Red Dwarf
- This article describes the British science fiction comedy television series. For the type of star, see red dwarf.
Red Dwarf is a British science fiction sitcom ("Britcom" in the U.S.), created and originally written by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor.
It parodies most (if not all) of the sub-genres of science fiction but is first and foremost an 'odd couple' type comedy. The first series aired on BBC2 in 1988. Seven further series have so far been produced, and a film is currently in production. The idea was originally developed from the Dave Hollins: Space Cadet sketches introduced on Grant and Naylor's 1984 BBC Radio 4 show called "Son of Cliché".
Production history
Grant and Naylor wrote the first six series together, before Grant left in 1996 leaving Naylor to write the next two with a series of new and less well-known writers, notably Paul Alexander.
Series I and II were BBC productions, series III was made by Paul Jackson Productions, and all subsequent series were made by Grant Naylor Productions. In practice all that changed were the names, although at the beginning of series IV production moved from the BBC's Manchester studios to Shepperton Studios.
A period of four years elapsed between Series VI and VII. When the series returned, it was shot on film and no longer in front of a live audience. Although critics praised the higher production values for Series VII, when the show returned two years later for Series VIII, it had reverted to videotape production.
Scenario
In the show, the Red Dwarf is a gigantic spaceship, belonging to Jupiter Mining Corporation, which, following an on-board radioactive disaster, is left to drift through deep space. Three million years later, after the radiation has dropped to a safe level, the only surviving crew member emerges from stasis (where he'd been placed as punishment, though his stay was intended to be only eighteen months) and is surprised to face this grave reality.
This is the slob anti-hero Dave Lister (played by Craig Charles). Lister speaks with a marked Scouse accent. He craves Indian food such as vindaloo curries and shami kebabs, all of which are in plentiful supply on board the ship (though the mechanics of storing curries for thousands of millennia have not been explored on the show).
Lister enjoys the company of a hologrammatic simulation of a deceased crew member Arnold J. Rimmer (the 'J' stands for Judas), played by Chris Barrie. Rimmer, Lister's room-mate before the disaster, is a humourless and status-obsessed loser, loathed by everybody on board. It was he who actually caused the radioactive disaster by poorly repairing a shielding plate on the power core, although in his defense he would have been able to do a better job if Lister hadn't been imprisoned in stasis. (Technically, the facility for simulating dead crew is reserved for high-ranking and/or essential personnel, but the ship's computer explains in an early episode that it believes company — and specifically Rimmer's company — to be essential to Lister's mental health. Lister expresses incredulity, but later implicitly admits that the computer was right, telling another character that "driving Rimmer nuts is what keeps me going"). The choice of hologram personality was rendered a moot point early in the first season; Lister almost from the start planned to find the computer disk containing the holographic backup of his ex-girlfriend Kristine Kochanski, but soon after he was activated Rimmer realized Lister would try to shut him down (the computer can only generate one hologram at a time) and hid all of the remaining holographic identity disks, somewhere where Lister would never find them. Notwithstanding his desperate desire to not be turned off, the holographic Rimmer bemoans his fate — he's dead, and his current sensibility is just a simulation of how he would feel if he were alive. In later episodes, Rimmer is also manifest as the superheroic character, Ace Rimmer.
Also accompanying Lister on his voyage back to Earth is The Cat (played by Danny John-Jules). The Cat is no ordinary cat, but a member of the species Felis sapiens, descended from a domestic cat which Lister had smuggled aboard three million years prior. The Cat is appears as a typcal biped humanoid with slightly elongated canines, he retains a cat-like interest in fish and female cats, a heightened sense of smell, unbridled vanity, and grooming in a uniquely feline fashion sense.
The other principal character is Holly, the ship's computer with a supposed IQ of 6000 (visible as a disembodied head on the screen and played, for the first two series and in series 8, by Norman Lovett and later by Hattie Hayridge after Holly performed a 'head sex change' upon himself; Lovett is scheduled for the movie version). Holly runs most of Red Dwarf's systems despite now suffering from computer senility.
Among Holly's systems are the service droids known as skutters that clean, perform engineering tasks and function as Rimmer's hands since he cannot touch anything non-holographic.
Later on, the crew are joined by the servile android Kryten (most famously played by Robert Llewellyn, but played by David Ross in his first episode) whom Lister encourages to break his altruistic programming and become a lying, cheating human like the rest of us.
Lister's longlasting crush is Kristine Kochanski, played by C. P. (Clare) Grogan. She was killed along with the rest of the crew in the first episode, and several subsequent episodes revolve around Lister attempting to bring her back, either through time travel or as a computer-generated simulation like Rimmer. In the seventh season, an alternative Kochanski from a parallel universe (played by Chloë Annett) joined the series as a regular character.
One interesting aspect of the Red Dwarf universe is that there are no aliens (much to Rimmer's disappointment). Although there is a large and bizarre mix of intelligent life within the Red Dwarf universe, all of these are somehow or another derived from Earth. Most of the strange creatures the crew encounters are GELFs: Genetically Engineered Life Forms.
Episode list
Series 1 (1988)
- The End - The crew are wiped out by a radiation leak when Rimmer fails to fit a drive plate properly. Three million years later Lister is revived from stasis finding himself the last human being alive. Safely sealed in the hold during this time a species of cat has evolved from his pregnant cat. Holly, the ships computer, brings Listers dead bunkmate Rimmer back as a hologram - apparently to keep Lister sane.
- Future Echoes - As the ship reaches light speed the crew see echos of the future including a Lister that's now a proud parent of twin boys, and a Lister that's just been blown to bits in the drive-room...
- Balance of Power - Lister takes the chefs exam in an attempt to outrank Rimmer into handing over tho hologram disc for the love of his life Kristine Kochanski.
- Waiting for God - Rimmer uncovers a pod which he believes belongs to an alien race called the Quaggars. Meanwhile Lister finds out he is the god of the cat race.
- Confidence and Paranoia - Lister breaks the quarantine on the officers deck only to contract a mutated pneumonia virus that makes his dreams come to life. Unfortunately his latest dream is the personification of his ego-boosting confidence and his "is that a urine stain on your trousers" paranoia.
- Me² - Rimmer finds out that even he can not stand himself after he tricks Lister into running a second hologram of himself instead of Kochanski.
Series 2 (1988)
- Kryten - The Series 4000 service mechanoid Kryten sends out a distress call on behalf of the remaining female crew of his ship, the Nova 5, which is picked up by Red Dwarf. However, things are not entirely as they seem...
- Better Than Life - A post pod that has been chasing Red Dwarf for three million years finally catches up to deliver the letters, and Rimmer recieves a letter from his mother informing him that his father is dead. To cheer him up, Lister and the Cat accompany Rimmer into the total-immersion computer game Better Than Life, where everyone's dreams come true.
- Thanks For The Memory - It's Rimmer's death-day, and a party is arranged for him on a convenient planetoid. Back on Red Dwarf, he is still drunk and confides in Lister as to how many times in his life he's had sex, and it isn't many. Lister decides to do something about it, but a more worrying problem arises the following morning when he and the Cat have casts on their legs, Lister's jigsaw puzzle has been magically solved and four days have disappeared from Holly's memory banks and Lister's diary.
- Stasis Leak - Holly detects a stasis leak on Level 16. Stepping through the leak transports the gang back to three weeks before the accident that wiped the crew out. Lister is determined to solve the puzzle of a picture he found of himself and Kochanski getting married, while Rimmer is more concerned with ensuring he goes into stasis and survives the accident.
- Queeg - Holly's increasing fallibility results in him being replaced by the backup computer, Queeg 500. Queeg runs things strictly by the book: Lister and Cat are forced to work for their food, while Rimmer is put through the regulation 500 jerks and three-mile run every day, whether he's conscious or not, and Holly is relegated to nightwatchman. It's more than he can take and he challenges Queeg to a contest to determine who will run Red Dwarf, with erasure for the loser...
- Parallel Universe - Holly invents the Holly Hop Drive. To the casual observer, it looks simply like a box with "Start" and "Stop" buttons, but to Holly, the drive is capable of taking Red Dwarf back to Earth immediately. The device malfunctions, however, and Red Dwarf is catapulted into a parallel universe where society developed along matriarchal lines, with extreme consequences for Lister...
Series 3 (1989)
- Backwards - While Cat and Lister are busy ogling Wilma Flintstone, Rimmer escorts the newly-repaired Kryten on his driving test in Starbug 1, during which Kryten pilots the ship into a time hole, and they emerge in a universe where time runs backwards, crash-landing on the planet Htrae in the year 3991. Lister and Cat follow them in Starbug 2 and, upon seeing a sign for Nodnol, are convinced they have landed somewhere in Bulgaria.
- Marooned - Holly orders the ship be evacuated as Red Dwarf is approaching not one, but five black holes. Lister and Rimmer head one way in Starbug, while Kryten and the Cat go the other in Blue Midget, to rendezvous with Holly and Red Dwarf on the other side. However, Starbug is hit by an asteroid and crashes on an ice planet, with little food and hardly any kindling...
- Polymorph - Holly detects a non-human life-form aboard ship. The crew are skeptical (the last time this happened, it was one of Lister's socks), but for once she is right. A genetic mutant that can change its shape into anything, be it animal, vegetable or mineral has invaded Red Dwarf, and it begins to feed on the emotions of the crew...
- Bodyswap - A Skutter malfunctions and runs amok, causing over two thousand wiring faults and turning the ship into a massive booby-trap, and Lister's innocent attempt to order a milkshake and a chocolate bar sets off the self-destruct system. As the auto-destruct can only be over-ridden by a senior officer, Kryten performs a mind-swap, and the mind of Executive Officer Carol Brown is placed into Lister's body. She fails to over-ride the countdown and it continues to zero, when Lister's meal arrives as ordered. Rimmer then convinces Lister to swap bodies with him: he will be able to enjoy the benefits of having a tangible body again for a couple of weeks, while he exercises and gets Lister back into shape. However, he is unable to resist the pleasures he's been denied for so long...
- Timeslides - Kryten discovers that a mutating batch of photographic developing fluid is now capable of bringing photographs to life, and makes it possible to step into slides (albeit only within the confines of the photo). After visiting Frank Rimmer's wedding and one of Adolf Hitler's speeches, Lister goes back in time and changes history by giving his eighteen-year-old self an invention which will make him a billionaire. Rimmer is left alone with Holly and resolves to restore history to its rightful course and save Lister from his life as a billionaire: it's his duty as a complete and total bastard!
- The Last Day - A message pod reaches Lister from Diva-Droid International, manufacturers of Kryten and the 4000 series of mechanoids. It announces that Kryten is outdated and should shut himself down, as his replacement is on the way, and Kryten resigns himself to his fate. Lister decides to throw a last-day party for Kryten, and waking up the following morning with a hangover, Kryten finds that he's had fun for the first time, and decides not to go quietly after all...
Series 4 (1991)
- Camille - Lister begins to try and break Kryten's programming in order to make him able to lie, cheat and be insulting. Kryten then takes Rimmer asteroid-spotting in Starbug, and when Kryten recieves a distress call he lies to Rimmer and goes to search for survivors. He finds Camille, who appears to him to be a female 4000 GTi mechanoid, and the two fall instantly in love. The truth outs when Camille returns to Red Dwarf: she is a Pleasure GELF, designed to be everyone's perfect mate. She reverts to her real appearance (a big green blob), but Kryten still takes her out on a date. The relationship is put in jeopardy when Camille's partner Hector arrives, and Kryten has a difficult decision to make...
- DNA - Red Dwarf encounters a drifting spacecraft and the crew investigate, finding a DNA modifier. The Cat fiddles with it and manages to change Lister into a chicken, then a mouse, and back to human. Then, Kryten is caught in the DNA modifier and he becomes human too...
- Justice - Even a bout of space mumps isn't enough to keep Lister in bed when he discovers there's a woman on board. An escape pod from a prison ship has been picked up. The ship was transporting dangerous criminals to their final trial, sentence and incarceration on Justice World, but there was a mutiny, and everyone on board was killed except for a female prison officer and one of the inmates. The crew head to Justice World themselves in Starbug, in case the pod contains the prisoner, but the Justice Computer puts a spanner in the works when it convicts Rimmer on 1,167 counts of second-degree murder, a consequence of his faulty drive-plate repair that killed the crew of the JMC vessel Red Dwarf...
- White Hole - Holly's condition has degenerated to the point where she cannot count without banging her head on her screen. Kryten is conducting an intelligence-compression test, which if successful on Lister's old toaster, could restore Holly's IQ of 6,000. The test works on the toaster, but goes wrong on Holly, leaving her with an IQ of more than 12,000 but a lifespan of three minutes. She shuts herself down and leaves the ship on emergency backup systems. As if that isn't bad enough, Red Dwarf is running into a white hole, and will be destroyed unless they can plug the hole. Holly is switched back on and quickly concocts an audacious plan that involves playing pool with planets... (guest starring David Ross as Talkie Toaster)
- Dimension Jump - In a parallel universe, dashing and heroic test pilot Arnold J. 'Ace' Rimmer pilots a ship equipped with the new Wildfire drive, which will exceed the speed of reality and propel him into a different dimension. He duly arrives in the Red Dwarf universe, just as Starbug is carrying the crew to an ocean planet on a fishing trip. He collides with Starbug, which crashes, and Ace heads down to help Starbug. Rimmer is naturally extremely jealous of this 'better' version of himself, and Ace eventually decides to leave, but not before revealing to Lister that he was kept down a year in school and learned to stand up for himself, while Rimmer wasn't and never did.
- Meltdown - Kryten discovers a matter transporter in the research lab, which Holly informs them will home in on any atmosphere-bearing planet within 500,000 light years. The crew are sent 200,000 light-years to Wax-World, a Wax-Droid theme park that has been abandoned for millions of years, during which time the droids have broken their programming and now the inhabitants of Villain World are waging war against Hero World. Rimmer sets himself up as commander of the Hero World droids, seeing this as his chance to pit his tactical wits against the greatest military minds of the past, while the Cat and Lister are captured by Adolf Hitler.
Series 5 (1992)
- Holoship - Rimmer suddenly disappears from Red Dwarf and re-materialises on the holo-ship Enlightenment, a ship made out of light and crewed entirely by holograms who can eat, drink, touch, feel and taste anything on the ship, as light can touch light. The crew is also required to have sex at least twice a day for its own sanity, and Rimmer takes advantage of this with Commander Nirvanah Crane. They begin to fall in love, but the ship is crewed by the hologramatic cream of the Space Corps and the only way to gain a place on the ship is to defeat one of its crew in an intelligence test. Rimmer decides that as he has a 96% chance of failure, the only option left open to him is to cheat like the bastard that he is, but he doesn't know that in the challenge, he will compete against Nirvanah... (guest starring Jane Horrocks as Nirvanah Crane)
- The Inquisitor - Starbug is captured by a being called the Inquisitor and returned to Red Dwarf. The Inquisitor is a self-repairing simulant who survived until the end of time and, realising that there is no god and no afterlife, decided that the only point of life was to make something of yourself. He is on a journey through time, seeking out people who wasted their lives and removing them, allowing a different person to exist in their place, what would have happened if a different sperm met a different egg. The Inquisitor tries the crew and finds Lister and Kryten unworthy of existence...
- Terrorform - Rimmer and Kryten have a rather nasty accident while moon-hopping: Kryten is left in pieces among the wreckage of Starbug and Rimmer is gone. Kryten sends his hand back to Red Dwarf to fetch help. When Lister and the Cat arrive, they find themselves on a Psy-Moon, a planetoid which terraforms itself to match the psyche of anyone who lands on it, and a planetoid based on Rimmer's sub-conscious is a very dangerous place to be, especially for Rimmer, who is about to be tortured and sacrificed to a hideous creature formed by his own self-loathing...
- Quarantine - Red Dwarf recieves a distress call from the hologram Dr. Hildegarde Lanstrom. Lanstrom had been working on a theory that viruses can be negative or positive, and had synthesised several positive viruses, including ones that grant whoever contracts it extreme good luck, and extreme sexual magnetism (the Cat fears he's a terminal case). However, when the crew (minus Rimmer) arrive at Lanstrom's lab, she proves to have contracted a holo-virus and is totally insane. She passes this virus on to Rimmer before dying, resulting in Rimmer imprisoning his shipmates in Quarantine (in compliance with Space Corps Directive 595) and then appearing before them, completely mad, clad in a red-and-white checked gingham dress and army boots...
- Demons and Angels - Kryten has a new invention which he hopes will solve any supply problems that might arise on Red Dwarf, called a triplicator. It can create two copies of anything placed within its field. The machine soon develops several flaws. Firstly, the copies have a lifespan of exactly one hour. Secondly, while one copy is infinitely superior to its original, the other is infinitely worse. Finally, when Kryten reverses the procedure, Red Dwarf explodes. The crew escapes and discovers two Red Dwarfs instead of wreckage, and the race is on to combine the 'high' ship with the 'low' ship before they both cease to be...
- Back to Reality - The crew are in Starbug on a recon mission to an ocean planet when they discover the wreckage of the SSS Esperanto, which conducted a marine seeding experiment. It appears that all life on board committed suicide, right down to a haddock which closed its gills and suffocated itself. The crew is promptly attacked by a giant squid and Starbug crashes, and it's game over. The crew awakes, having just spent five years playing the total-immersion video game Red Dwarf, and they prepare to return to reality, a frightening totalitarian world. It's all a hallucination caused by the ink of the Despair Squid, which causes suicidal feelings, and it is down to Holly to snap the crew out of it before they follow the crew of the Esperanto and commit suicide...
Series 6 (1993)
- Psirens - Lister comes out of Deep Sleep (a less-efficient version of stasis) aboard Starbug with amnesia. Kryten brings him up to speed on the situation: Red Dwarf was lost 200 years ago, and he has been chasing the ship alone and upgrading Starbug for long-term habitation. There is a chance of recovering Red Dwarf at last by heading through an asteroid belt that Red Dwarf is forced to circumnavigate. However, the belt turns out to be a spaceship graveyard inhabited by psirens, shape-changing GELFs who lure unwary travellers to them and suck out their brains through a straw...
- Legion - Starbug is 24 hours behind Red Dwarf, and is losing ground on the larger ship. They are distracted when a heat-seeking 'missile' locks onto them and tractors them to a space station inhabited only by a being called Legion, who proves his good faith by converting Rimmer from soft light to hard light (making him able to touch and feel) and by removing Lister's appendix, on the verge of peritonitis. Unknown to them, Legion is in fact a Dallas, Texas in November 1963. Within minutes they have altered the future for the worse and now they're going to have to hatch a plot that's going to drive the conspiracy theorists nuts...
- Stoke Me A Clipper... - Ace Rimmer arrives from another dimension badly injured and reveals to Rimmer the secret of Ace - the fact that Rimmers from countless dimensions have all taken the reins to be everbodys favourite hero. Now Ace must train Rimmer to succeed him and keep the legend going.
- Ouroboros - The crew of Starbug come across a rift betmeen Dimensions and meet thier counterparts from another reality. Only this time Kochanski was in stasis and Lister is the hologram. The rift breaks and Kristine is trapped with our crew although Lister doesn't mind Kryten goes into jealousy override determined to get her back to her own dimension. Lister finally uncovers his parents identities.
- Duct Soup - An engine failure leaves the crew trapped in Listers quarters and they must navigate the tiny duct labyrinth to get to restart the engines before they crash. Lister starts to suffer from claustrophobia and explains how he got it while Kochanski tells how her Dave was gay.
- Blue - Lister finds himself missing Rimmer so much he starts dreaming about him. Kryten takes matters into his own hands by creating virtual ride The Rimmer Experience based on Rimmers diaries providing Lister with a permenant cure.
- Beyond a Joke - Kochanski, fed up with the purile activities of this crew, decides to educate them on the finer points of etiquate by introducing them to a virtual reality rendition of Pride and Prejudice. Krytens jealousy gets out of hand.
- Epideme - Lister gets infected with an intelligent virus and promptly fails to convince it not to kill him. Kochanski has a solution thats better than death but comes at a high price.
- Nanarchy - In an attempt to get Lister a new limb Kryten tracks down his missing nanobots only to find they are in Listers laundry basket and they've got an old friend with them.
Series 8 (1999)
- Back In The Red - Part 1 - Red Dwarf's size problem begins to correct itself with Starbug trapped inside an air duct. They escape just in time to be arrested by Captain Hollister, who has been resurrected along with the rest of the crew (including Rimmer, as he used to be), and the ship has been restored to its original condition before the JMC was forced to make severe cut-backs. Lister, facing imprisonment on Red Dwarf's prison floor, bribes Rimmer to help him out, giving Rimmer access to the crew's confidential files, and Rimmer also finds Dr. Lanstrom's luck and sexual magnetism viruses (Quarantine) in the wreckage of Starbug...
- Back In The Red - Part 2 - Rimmer has access to the crew's files, and he wastes no time in putting them to use (along with the sexual magnetism virus, of course). Lister, Kryten, Kochanski and Cat face the board of enquiry for the first time, and agree to the usage of psychotrophic drugs...
- Back In The Red - Part 3 - The accused make their escape from Red Dwarf thanks to the luck virus and the Cat's ability to make Blue Midget dance. However, they're really hallucinating under the influence of the drugs and are hooked up to an AR machine. Rimmer is worried: if Lister says anything about their agreement, he could be in trouble, so he sneaks into the AR suite to alter it. However, the accused are tipped off that they are in AR by Rimmer's tamperings, and manage to escape using the safety trap-doors built into the program. They confront Rimmer and convince him to escape with them, but there is one more twist remaining...
- Cassandra - Rimmer, Lister, Kryten, Kochanski, the Cat and Holly are all imprisoned in the Tank for two years for mis-using confidential files. Lister decides to sign everyone up for what he believes is a singing group called the Canaries: they are in fact a combat team who go first into dangerous situations. Their first mission is aboard the wreck of the SSS Silverberg, a prison ship for its computer, Cassandra, who can predict the future with 100% accuracy... (guest starring Geraldine McEwan as Cassandra)
- Krytie TV - After Kryten reveals he showers with the female inmates (having been classed as a woman when he arrived on Red Dwarf due to his lack of genitals), he is knocked out and reprogrammed by the less scrupulous members of the Tank, and duly starts up his own pay-TV venture, Krytie TV, and the star of its first show, 'Women's Shower Night', is none other than Kristine Kochanski. Meanwhile, Lister gets his guitar back, minus strings, and in the same post is notification of an appeal against his circumstances which if successful will apply to all other prisoners in Lister's situation...
- Pete - Part 1 - Rimmer and Lister aren't having a good time, frequently in and out of the captain's office for various offences, each of which annoy Hollister more and more until he snaps and has them thrown in the Hole, a sparse prison cell inhabited only by an insane Welshman called Birdman and his pet canary, Pete. Meanwhile, the others return from a Canary mission with a time wand, a device that can manipulate time, and when the time wand meets Pete, the consequences are not good...
- Pete - Part 2 - The gang decide to follow Rimmer's lead and run away from Pete, now de-evolved into a Tyrannosaurus rex, but he manages to eat the time wand. Meanwhile, Kryten's penis Archie (which he has made himself in an effort to be reclassified as a man) escapes, and he is prevented from chasing it when the Canaries are detailed to stop Pete after his deadly rampage through the supply decks...
- Only The Good... - The gang have been good recently and have got probation. Rimmer is waiting on Captain Holliser after an unfortunate incident with a baby dinosaur, his confining himself to the Hole for a year, and his recent contraction of yellow fever. Meanwhile, Red Dwarf is infected by a chameleonic microbe and the ship is evacuated, except for the inmates of the Tank...
Character List
The following people were semi-regular characters in Series 8
- Captain Hollister (played by Mac McDonald) (also made guest appearance in two episodes in Series 1 and one episode of Series 2)
- Warden Ackerman (played by Graham McTavish)
- Kill Crazy (played by Jake Wood)
US version
A pilot episode for an American version was produced for NBC in 1992, though never broadcast. The show followed essentially the same story as the original UK pilot, substituting American actors (including Craig Bierko as Lister) for the British; the one exception being Robert Llewellyn, who reprised his role as Kryten. The pilot was unsuccessful.
A later pilot consisting of scenes from the first pilot edited in with new footage (and featuring Terry Farrell as a female Cat), was also unsuccessful.
However, the comparison between the UK and US shows is interesting: the anti-hero, slobby pantheist Lister was replaced with a muscular hunk when he is translated for American TV. When Lister learns that three million years have passed in the UK show, he says "I've still got that library book..."; in the American version he says "My baseball cards must be worth a fortune!"
It is also interesting to note that the multi-ethnic cast of the British original (John-Jules is black, Charles mixed-race, and Barrie and Llewelyn white) was replaced by an entirely Caucasian one for the second US pilot (the first pilot still had a black Cat), leading John-Jules to dub it 'White Dwarf'.
Spin-offs
The franchise has expanded to include four novels, written by the show's creators, Doug Naylor and Robert Grant.
Last Human and Backwards are both (different) sequels to Better Than Life, and are not consistent with each other.
All four books were published in audiobook format, the first two read by Chris Barrie with Last Human read by Craig Charles and Backwards read by its author Rob Grant.
The song Tongue Tied, originally featured in a dream sequence in the episode Parallel Universe, was released as a single in 1993. It reached number 17 in the UK charts.
A planned Red Dwarf: The Movie has been delayed from its original schedule. According to the official website, it will now enter full production in January 2005, with details of a release date to follow.
Invented words
Red Dwarf is famous for innovating the word "smeg" in order to remove swearwords from the show and to add to a futuristic terminology. Some examples of the word in context are "smegger", "smeghead", "smeg off", "smeg-for-brains", and "smegging hell". The character of Rimmer famously tells a vending machine in one episode to "...smeg off, you smeggy smegging smegger!" The writers of Red Dwarf have stated that they invented the word and that it has no connection with any similar real words, such as "smegma"; very few fans, however, lend any credence to that claim.
The idea of a substitute curseword was borrowed from the BBC sitcom Porridge, which brought the word "Naff" into popular usage, and again used further in the Channel 4 sitcom Father Ted, which used the word "Feck".
There are other terminologies invented by Red Dwarf that are not as well-known as "smeg". Given the sarcastic and argumentative nature of the show's plotlines, many of these other new words are derogatory designations including "Goit" (one who is annoying or awkward — perhaps adapted from the word "git") and "Gimboid" (one who is stupid or clumsy — similar in meaning to "moron", and possibly an adaptation of the word "gimp").
The currency in use at the time Red Dwarf left the Solar System was apparently the "dollarpound", divided into one hundred "pennycents".
In one episode, Cat uses the word 'Jozxyqk' in a Scrabble game, claiming it to be a cat word meaning "...the sound you get when you get your sexual organs trapped in something."
Several sets, seen often in the earlier episodes, have the phrase "Level Nivelo" prominently displayed on one wall. "Nivelo" is not an invented word within the series, but rather Esperanto for the English word "level". In the Red Dwarf universe, the constructed language Esperanto is in much wider use than it is today, and Red Dwarf is officially a bilingual vessel. See the first episode in season two, "Kryten," where Rimmer attempts to learn Esperanto.
See also
