Hello, and welcome to the first edition of my regular Saturday news column. I’m John Craven. Updating on Saturday has been chosen for two reasons – firstly, it means I can react to the news posted on the official site on the Friday, and secondly it gives me something to do now the football season is drawing to an end. The most exciting news this week is about new additions to the RPG – an AI screen and the Extra Bits Book. As the RPG head-honcho Todd Downing says, this supplement to the original game contains “an overwhelmingly disproportionate amount of content for its short page count”. Also in production at the moment is the Red Dwarf RPG Series Sourcebook, which aims to turn every single episode into playable elements of the game.

The RPG is turning into something amazing. These new plans, along with what I saw of other people’s books at Dimension Jump and my new job, have finally persuaded me to splash out on a copy of the book. I probably won’t play the game itself, but the book is lovingly prepared, well researched and brilliantly written. It simply serves as an excellent reference point for the various paraphinalia in the series, such as guns, ships and gadgets, etc.

Also on the official site this week is a new range of clothing in Australia. The long sleeve top, despite using the elongated Re-Mastered ship, looks fantastic, and I could well stride into next year’s Dimension Jump wearing it. The other news on the site is not so interesting – info about a band launch and Talkie Toaster talking to The Inquisitor Evidently, Mr. Flibble is on holiday.

No updates to this site today, but John and I are both hard at work. Coming this week, an article on the Movie, detailing how good it will be, guides to the alternate titles to the episodes and anomalies in the running order, and hopefully, more additions to our ever-expanding Books, Episodes and Documents sections. Don’t touch that dial…

We’ve been hard at work here at Ganymede & Titan, and the Episodes section is now starting to be brought back online. A Capsule, Reviews, and a Scene Summary for The End is now avaliable, and there are plenty of plans for other sections to follow. We hope to cover an episode a week. We really want to gather together a good selection of reviews for each episode, so if you have any to contribute (even if it’s only one), then get in contact. Thanks to Nik Horne for his great review.

None of which really matters at all, though, if you’ve glanced at the piccy on your right. Jon Palmer has announced on alt.tv.red-dwarf that he has created a foot-long version of Starbug in lego. This is possibly the coolest thing I’ve ever seen, and made even more so by the fact that he plans to do a similar model of Red Dwarf. There’s plenty of other great lego models on his site, so go have a look.

Meanwhile, the official site has updated, and Ian will bring you our view on the various bits of news tomorrow. There should also be some updates on the Books section. I’d also like to thank Annette, one of the original authors of the PIP, for giving her blessing to the PIP Addendum Project (or, as she suggests, PAP).

Finally, The Red Dwarf Zone has picked up on something rather interesting in their JMC News section, as they usually do – Blackstar.co.uk have got the Series III DVD listed – and it uses the same image as The R2 Project previewed. “Could it be the real deal?”, The Red Dwarf Zone ponders. Well, no. It’s an obvious fake (as our previous news item proves), and Blackstar have been taken in – hook, line, sinker, rod and copy of Angling Times. Tsk.

Just another really quick update – a Cast Listis now online, detailing every actor who has ever appeared in Red Dwarf ever. To compile this, I had to sit through 52 credit sequences of Red Dwarf, and if I ever hear that theme tune again I shall personally go and strangle Howard Goodall. Anyway, expect a similar crew list over Summer, once I’ve recovered.

There was supposed to be a proper update today, but things aren’t quite ready – so expect a bumper update tomorrow, including the launch of a new section of the site. I hope you’re all suitably on tenterhooks, and won’t be able to sleep tonight.

Always first with the latest info, G&T have spotted something posted on Ain’t It Cool News – last week. Ahem. You may remember that they posted the article on the teaser poster back in February, which turned out to be completely genuine. Well, they’ve finished gloating about that (yes, we were the site who pointed out the mistakes – and they were mistakes, no matter how many quotation marks you put around the word), and have come up with some rather interesting stuff:

“I have info on 2 things, since you mentioned Red Dwarf recently I thought I’d let you know that while I was working on an Aussie TV film at Pinewood Studios, I bumped into the Chris Barrie double this month during pickup shots for Tomb Raider 2. He said he was about to work on Red Dwarf when Tomb Raider finishes – again as Chris Barrie’s double and they are to film at a derelict refinery complex in Oxford towards the west side of the city, which will be the exterior shots of a huge crash site. There will also be filming at a military armoury somewhere in Hampshire that was also used for the last Bond movie.”

So, is it true? Well, it’s not from the same contributor as last time, so the previous news being right means very little. It certainly goes against everything we know about – for a start, the movie is being shot in Australia, not Britain – but as it’s only not being shot in Britain because the studios aren’t avaliable, this doesn’t mean that location work could not be filmed here. And it’s unlikely that they would tell anyone where they planned to film location work, to stop thousands of fans turning up on their doorstep. However, we know that shooting in Australia is scheduled to start at the beginning of October – doing location shooting straight after Tomb Raider 2 wraps seems rather too soon.

Personally, I think it’s rather dubious – there’s no good reason to believe it, and until then you have to take such rumours with a pinch of salt. But I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

As for this site, there will be a proper update tomorrow. And following on from the Takeshi’s Castle article, we’re hunting for people to write stuff for us, on any aspect of Red Dwarf, either factual, or opinion pieces – or even just reviews of episodes. Please, just contact us with your ideas. We’re also interested to see what you think of the site, and whether there is any way it could be improved (although if you mention trying to get news items up that are less than a week out of date, I’ll tell you to fuck off). There’s a sad lack of decent fan stuff on the net – we want to change that, what with the movie coming up…