G&TV Special: Whatever You Want (13/05/2000) Features Posted by Ian Symes on 6th December 2023, 09:37 Way back at the turn of the century, three Red Dwarf fans competed for not one but two money-can't-buy prizes. Whatever You Want was a Saturday night entertainment show, hosted by Gaby Roslin for four series between 1997 and 2000, and inexplicably not featuring Status Quo as the theme tune. It was part of a lineage of similar programmes, preceded by Jim'll Fix It and followed by Tonight's The Night with John Barrowman - Roslin definitely the most wholesome of those presenters - that strove to make ordinary people's dreams come true through the magic of television. While there were smaller items throughout each show, the main focus was a game show element that pitted enthusiasts with a shared interest against each other for the biggest prize of the night. And on 13th May 2000, it was Red Dwarf's turn. The three superfans chosen to compete were called Vicky, Rob and Jane, the latter of whom later became the Chair of The Official Red Dwarf Fan Club. And the prizes were very special indeed. Firstly, a custom-built Starbug, made for the show by the legendary Bill Pearson, overseen by the equally legendary Jim Francis, both of whom had recently worked on Series VIII. Not only that, the lucky winner would also spend a full week on set, and have their name in the credits, of Red Dwarf: The Movie. This sets an ongoing world record for the longest delay between winning and receiving a competition prize. After airing over 23 years ago, the programme was never repeated or included on any commercial releases. As it was a few years too early for catch-up services or social media, it never resurfaced online, and has been pretty much considered lost media. But guess what? Gaby Roslin's not the only one who can make Red Dwarf fans' dreams come true... Read more →
RPG Free Quickies Posted by Ian Symes on 13th November 2023, 09:47 As you may have gathered, we’ve currently got a bit of a bee in our bonnet about media going missing. Ever since being described by the official site as the “potty-mouth archivists” of Red Dwarf, we’ve taken the epithet to heart, to the extent that this description is now backed up in a complete rebuild of said official site. We’ve come a long way since the 50s, 60s and 70s, when master tapes of major TV shows would be reused or binned as a matter of course, and any current releases of significant media are backed up by fans almost immediately. But there does seem to be a bit of a blind spot at around the turn of the century and a few years either side, things that were released recently enough to be documented online, but before decent upload speeds and significant storage space were available to all. Which brings us on to the Red Dwarf RPG, released in February 2003 by Deep 7 – then a fledgling and relatively new indie, now going strong for nearly twenty-five years, with games such as Arrowflight, Santa’s Soldiers and Grimmworld released to much acclaim. It was only ever officially released in the US, although it was easily accessible for purchase at conventions and online within the UK, and it spawned a couple of further additions, the A.I. Screen accessory (complete with the Extra Bits expansion pack), and the Series Sourcebook, which ambitiously converted each episode to a playable format. All of which is long since out of print, and incredibly difficult to get hold of. Well, you can currently buy a copy of the main RPG book, if you’re willing to part with £1,774.05 for it. Furthermore, digital copies are very hard to find too, particularly in the case of the expansion packs. The licensing rights to produce such a Red Dwarf game have long since expired, which makes official reprints or digital releases extremely unlikely. So unless someone happens to, I don’t know, upload high-res PDFs of absolutely every piece of material that Deep 7 produced for Red Dwarf, it’s likely to be lost forever. Oh, look at this! G&T regular Ben Paddon (they of Jump Leads fame), has sent us a link to archive.org, where someone has uploaded high-res PDFs of absolutely every piece of material that Deep 7 produced for Red Dwarf. What a coincidence! A huge thank you to all involved.
Video DwarfCast #2 – TOS Trailer Revisited Features Posted by Ian Symes on 16th October 2023, 09:37 Cast your mind back to the year 2000. Series VIII is only a year old, the inevitable Red Dwarf Movie is just around the corner, and an increasing number of people now have the ability to connect their computers to their phone lines, in order to receive midi approximations of popular songs, animated "under construction" signs and slow-to-load-but-very-exciting Macromedia Flash graphics. The conditions were just right for reddwarf.co.uk to begin its two-decade-long voyage of weekly updates, bringing us such features as Doug Naylor's regular blog, updates on the new GNP series Weird City and of course the animated remake of Asso: Spanish Detective. Or at least that was the future promised by the interactive trailer that was published ahead of TOS's big relaunch of November 2000. With the current state of the official site, coupled with the fact that Flash itself has now passed on, we assumed that this small slice of Dwarf history had been consigned to the burning bin fire of lost media. But thankfully, during the process of building our unofficial archive, we uncovered the dusty swf file. You can access it here (providing you have a Flash emulator), or if you prefer to consume your important historical documents with a side order of sarcastic nerds making snide comments, here's your guided tour: Read more →
The state of The Official Site and why we’ve created reddwarf.info Features Posted by Jonathan Capps on 14th September 2023, 09:30 On 25 February 2021 it was announced that reddwarf.co.uk would be moving hosting providers and this would involve "a short break in service". Four months later it returned, with the revelation that after 22 years the traditional weekly updates would be stopping. Also mentioned was that "it turns out that rebuilding a site that can comfortably re-house over two decades' worth of content was actually a much bigger job than we thought it would be" and "At the time of writing, we're still seeing a few 404 errors when it comes to some sections". Well, it turns out that was a bit of an understatement as it doesn't take long for anyone trying to use the site after the migration to notice that large amounts of content, images and even whole sections are either entirely gone or unnavigable through normal means. It's all well and good saying that everything is pretty much back online, but what good is a 22 year archive of news updates when the archive navigation is entirely non-functional? Well, to cut to the chase before I go on more after the jump, here at Ganymede & Titan we've come to the conclusion that this isn't getting fixed any time soon and so we've taken matters into our own hands. Using a cunning combination of the Wayback Machine, content that is still accessible on reddwarf.co.uk itself, and a great deal of finagling we've put together a totally fresh, and working, archive of The Official Site. Presenting... reddwarf.info Read more →
G&TV Special: Holly on Tomorrow’s World Features Posted by Ian Symes on 3rd April 2021, 12:38 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. Read more →
Simulants’ Revenge – Full Playthrough Features Posted by Jonathan Capps on 19th September 2020, 14:41 EDIT (21/09): Thanks to MiloScat (double thanks, in fact, since he was the one to get us looking into the same in the first place) we've very quickly discovered that the version we play here is in fact a medium fidelity version and there's at least a high and low fidelity version. We've now repackaged the downloads to include these versions. This also clears up speculation in the video and in this article regarding the visuals, as the high fidelity version seems to have all the visual features seen in the screenshots. Back in 2003, TOS and a company called Blue Beck launched the first ever official Red Dwarf game, Simulants' Revenge. Billed as the first of a "host" of new games, it would sadly be the only example of its kind and the only official game to be made for the next decade plus. It was made for the then prominent mobile platform J2ME (if you had a phone in the early to mid 2000s that produced actual colour images it was probably running this platform) but it quickly fell off the face of the earth as GNP's short lived foray into the mobile space was put on ice. After a question submitted to an episode of DwarfCasts piqued our interests we promptly tracked down a copy to fill a 17 year gap in our collective knowledge, so we can now present to you a full run through of the game with colour commentary from Jonathan Capps, Danny Stephenson and Ian Symes... Read more →
G&TV Special: The 10%ers Features Posted by John Hoare on 18th April 2019, 06:00 These days, it's difficult to imagine the sheer unavailability of Series 1 of Red Dwarf. Broadcast in 1988, it was only released on VHS in 1993, and got its first repeat run in 1994. For five years, the series existed merely as fuzzy off-airs, passed around among fans with increasing generation loss. It'd be really odd if anything major linked to Red Dwarf was like that these days, wouldn't it? On an entirely unrelated matter, today's topic is Grant Naylor talent agency sitcom The 10%ers. Which has never had a commercial release or a repeat run. And seeing as it's 2019 and both are looking increasingly unlikely, we're going to be a little cheeky. Today is the 25th anniversary of the start of Series 1, after all. So here's the pilot, broadcast as part of ITV's Comedy Playhouse in 1993: Read more →
