DwarfCast 108 – Cassandra Commentary DwarfCasts Posted by Jonathan Capps on 18th June 2020, 11:58 Subscribe to DwarfCasts: RSS • iTunes In what is quickly becoming something close to a nasty habit, we're back once again with another episode commentary. And today is a day for both joy and joy, as we finally put Series VIII to bed with the long, long overdue commentary for Cassandra. Danny Stephenson, Jonathan Capps and Ian Symes once again convene to discuss this episode's title of 'the good one in series viii', the nature of predeterminism, and to offer a surprisingly generous appraisal of series VIII's position in Red Dwarf history. As if all that wasn't *quite* enough for your poor ears to handle, we've also got an especially waffly edition of Waffle Men in which we get far more self reflective than is entirely necessary. Read more →
Take the Fifth Features Posted by John Hoare on 10th February 2019, 12:48 "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. Read more →
Gaps In The Red:The Last Day of Series VIII Features Posted by Ian Symes on 15th May 2018, 08:08 UPDATE (20/05/18): New documents come to light! The recent mumblings regarding a possible imminent announcement of brand new Red Dwarf naturally lead to a discussion about the merits of Series VIII, because this is Ganymede & Titan. In the course of what would go on to be a characteristically tedious debate, an interesting link was brought to light by commenter bloodteller: a contemporary set report on the final studio recording of the series, miraculously still online nearly twenty years after it was first published. This was a great find, remarkable for several reasons. Firstly, it turns out that the internet-enabled fans of the late 1990s had a dangerously casual attitude to spoilers compared to the self-regulating secrecy of today - every single scene described in detail and badly remembered jokes reproduced in full, online months before broadcast. It also throws up some neat little details about the production that would otherwise be lost to the mists of time, such as a message to the fans being signed "big hugs and kisses - the Inquisitor", the audience being shown a picture of Ed Bye in a dress, and an incident where a make-up artist is caught unaware by a freshly-painted set. Read more →
DwarfCast 88 – Only The Good… Commentary DwarfCasts Posted by Ian Symes on 20th August 2017, 15:54 Subscribe to DwarfCasts: RSS • iTunes It can't have escaped anyone's attention that things have been a bit slow on the old DwarfCast front of late. It's becoming increasingly difficult to get sufficient numbers of us together in the same room, but we managed to gather three on a Friday night last month. And how did we mark this rare and joyous occasion? By watching the fourth worst Red Dwarf episode of all time. You're welcome. So join Jonathan Capps, Danny Stephenson, Ian Symes and the Fan Club's Jo Sharples as we discuss mostly the bad bits of Only The Good..., covering such diverse topics as how to amuse yourself in prison, multiple piss-poor fonts, Danny John-Jules's cracking set of pins, having it off with Hollister, what the opposite of lemon is, and Richard Naylor's first producer job. Read more →
Red Dwarf: The Complete Guide To Almost Everything Features Posted by Ian Symes on 15th August 2015, 14:00 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... Read more →
Xtended Revisited: Back in the Red Features Posted by John Hoare on 12th May 2015, 19:17 Welcome to the thrilling climax of Xtended Revisited - for which we turn our eyes away from material first released on a scruffy VHS in 1997 as per our first three parts, and instead turn to a nice shiny DVD release from 2006. And what we have here is a rather different proposition. The story behind-the-scenes of Back in the Red is oft-told: planned originally as a one hour special to open the series, due to timing and budgetary reasons it ended up being split into a three-part episode. Doug was never happy with the result, and when the VIII DVD came along, as well as the broadcast episodes being included, the opportunity was taken to create a brand new edit - combining all the episodes into a single part, and adding some dialogue scenes which were cut from the broadcast version for reasons of time. And thus Back in the Red Xtended was born. Read more →
High & Low: Deleted Scenes Features Posted by John Hoare on 12th March 2015, 13:54 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.) Read more →
DwarfCast 59 – Back In The Red Commentary DwarfCasts Posted by Ian Symes on 9th January 2015, 17:09 Subscribe to DwarfCasts: RSS • iTunes Nearly a decade ago, we embarked on a mission to record commentaries for every single episode of Red Dwarf. Progress is slow, and occasionally entire years will pass without an update, but we'll get there eventually. However, getting a high proportion of G&T staffers in the same room at the same is a rare, nay freak occurrence, and so when we actually get a chance to blabber through an episode of our favourite show together, we usually want it to be an episode we actually like. Luckily, two men with strong stomachs and erratic sleeping patterns are on hand to wade through the shit bits when all others have gone home or fallen asleep... Read more →
DwarfCast 52 – Pete Commentary DwarfCasts Posted by Jonathan Capps on 21st August 2013, 22:09 Subscribe to DwarfCasts: RSS • iTunes Get out your map, identify the nearest hill, and bloodly well run for it because G&T are doing a Red Dwarf VIII commentary and that shit's never pretty. In previous years the Krytie TV commentary decended into a pathetic, drunken argument, and the commentary for Cassandra was so soul crushingly depressing that we never even bothered releasing it. Read more →
Dave’s Red Dwarf Weekends: VIII Edits Features Posted by John Hoare on 10th September 2012, 10:48 For many years, I have sat perched on the edge of my chair, bitching about UKTV and Red Dwarf edits. About how pointless they are, about how they show no respect for the show, about how they often cut out the funniest moments of the episode. But whenever it came to documenting them, it seemed an insurmountable task. Well, with Dave showing each series in the run-up to Red Dwarf X, it's pretty much now or never. So, in the sprit of my recent I'm Alan Partridge Series 2 dissection, here is a list of every edit made to Red Dwarf VIII, as shown on Dave pre-watershed on Saturday 8th September. Whilst reading this article, you may wish to ponder this dichotomy: how can a channel care so much about Red Dwarf to commission a new series, and yet give its repeats so little respect? Read more →
