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If Doug needs a budget de-aging team the one who did Sylvester Stallone in Samaritan are probably available

Sylvester Stallone 2022 superhero samaritan – YouTube

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I imagine the polymorph just creates an AI like reproduction of whatever person creates an effect (a sexy woman, Rimmer’s mum) combined with information about what that figure would say to gain the response (what’s the most embarrassing thing Rimmer can imagine his mum doing or saying) and then create hallucinations . I think it’s just a mindless beast able to run AI type programs using data from other’s minds.

I always wondered did Lister even have an intimate experience with a “Rimmer’s mum” polymorph, or did he experience it as the image of a different person, or did he just lie there groggy and go along with it and nothing actually happened.

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I only found out last night that Smoke on the Water is apparently “Swiss time was running out” and not “since time”

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I had a friend at uni who was sure the show couldn’t end until “Lister finally gets to Fiji”

Has there ever even been an example of a scripted show going from TV to radio and not the other way around? That sounds absolutely bonkers a suggestion to me. 

Dr who in the wilderness years?

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Cat was a woman in one of the American versions..? And wasn’t interested in US Lister IIRC

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I’ve recently wondered, when Doug and Rob first came up with the “baby Lister was found in a box” thing, was it so they could do something with the story of his birth, or originally just a way to make Lister’s origin seem more humble?

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I’ve said it before but Out of Time was the first episode I saw as a kid (must have been on its premiere broadcast). It really disturbed me. Then somehow I saw Queeg, Marooned and then the rest of the series from Polymorph on. I read the novels but I didn’t see the first 2 series until the remastered videos.

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I have a friend who’s really into this US brand of thick , sweet peanut butter, streaked with various flavours of “jelly” (I know they call jam jelly, but this stuff feels like a cross between the 2), called Smuckers Goober. He imports jars of it when he can’t find it here.

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would Die Hard still be a Christmas movie if it was about Hitler stealing Jaffa Cakes?

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meanwhile in reddit-land…

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 Not to mention them remastering 18 of the actual episodes that he worked on …

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it’s fascinating to me to imagine what Rob’s private reaction to the whole run of Dwarf history after he left was, obv he must have known about the controversial bawdy silly tone of Series 8, the struggle to get the film made, the weirdness of Back To Earth, the mostly triumphant X-TPL run, etc. Did he feel any secret triumph at the hiccups or did he just choose to not think about any of it, positive or negative.

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what do you call the full fledged Mars, Snickers etc? Mega-bars?

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TROWEL!!

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40 secs – “they have a cave trowle”

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I have a Southern English friend who’s always said “trole”, but I just thought she was being quirky. Pre internet culture, when would we have heard the word “troll” in media anyway? Discworld audio books? Any famous fantasy films feature someone mentioning a troll?

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Tbf the Last Human novel had a more complex McGruder (in flashback) and that shape shifter. I wish TV Doug had been that brave 

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I actually did find a handful of UK clips about trolls in the news, and a clip from the discworld games, to prove it is trohl

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I tried to picture Titan Kris as Clare, as that made sense to me with her being the Rob era’s Kris, but my mind kept defaulting to Chloe, as the dialogue and story seemed to match her better somehow. Maybe because I’ve watched Chloe in more “steely and determined” roles.

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I once innocently asked on Reddit why American Youtubers all say “troll” to rhyme with “role” (I always think of it just rhyming with doll/toll), and some people got really angry and bit my head off, saying that I was cunningly “trolling them about the word troll” because everyone knows it’s pronounced “trole” and I was apparently stupidly trying to annoy them. I genuinely though “trole” was some funny meme-like mis-pronunciation.

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Maybe we could find street CCTV of the studio on the day and find someone who can convert the visual sound waves to audio, or failing that find the nearest ancient stones site and use magnets and wind chimes to activate any “stone tapes” it may have saved of the day.

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Surprised Rob ever said anything specific criticising Series 7+? Wasn’t he supposed to be to uncomfortable to even watch them?

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I had a friend who owned the Toxic Avengers boardgame in the 90s which I remember being pretty awesome

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did Rob have particularly negative memories of Norm then? Considering the twist ending.

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Not dwarf but I had a dream the other day that the BBC were premiering a new sketch show called “evil cast” in which comedy figures like the Little Britain duo and Miranda Hart were promising to be as offensive and anti woke as possible. I also had a weird dream that I found out that “heil honey I’m home” was massive in Wales and Welsh dubbed dvds outsold stuff like Fawlty towers and Blackadder there. (And of course had multiple series that had only been aired there)

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In John Waters short story collection Carsick he imagines himself dying and going to hell, where he has to watch “it’s a wonderful life” for eternity 

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I still feel like the scene where Carzon believes he’s going to have to give up his life to download Kryten feels directly like the similar scene with C3po in star wars episode 9. I was expecting everyone who read the book to point it out.

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Chloe Kochanski was Scottish with an English accent though I suppose? (In the tradition of Captain Picard being French with one). Maybe Chris assumed it was Kochanski tradition now. And I suppose it’s possible Titan doctors can change your voice to someone else’s based on a phone recording. They can turn a cat into a Cat-man after all.

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amazon price drop – Titan currently £16 with postage

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Cadet Kochanski straightened up and steeled herself at her new console. She was finally serving under Captain Hollister – the best mining captain in the corps, one who’d steered ships through the most inhospitable regions of deep space while casually munching donuts, on his famed, trusty old ship the Red Dwarf.
But there was a catch.
Rucker, her navigation supervisor, had warned her. “He took a bump on the head a few years ago” she warned. “He’s still a genius – but he can’t follow figures at all. He can only understand in terms of insulting 20th Century cultural similes.”

“We all undergo advanced mental training in order to communicate with him.”

Now – in the thick of an asteroid storm, all crew yelling and clutching their stations while being thrown around like frogs in a blender – it was time for the test.

“What’s our turbulence, Cadet?” yelled the Captain.
“intensity 82 sir!” retorted Kochanski, loudly and smartly, before wincing at her mistake.

“That means nothing to me, Cadet!” he yelled again. “What’s our turbulence?”

“We’re shaking like Gary Glitter at the Girl Guides, sir! We’re bouncing around like a hungry Frenchman in a croissant shop!”

“Very good, Cadet! How fast are we dropping?”

“56 knots…I mean…Like Michael Barrymore after his second bottle of White Lightning, sir! Faster than Philip Scofield out the back door of a gay youth club!”

“Thank you, Cadet! I think we have a promising young officer here” boomed the Captain, as they left the field and floated into a region quieter than the Step’s reunion’s booking agent.

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 (via enhancing a shooting script page to read the ink bleeding through from overleaf) 

“zoom – need another reflecting surface across the street”

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I didn’t even think of the “cat in the bag” joke (facepalm)

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I loved My Parents are Aliens, even though I was already an older teen when it came on, my younger siblings watched it and it made me laugh.

not sure if people know Bucky was a de-copyrighted version of a rabbit called Jaxxon from 70s Star Wars comics, bought back into canon in the Disney era.

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Maybe it’s influenced, or just similar satire about how differences between things like the Catholic and Protestant branches of Christianity can seem insignificant/pointless from the outside.

It was almost the exact same dialogue from Dwarf though I think, I’ll have to dig it out

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 I can’t find my copy now, but Mogworld by Yahtzee Croshaw has a scene where the main character meets two warring groups of Dwarves, who’s conflict is nicked from the cats in Dwarf – they have a religion which is the same except for hat colours or something. There were some other jokes which felt cheekily nicked (or at least heavily inspired) by stuff like Discworld and Monty Python too. Having said that, it was a funny novel and I enjoyed it.

 

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yeah, I thought it was gonna be an ironic comment on her non-character status in the books and (Rob’s era of) the programme, ha ha

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maybe I was reading too quickly but I didn’t really get why Rimmer was famously wanted? The stuff he’s meant to have done didn’t seem severe enough to make him a top criminal on Titan. Unless it was because Pyle was after him and she could alert the media, or because he was a RD crew member.

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anyone else annoyed that Rimmer never got to have a romance with Pyle?

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Meener is sir/boss is Dutch/Afrikaans (according to google)

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at the start, when Lister and Kris are about to speak and get interrupted, I thought the book was going to do an “adult Maggie Simpson” running joke that Kochanski would never speak, or would keep getting cut off.

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I thought the Hollister/Todhunter dynamic had more unrealised comedy potential than the Petersen/Pear one. They’re basically Jeeves and Wooster.

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 I agree here that Carson worked as a character, though I’m not sure Lister should have been quite so happy to kidnap him. 

yeah it felt weirdly cruel to me that even Lister didn’t care about Carzon getting in trouble with his master (I know they didn’t know how dangerous his master was then, but they were still ruining his job).

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 Topological Paradox technology is brilliant, and could have looked cool on screen as a simple effect. It’s maybe more of a Doctor Who or Hitchhiker’s concept, or even more dreamy fantasy like Labyrinth, but it still fits. 

it felt to me like something from Neverwhere, but with a Dwarf twist. Mind you, it’s been decades since I read or watched Neverwhere. 

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people are saying DDJ is in Ann Droid as a taxi driver

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for some reason the idea of Rimmer’s contract having small print on the edge really made me laugh

I visualised Kochanksi as looking like C Grogan, but with a Yorkshire accent

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I thought the tunnel thing was a clever way to incorporate Cat/DJJ’s dancing into the story, which I suppose Dwarf only did in the blue midget scene at the start of Series 8? It struck me as something that would have been better on screen than in a book tbh. (assuming they recast some young dancer in the role?) In fact, at that point the novel started, to me, feeling like a comedy version of Gaiman’s Neverwhere.

also I thought Carzon and the innocent way he tags along reminded me of the robot from Bill n’ Ted 3

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I feel like one of the complaints about Series 8 – that it implies that Lister actively sabotaged Rimmer’s studying – is referenced/improved, in that the novel makes clear that Rimmer is blaming Lister “just existing” on the fact that he just can’t get to grips with the subject.

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I felt a twinge of uncertainty on the first Rimmer/Lister scene where Rimmer thinks to himself about how gross Lister’s hair is – 6 years ago, the fantasy author Naomi Novik released her magical boarding school novel A Deadly Education, with a scene where a black girl is warned that she should cut her hair, because her dreadlocks are particularly suspectable to the magic lice in the castle. This quote caused such a furore on social media that Novik and the publishers eventually re-released the book with the quote removed, and Novik apologised on Twitter. 

I’m not black or an expert on racism, so I don’t really have a view on either scene, but it did give me a twinge of feeling grateful that 2019 era cancel-ready young fantasy fans probably won’t be reading Titan.

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I think Rob and Doug said (in the novel omnibus extras?) they were thinking of Dan Akroyd when they first wrote Lister, and weirdly Craig looks a little like Dan Akroyd to me in those photos (the bottom and middle right ones for example)

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wasn’t this Frankenstein male?

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