You Stupid Ugly Goit: Leaseholder’s Addendum

Posted by John Hoare on 10th August 2019, 21:33

While we’re all working on bigger things for G&T behind the scenes, it’s left to me to keep the front page updated. And what better way to do that than foist some unpleasant off-cuts from an old article onto you?

Here is your plate of raw offal, then. A couple of months back I posted this piece, on the reshoots required for Series 1 to put Holly in-vision. There was one thing I was never quite able to nail down, however, and going after it seemed like an annoying diversion in an already faintly annoying article, so I pretended not to notice and hoped everyone else would happily ignore it as well. Still, perhaps you’re cleverer than me, and can figure out the below mystery. And it concerns a very important scene in the development of Holly.

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You Stupid Ugly Goit

Features

Posted by John Hoare on 12th June 2019, 09:52

ED BYE: Rob and Doug and I made the decision that it'd be better to see Norman rather than just hear him, because he's got a great lugubrious face.
NORMAN LOVETT: Initially the money was low because it was a voiceover, so they can get away with paying you peanuts for that.
ROB GRANT: Norman had been banging on from the start saying "Get my face on-screen, that's the money...
NORMAN LOVETT: So I kept moaning and whinging about this. I said "Why have I got to do a voiceover in a TV show? Why can't you see this face, and why can't this computer called Holly look like this bloke here?" By the time we'd recorded the third episode of the first series, it had been agreed that we would see Holly, and we'd go and reshoot some of the bits for the first and second and third episodes...

The Beginning, Series 1 documentary, The Bodysnatcher Collection

The above story - in endless slight variations - has gone down in Red Dwarf lore. Norm whinged right at the start of Series 1 that Holly should be in-vision, the powers that be eventually agreed, and they went back and did some reshoots to add his FACE to the early episodes. (The real horror arises when you consider that due to the electrician's strike, where Series 1 was entirely rehearsed but never actually recorded, Norm was probably on his ninth week of moaning about this, rather than the third. Try not to let that shrivel your soul too much.)

However, what hasn't been done is going back to examine those early episodes in detail, to see exactly how those reshoots worked. And when you do, you spot a few interesting details which haven't been widely talked about.

Let's take a look. Doing this takes a certain amount of extrapolation; without access to the proper production paperwork, we have to do a bit of stretching and join some dots along the way. But I think the below makes sense. Obviously, to get any kind of idea of how this worked, we have to take the episodes in production order rather than broadcast order.

High & Low: Holly Scenes

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Posted by Ian Symes on 19th February 2019, 13:24

Behold! Former G&T regular feature High & Low, in which we compile both the top ten and the bottom five of a particular Red Dwarf topic, is back, just three years and ten months after the last one. That's about average for a second-class fansite. We're no longer attempting to make it a monthly occurrence, but we fancied bringing back the format as an option to use from time to time. And as we not only promised back in 2015 that the next edition would be Holly Scenes, but even went to the trouble of getting Hattie Hayridge herself to pick one of the entries, we'd better finally crack on with it...