DwarfCast 166 - Re-Disc-overy: Series IV featured image
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"Ribs and Pipes and Penises (oh my!)"

Our voyage of re-disc-overy continues, as we tackle a most unusual release; the one that was out in the US before the UK, and that Young Cappsy managed to review before Young Ian for once. We rake over this bitterness as well as embarking on not one, not two, but three commentaries, forgoing the tradition of focusing on one big extra in favour of covering a handful of little bitty ones, the regular features that would otherwise be glossed over. Once again, we ensure that every single aspect of the release is discussed, and along the way we re-evaluate Hattie Hayridge's return to the role of Holly, try to get to the bottom of why the cast commentaries are so difficult to get through, and attempt to comprehensively solve the issues of both war and racism.

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Take the Fifth featured image

"Despite some last-minute shooting by Rob and Doug after the wrap party, Demons & Angels was felt to be the weakest show of the series by Rob and Doug, and so was placed 5th – the traditional place for what you think is your worst episode. (Despite D&A being great.) Nobody cares if you’ve got a duff ep if you’ve had four great ones before it, and end the series with a blinder."

"Episode Orders", Ganymede & Titan, December 2005

Over the years on here, we've often idly mentioned the idea that the worst episode of any given comedy show should be put in the fifth episode slot out of six. In fact, we've mentioned it so much that it's almost become a truism, a cliché... and yet we've never really examined where it came from, or actually looked at whether it applies to Red Dwarf in any concrete way.

Hello. I am John Hoare, and I am going to take a look at whether this actually applies to Red Dwarf in any concrete way.

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Red Dwarf: The Complete Guide To Almost Everything featured image

Do you remember a time, a few years either side of the turn of the century, when the internet was mostly comprised of auto-playing midi files and non-HD porn? Back then, if you searched Yahoo, or Alta Vista, or Lycos, you could find tonnes of Geocities-hosted web pages for each and every one of your favourite TV shows, which invariably featured the same handful of low-res jpegs, lists of quotes, episode guides and those ubiquitous auto-playing midi files. Then blogging came along, and we all realised that we could just write about our opinions on our favourite shows, rather than trying to provide a comprehensive mine of information, given that new-fangled things like Google and Wikipedia could do that much better.

So things like episode guides disappeared from fansites. Not entirely, but they were no longer an essential component. It was only recently that we realised that G&T had nothing even resembling such a guide - not even a list of episodes anywhere. When we started, in 2002, we launched an ambitious project of producing detailed "capsules" for every episode, but, well, you can see how that went. We got to thinking that it might be fun to try and write an episode guide now, and see where it ended up. As it turns out, it kind of got out of hand...

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High & Low: Deleted Scenes featured image

Let's be perfectly clear. Generally, when talking about deleted scenes - whatever the given TV show or film - the quality of the scenes themselves doesn't actually matter. When I pop in a DVD, I don't care how good they are. It's how interesting they are which makes them entertaining. A scene can be absolutely appalling, deservedly cut... and still be one of the best extras of the lot.

This perhaps doubly-holds for Red Dwarf. It's easy to forget how lucky we are with deleted scenes being included on the DVD releases; you only have to check your shelves to see which other sitcoms from 1988 include such things for the proof of that. (Mind you, sadly these days, budget cuts across DVD ranges mean we're lucky to get them for a sitcom made today.)

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DwarfCast 55 - DNA Commentary featured image
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Join G&T's Ian Symes and Danny Stephenson, along with hangers-on Rich Lawden, Jezzmund Tutu and Tom Pyott, as we transmogrify your minds and talk all over the top of Series IV episode two DNA. We discuss the unusually high proportion of movie references, Lister's journey to the centre of the moral compass, decades-old editing techniques and the demise of video clubs. We actually recorded this about six months ago, but we've been putting the edit off, due to a tricky situation caused by the coming together of Danny's arse and the 'next chapter' button on the DVD remote. Hopefully you won't see the joins.

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DwarfCast 49 - Justice Commentary featured image
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Once more the G&T team have assembled to talk about one of them Red Dwarf episodes everyone seems to like these days, and also cover another series of deleted scenes, worts and all. The voices in which Justice will be done are: Ian Symes, John Hoare, Tanya Jones, Daniel Stephenson, Jonathan Capps and the Fan Club's Jo Sharples.

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