Comedy, Chaos – And Cowboys! The Red Dwarf Companion Review

Posted by Dave on 5th March 2025, 09:35

As a community, Red Dwarf fandom has always been pretty good at knowing when anything Dwarf-related is about to drop. We’re there for new episodes, whether they’re premiering on TV or showing up a week early on an app; we know when to expect new DVDs and Blu-Rays to drop (even if Play.com doesn’t exist any longer to get them to us days ahead of release); and we have a pretty good idea of any Red Dwarf books, badges, T-shirts, mugs, magazines, posters, models and figurines that are coming our way. (Ahhh, so you’re a keyring man!)

It was a surprise, then, to learn from thomasaevans in the G&T forums at the start of this year that BearManor Media was publishing a new Red Dwarf book, Comedy, Chaos - and Cowboys! The Red Dwarf Companion by Joe Nazzaro.

And not only that, but that this book would be a detailed account of the making of Red Dwarf Series VI, based on notes taken for the contemporary (well, 1994) book release The Making Of Red Dwarf.

And not only that, but that this new book was also already available to order and read immediately.

For whatever reason, this book had gone completely under the radar of most of us, with even the most enthusiastic Red Dwarf fans unaware that it was even on the horizon.

But is it worth your time and money? Let’s find out.

So What Is It?

Features

Posted by Dave on 25th May 2024, 14:10

Repetition, Running Gags and Callbacks in Red Dwarf

We're once again opening our doors to long term G&T regular Dave, bringing us his latest deep analysis of one of the show's core elements.

Like all sitcoms of a certain age, Red Dwarf has a tendency to repeat itself from time to time.

I’m not talking about in-the-moment repetition like the White Hole sequence that gives this article its title, or the Terrorform gag about Kryten’s short-term memory being erased – those are deliberate repeated phrases that give a single joke the necessary rhythm and cadence. I’m talking about episode-to-episode and series-to-series recurrences of the same ideas, jokes, lines and structures, and the way that these have accumulated as the show has gone on.

Save Page 61

Features

Posted by Flap Jack on 25th November 2022, 08:00

Previously on G&T: Regular reader Flap Jack put us all to shame with his incredibly detailed examination of the changes between hardback, paperback, Omnibus and unabridged audiobook versions of the four Red Dwarf novels. Now he's back to finish the job, with an examination of the abridged audiobooks.

Imagine: it’s 1993, and you’re excitedly rushing home after picking up a copy of the newly released Red Dwarf Series 1 VHS. You heat yourself up a bowl of alphabetti spaghetti, grab a Leopard Lager from the fridge, and start up the tape to watch The End. But part way through, you start to realise something’s wrong. What happened to the subplot about Rimmer’s exam? Wasn’t there a scene where you see Lister with Frankenstein before he gets in trouble with the Captain? What’s going on? You double check the VHS sleeve, and realise to your horror that it doesn’t say “Series I Byte One” but “Series I Abridged”! You try to scream, but discover your mouth is sealed shut. You run to the door, but behind it is just a brick wall. You look back at the alphabetti spaghetti: all ampersands.

Revisions Timetable

Features

Posted by Flap Jack on 12th October 2022, 08:55

In the latest example of our readers being better than us at writing articles these days, we're proud to present an extremely niche but very important missive from Flap Jack. Ever since recording the Book Club, we've wanted to catalogue all the changes made within the various releases of the Red Dwarf novels. In a beautiful piece of synchronicity, old Flappo Jacko got in touch a few weeks ago having done exactly that. This is the first of two articles investigating the amendments to those sacred texts.

Red Dwarf is no stranger to having its episodes tweaked with over time. From smaller changes like the word “week’s” being omitted from the opening of Polymorph on VHS, to the huge reworks made for the controversial Red Dwarf Remastered project, you can never be absolutely sure that your favourite moments will be unaltered whenever the show is released onto a new format.

But there’s one corner of the Dwarf canon where this phenomenon has so far only experienced surface-level scrutiny: the novels. If you’ve ever read Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers on paperback and then later re-experienced it on audiobook - or in the Omnibus edition with its sequel, Better Than Life - you’ll probably have noticed that a few things here and there aren’t quite the same. How many details were changed from version to version, exactly, and what were they? Today, let’s find the answers, piece by piece.

This Guy’s Pure Class

Features

Posted by Dave on 27th July 2022, 14:52

It's a rare, nay freak occurrence for us to publish guest articles, but when Dave Wallace got in touch with this effort, we made an exception for three reasons. 1) Dave is a long-standing and very funny member of the community, and it's the community that continues to make G&T worth visiting; 2) We're in one of our shit phases for written content at the moment; 3) It's really bloody good. Enjoy Dave's musings on one of Red Dwarf's most important but lesser documented themes.

Red Dwarf is a sitcom about a lot of things – space, science, weird cosmic phenomena, and the consequences of having a three-million-year old bum, a creature evolved from a cat and a hologram simulation of a long-dead jobsworth as the only sentient beings left in existence.

But strip away its sci-fi trappings, and at the heart of the show is a concept that’s as universal as it is timeless: class.