As we approach the August Bank Holiday weekend, and therefore the conclusion of this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe, let's travel back in time to 31 years ago. It was a time when the festival had more of a reputation for weird and wonderful variety acts than a focus on stand-up comedy, when multi-channel television was in its infancy in this country, and when Norman Lovett still had hair.

These three states of affairs combined to form episode seven of Up Yer Festival, a daily show broadcasting live from the Fringe to an audience of tens on BSB, an early satellite service that was very briefly on air from March to November 1990, when it merged with fellow fledgling broadcaster Sky Television to form the more familiar BSkyB. Produced by Noel Gay Television, at the time the parent company of both Paul Jackson Productions and the newly formed Grant Naylor Productions, the show combined a sample of acts from the festival with specially shot sketches, all linked together by a guest host, including on one occasion, recent Edinburgh migrant Norman Lovett.

It's an obscure show on an obscure channel that aired on an obscure satellite service over thirty years ago, but thanks to the magic of the internet (and also to our good friend Jonsmad for pointing us towards it), the full series is available on YouTube, uploaded by the show's producer Richard Hearsey.

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G&TV Special: Holly on Tomorrow's World featured image

The latest edition of our now officially sporadic archive telly feature is something truly special for once: a rare in-character appearance by one of the boys from the Dwarf on a different programme, unseen for over twenty years.

On Wednesday 3rd March 1999 (the day before the seminal Back In The Red (Part Three) first aired), Norman Lovett popped up as Holly on Tomorrow's World, the BBC's flagship technology programme that ran from 1965 to 2003, to discuss AI with host Philippa Forrester. He was there to launch their Turing Test experiment, to see if chatbots could convincingly pass as human. He returned two weeks later for the show's annual Megalab live event, briefly cameoing in character before appearing as himself to take part in the test, alongside Sir Terry Pratchett and Jaye Griffiths from off of Bugs.

Never repeated, and not included on the Series VIII DVD for whatever reason, this has been one of the rarest and most elusive pieces of Red Dwarf ephemera - it was even mentioned in a forum thread about unattainable Dwarf-related media as recently as two weeks ago. But now, just over 22 years later, here are the relevant moments from both episodes.

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G&TV logoIt's a tricky thing trying to launch a new TV vehicle around a particular actor or comic. Sometimes you have bags of acting and comedic talent wasted on a dreadful script and sometimes the talent have an on-screen personality akin to sand paper being rubbed violently all over your brain, and make jokes so terrible by today's standards that fan sites 20+ years later have to quickly change their article plans because they don't have the brain power to handle it correctly.

No risk of that with our Norman, however, as this month we take a look at his I, Lovett-esque contribution to BSB Galaxy's The Last Laugh series, information on which is quite thin on the ground but we can definitely assume the channel offered rehearsal facilities in Edinburgh.

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Today, a readthrough is taking place for the forthcoming Red Dwarf special. Dave have already tweeted a photo of the front page of the script, and now Baby Cow Productions have posted a lovely little cast photo on Instagram. The guys are all there, there’s Danny, Craig, Chris, Robert and… oh wait…

We were already aware that Norman’s presence in the special was a possibility after Richard Naylor responded in the affirmative to a question about plans to involve Holly, but I guess this confirms it. Norman Lovett will appear for a second consecutive episode of Red Dwarf.

Thanks to Joey Newsome for the heads-up.

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 featured image

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.

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High & Low: Holly Scenes featured image

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...

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It was always going to be difficult to keep secrets quiet when there's a year-and-a-half gap between an audience recording and an episode being broadcast. The fans who attended those Series XII recordings have done their part admirably, with very little - if any - information leaked on forums or social media. The same can't be said for those involved in the show, however, as we've previously detailed. And today, something that's been mentioned a handful of times prior to now if you know where to look on Twitter and Facebook has finally reached a mainstream comedy website, and we feel that there's very little point in us continuing to ignore it.

Yes, Chortle are reporting - and this is your last chance to stop reading if you don't want to see something that you probably already know - that...

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