G&TV Special: Smeg Ups Rough Cut Features Posted by Ian Symes on 8th December 2019, 16:14 Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas everyone. It was twenty-five years ago this very month that all our mums went out to buy the Smeg Ups tape for us to open on Christmas Day 1994. For Red Dwarf fans of a certain age, this seems to be an almost universal experience, especially the ones like us who are still obsessed with it now - the joy and laughter provided by seeing the cast off-guard and out of character cemented our love for the show, and imbued us with a fondness for and fascination with the behind-the-scenes process too. So what better way to pay tribute than to investigate the process of making the video itself? At some point during the compiling stage of production, a rough cut was dubbed on to VHS, before any grading, mixing or sound effects were added, and with big "LINK Goes Here" captions in lieu of Llew. This tape somehow made its way out of the edit suite and into the hands of fans, who made copies for their friends, who made copies for their friends, and so on until an extremely low quality version, suffering from multiple layers of analogue generation loss, became a relatively readily available open secret. Inevitably, you can now find it on YouTube. The full length tape is there as an unlisted video, and there's also a compilation of the most interesting bits: Read more →
That’s gotta be Comedy Bloopers! Quickies Posted by John Hoare on 26th December 2015, 13:34 At 11:45pm on Christmas Day, BBC One showed the brilliantly-named programme Comedy Bloopers. I do hope you all enjoyed the BBC's other offerings over Christmas: Sci-Fi Drama, Period Drama, and Some People Dancing. As G&T is on reduced power over Christmas, I think I'll just toss out the cliche that it was undemanding fun, perfect for the end of a drunken evening, without really being that original or brilliantly put together. (Compare it with early It'll Be Alright On The Night episodes for how you really make this kind of show into something special, but I digress.) One thing that was pleasing about it however, is that it included a wide range of comedy, across different decades, rather than just concentrating on old or modern stuff. It's fun to see a Two Ronnies clip right next to Citizen Khan - or indeed, an Inbetweeners clip right next to Red Dwarf VI. Oh yeah, clips of Red Dwarf. And what would a G&T article be without a pointless list of them? 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 →
Play Listings! News Posted by John Hoare on 21st August 2007, 16:12 Slightly out-of-date with the title, but Play are now listing Red Dwarf: Series 1-3 - Remastered, for £39.99 - that's £10 off the RRP. Read more →
Nitpickers Unite! News Posted by John Hoare on 7th June 2007, 11:58 I used to love The Nitpicker's Guides, by Phil Farrand. Sitting there and wallowing in all the mistakes made in Star Trek might sound the saddest thing in the world - and that's because it is. But, dammit, I enjoy reading about the inconsistent nacelles on Enterprise model shots. Read more →
Smeg Outs UMD Cancelled News Posted by John Hoare on 23rd November 2006, 11:38 Yesterday, I was sitting there thinking, and I realised something. The Smeg Outs UMD release was planned for release in time for Christmas - but I couldn't see it listed anywhere. A quick check with Andrew on the Webboard revealed that it has actually been cancelled. At the time of the Smeg Ups release I said "I suppose sales will be the ultimate judge of whether the release was worth doing or not" - clearly, the answer was not. Maybe people were too busy buying releases like this. Read more →
#Oh, Mr. Guitar… News Posted by John Hoare on 10th July 2006, 10:58 Smeg Ups UMD released today! Read more →
Series III Smeg Ups Features Posted by Ian Symes on 21st November 2003, 00:00 Another batch of out-takes, all plundered from the 1995 Smeg Outs video. Thanks to the magic of missing studio rushes, this was in fact the only way of getting out-takes from certain scenes, as detailed in the article. Read more →
Series II Smeg Ups Features Posted by Ian Symes on 6th July 2003, 23:00 As per the Series I DVD, no actual new out-takes were used for this compilation. In fact, it is perfectly clear that whoever made the section was working directly from the Smeg Outs tape, as we'll prove below. Read more →
