There's no kind of atmosphere
I'm all alone
More or less
Let me fly Far away from here
Fun fun fun
In the sun sun sun
I want to lie
Shipwrecked and comatose
Drinking fresh
Mango juice
Goldfish shoals
Nibbling at my toes
Fun fun fun
In the sun sun sun
Fun fun fun In the sun sun sun
What a life I’ve lived.
In the case of "Red Dwarf", the genius was in having the ship be an ugly industrial environment in the vein of "Dark Star", "Alien", "Outland" etc. That allowed for sets to be built easily and cheaply. I think some of it was even filmed in a BBC canteen/cafeteria.
You see this with TNG v DS9. TNG would have one alien ship in an episode at best. It forces you to write story. Come DS9 and you can have 50 bajillion ships on screen so they write a story to make that happen. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, DS9 and B5 are good shows, but I miss the days when Captain Picard would mull over the implications of the prime directive with a cup of tea.
"We open on the corridor of a space ship. Space Odyssey this is not, no high tech serenity here. No, the is very much an ordinary, boring corridor. It could even have been a corridor in a TV studio..."
RIP Rob! Will be having a vindaloo, lager, and maybe some fish (Fish! Fish! Fish!) later in your honor
(EDIT: 100% talking about the UK version here, had no idea or forgot there _was_ an American version)
> Grant Naylor is a gestalt entity occupying two bodies, one of which lives in north London, the other in south London. The product of a horribly botched genetic-engineering experiment, which took place in Manchester in the late fifties, they try to eke out two existences with only one mind. They attended the same school and the same university, but, for tax reasons, have completely different wives.
> The first body is called Rob Grant, the second Doug Naylor. Among other things, they spent three years in the mid-eighties as head writers of Spitting Image; wrote Radio Four's award-winning series Son of Cliche; penned the lyrics to a number one single; and created and wrote Red Dwarf for BBC television.
> They have made a living variously by being ice-cream salesmen, shoe-shop assistants and by attempting to sell dodgy life-assurance policies to close friends. They also spent almost two years on the night shift loading paper into computer printers at a mail-order factory in Ardwick. They can still taste the cheese 'n' onion toasties.
> Their favourite colour is orange.
After that, they each wrote an additional Red Dwarf novel individually / separately. Personally I've never come across those last two novels, although I always check for them whenever visiting a used book store. Maybe they were only released in the UK. They're available on Amazon in the US, but I haven't quite given up hope on stumbling across them naturally yet...
Backwards spent the first section of the book in the backwards universe, over years. It’s has an interesting exploration of the implications of that universe. By comparison Last Human wraps that up in a few pages and spends most of its time dealing with android assassins.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mlnntKi2no
Even the second attempt at it, with Star Trek DS9's Terry Farrell (as Cat), was a bad idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfJsViD9SjM
The original was lightning in a bottle.
Some random Red Dwarf outtakes: https://youtu.be/l6VTzq5N0Mo
I fell off it after they had that comeback season roughly in 2000 where the whole ship got revived. Then I saw a few clips from a later season where everyone was pretty schlubby. I'll need to track down some way to re-watch the whole thing.
The later series/seasons are very uneven, which surprised me. I stopped watching originally around when Chloe Annette's Kochanski was introduced but I was surprised that instead of a steady decline that the quality was very up and down.
(This is a show where two teams are left inside a scrapheap and given a day, or so, to build a contraption/device.)
He was just so enthusiastic about all the teams, and seemed genuinely interested in both the design, the building, and the performance of whatever it was they were being challenged to build.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapheap_Challenge
But I can't say I've ever heard of that before, or seen any. I used to watch the UK series while having lazy breakfasts every Sunday morning with my then-partner.
That was always a nice treat for us both.
Also of note: Grant and Naylor wrote a series of Red Dwarf novels that were surprisingly good. They really fleshed out a lot of the character behind Lister and Rimmer. One novel goes deep on the concept of Better than Life, a one episode throwaway in the show but expanded to true horror in the novel.
They split (same time as they split on the show) and wrote separate novels in different continuity in the end. IMO Grant’s was notably better.
It's a pretty funny sci-fi book, similar dry wit.. I picked it up at a yard sale only because it said "from the creator of Red Dwarf" even though I mostly only knew of the show through others..
If you haven't read the books, please do yourself a favour. They are far far better than the series, have much more depth and have not dated as badly. I loved Red Dwarf when it was on TV (jesus, I was 12 years old..) but I find it a little hard to watch now. Some parts are still great though.
Rest in peace.