No no no, my cat’s name is Frankenstein. Frankenstein the cat, he is a Bombay cat.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Did Holly generate the mission to keep Lister sane and happy using his survival algorithms or was it plucked and adapted from the big book of JMC Emergencies (And How To Tie 50 Knots)?

All crew are dead bar one in stasis, cannot return to base due to massive radiation leak and there is strange power draw from the sealed decks and theft of the grooming supplies.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

The boys from the Dwarf stumble upon the near derelict base made out of the escape pods, shuttles and salvaged vessels that the regenerated crew and prisoners were forced to flee in for their lives and make their home for eternity.

Mutiny, starvation, catastrophic engineering failures and sheer corruption have dwindled the population of tens of thousands down to only one man, Kill Crazy, who is seen chomping on Captain Hollister’s left buttock in a psychotic frenzy for survival.

Rimmer promptly kicks him in the bollocks, eliciting pained laughter from Lister and they all go on their merry way again with nary a thought to the thousands they left to die in deep space while their city-sized mining vessel could comfortably hold numbers many times that.

In the distance, an ice-cold, humanoid figure hurtles towards the surface. It’s Irene Edgington. The frozen, dead projectile smashes through the last of the frail shuttles and whacks Kill Crazy once more in the bollocks before his life is slowly taken away in the vacuum of space, all while having bruised and very tender testicles.

Lister and Rimmer share a chuckle about how they could’ve easily saved Irene’s life as humans can easily survive for a few minutes in space without any major effects to their health.

The theme tune plays, but there is a strange, almost unnoticed change to the words…

Let me die, far away from here…

Fun, fun, fun…

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

I could be the biggest fan in the world of the BBC and its programming. Yet, even then, I know that no broadcaster outside of a purely educational or public information capacity deserves that money. Especially one that receives every single penny with no real say from the licence fee payer into what is broadcast. It has nothing to do with my stance on their programming, what they put out, it simply comes down to is this a necessity to live and in addition, are there alternative models that work well?

It is not a necessity and commercial and subscription services are working very well both in viewer numbers and their financial outlook.

We’ve became so used to paying the licence fee that we forget what it is ultimately, a tax on owning a television with all revenue going to a small part of what is shown on it. A tax that if avoided, is a criminal offence. In this day and age, that’s a comical premise but yet, it still stands to this day.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

I love the idea that George set up a nice life for himself in the mining decks and they were simply unaware of each other the whole time and with Holly being Holly, he simply forgot to tell them all.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Channel 4 receives nothing from the licence fee, however, S4C receives £76 million from the BBC.

For over thirty years, Channel 4 has shown some of the most original, subversive and challenging programmes of our time and it does it all without an expected penny of public money. I don’t look to Channel 4 just as an example of success financially. Even as a teenager, I inherently knew Channel 4 was, for the lack of a better cliché, edgier, cooler and more willing to take risks and show the kinda programmes that may only appeal to very specific people or very specific mindsets.

For showing Vic Reeves Big Night Out alone, they’ll always have my love and loyalty.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

Russ, you need to buy food and yes, some of the revenue will go to advertisements but you have a choice in what products you buy and from that, the consumer will always have a relative amount of control in how much can be spent on ad-breaks between Corrie by any one company. There’s no option in that regard with funding the BBC. I don’t have a choice in the matter, regardless of whether I watch or do not watch their programmes.

The BBC is not a necessity. I have never had a fire at my home, or a break-in, yet I do not call for my taxes to reflect my hope that these things never happen. I don’t ask to be taken off a hypothetical register of homes able to receive assistance in emergencies because I know these services are universal and for all of us when we need them the most. The BBC is not, and has never been for everyone, nor should it continue to receive funding out of a blinkered sense of necessity, tradition or individual opinion on its value to the watcher and listener.

I put in a complaint to the BBC because I have always been aware of the dangers that come with organisations who have monopolistic control over their market. The BBC is the sole receiver of the licence fee and as such, must be held up to scrutiny far more than commercial operators who can be run out of town on the strength of their programming and their ability to draw in audiences to watch the advertisements.

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