Stasis Leaked
The Unofficial Behind the Scenes Guide to the First Series of Red Dwarf
Jane Killick
Published by Elly Books at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 Jane Killick
Based on articles originally published in Red Dwarf Smegazine and TV Zone:
Copyright 1993 and 1994 Jane Killick
Discover other titles from Elly Books at: www.ellybooks.co.uk
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Cover Image: Galaxy M82 taken by the Hubble Space Telescope for NASA
Conspiracy theorists note: The beer and spaceship were not present when the original photograph was taken. Honest.
Contents
Chapter Three: Balance of Power
Chapter Five: Confidence and Paranoia
Chapter Seven: Peter Risdale-Scott, the BBC Man who said Yes!
Chapter Eight: Clare Grogan, the First Kochanski
Chapter Nine: Peter Wragg, Creating Space Scenes
Red Dwarf Series One Production Credits
Introduction
It was 9 o'clock on the 15th of February 1988 when I tuned in to BBC2 to watch a comedy programme set in space called Red Dwarf. I was a science fiction fan with a fondness for space series and, back then, I'd give anything a go. To be honest, I didn't know what to make of Red Dwarf at first. After a beautiful opening title sequence with a red spaceship and majestic music, the story began with two people cleaning out the nozzle of a vending machine. But my patience was rewarded some twenty minutes in when the set up was turned on its head. I may have been hoping for space, adventure and really wild things, but instead I found myself laughing: At the man with an 'H' stuck on his forehead, at a computer who insists "everybody's dead, Dave", and at a man who's evolved from a cat.
I still wasn't sure about the show, but I figured, it was worth tuning in the following week. That's when Red Dwarf grabbed me, with the episode Future Echoes. It was clever and funny. I loved the idea of light speed creating glimpses of the future which made me laugh and made for a good story. Thus I became, on February 22nd 1988, a Red Dwarf fan.
More than three years later, on a Sunday in December 1991, I went on location with the cast and crew to write a behind the scenes article for Starburst magazine. It was the first of many.
This book is a collection of some of those articles, looking at the making of Red Dwarf's first series. Most are based on an interview I did with Rob Grant and Doug Naylor in the Grant Naylor offices shortly after the filming of Red Dwarf VI (in 1993, I think) before the writing partners went their separate ways. It was one of the most entertaining interviews I have ever done, being both funny and fascinating. They had such good memories of what happened six years before that it was hard to fit in all their quotes. Snippets of other interviews, such as those with Craig Charles (Lister) and Chris Barrie (Rimmer) were carried out roughly around the same time. I've also included a few bonus interviews at the end which look back at the early days of Red Dwarf.
I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.
Jane Killick, 2010
The Long Journey into Space
The idea for Red Dwarf came from the minds of Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, two childhood friends from Manchester with an ambition to become comedy writers. Their careers began modestly on radio, with projects like the badly-received sitcom Wrinkles through to popular sketch shows like The News Huddlines, and the award-winning Son of Cliché. It was Cliché which featured a recurring sketch called Dave Hollins Space Cadet which later became the seed for Red Dwarf.
Rob and Doug subsequently moved to television where they became lead writers on the hugely successful puppet satire show, Spitting Image. Their television work also brought them into contact with producer Paul Jackson, with whom they'd worked on Three of a Kind. When they wrote a pilot script for Red Dwarf, it was Paul Jackson they gave it to. He liked the script, but thought the science fiction element would limit its audience and make it a hard sell. Other TV executives clearly agreed, as they rejected it... and rejected it... and rejected it again.
Rob and Doug did their best to make the script executive-friendly. They only put one model shot in the first episode - in other words, only one shot of the spaceship moving through space - so it wouldn't seem too expensive. The humour was based around characters, not 'space stuff' with an opening scene consisting of the two main characters bickering while forced to work together on a menial task. This was the philosophy of the show in those early days. It was The Odd Couple or Stepstoe & Son in space. The comedy came out of the situation of two disparate personalities trapped together.
It was BBC producer Peter Risdale-Scott who finally saw the potential in the script and commissioned the series. It must have helped that, by this time, Paul Jackson had gained a strong reputation for producing quirky and successful sitcoms. He'd worked on both The Young Ones (1982-84) and the Dawn French / Jennifer Saunders vehicle Happy Families (1985), also for the BBC in Manchester.
As for the casting, that was probably a surprise to everyone, not least Rob Grant and Doug Naylor who initially wanted traditional actors to play the roles. Even they are not entirely sure how they ended up with a poet, an impressionist, a dancer and a comedian.
Chris Barrie recalls: "I heard Alfred Molina had been offered my part [Rimmer]. It would have been interesting if it had been cast with luvvies, you know traditional luvvies, and not the smeg heads that eventually took the roles!"
Chris had been making a name for himself as an impressionist in TV and Radio for several years. Many of the voices in Spitting Image (such as Ronald Reagan) were his. So he was well known to Rob and Doug, not only for his time on Spitting Image, but also for his work on Son of Cliché where he'd played the computer Hab in the Dave Hollins Space Cadet sketches. "I went along to the auditions [for Red Dwarf] like many people that they'd worked with," he says, "because they knew us and it might be a good place to start auditioning people."
Craig Charles was not so much invited to audition, as badgered to be let in. He'd been sent a copy of the script by Paul Jackson who wanted a second opinion on whether the Cat was a racist part. Craig not only no problem with the idea of Cat being played by a black man, he also thought he would be great as Lister. Up until that point, the public knew him best as the performance poet on BBC1's early evening talk show, Wogan.
Danny John-Jules, by all accounts, nailed the character of the Cat at the audition. As a professional dancer, he knew how to move and wowed the producers with his feline prowess. He also dressed for the occasion, in his father's demobbed suit. It was this suit which inspired the design of Cat's very first costume, the pink suit which appears in the first episode.
Completing the quartet was Norman Lovett. The stand-up comedian had worked with Paul Jackson before and originally auditioned for the role of Rimmer. When that part went to Chris Barrie, Norman was asked to play Holly instead.
With the addition of Producer / Director Ed Bye, the team was in place. There was just one problem - a BBC technicians strike. And that's where the story gets really interesting...
Chapter One: The End
Written by... Rob Grant & Doug Naylor
Produced & Directed by... Ed Bye
Rimmer... Chris Barrie
Lister... Craig Charles
Cat... Danny John-Jules
Holly... Norman Lovett
Chen... Paul Bradley
Selby... David Gillespie
Captain Hollister... Mac McDonald
McIntyre... Robert McCulley
Peterson... Mark Williams
Kochanski... CP Grogan
STORY
Arnold Rimmer and Dave Lister are ill-matched colleagues forced to work and bunk together aboard the Jupiter Mining Corporation ship, Red Dwarf. They spend their working days arguing with each other and carrying out vital technical duties, such as unblocking the chicken soup nozzle of vending machines, but dream of better things. Rimmer aims to work his way up the promotion ladder, while Lister dreams of becoming a farmer on the island of Fiji with his pregnant cat. When the ship's captain finds the cat on board, Lister is punished by being locked in stasis and frozen in time.
Three million years later, Lister is revived by the ship's computer, Holly. The rest of the crew have been wiped out, killed by a radiation leak, including Rimmer who is now a hologram. Together, they discover they share the ship with a creature who evolved from Lister's cat.
FUNNIEST MOMENT (arguably)
Norman Lovett's exquisitely deadpan delivery of the "everybody's dead, Dave" speech.
BEHIND THE SCENES
After such a difficult journey from the first script to finally getting someone to commission a series, you would have thought fate would be smiling on Red Dwarf. Fate, however, had other ideas.
A BBC technician's strike in 1987 scuppered the first attempt to record the series. "We would rehearse each show and then the show would get cancelled," says writer Doug Naylor. "We went through the whole series like this, not making a show and the whole thing got cancelled."
Co-writer Rob Grant remembers it was very frustrating. "Everybody thought at the time that they wouldn't bother remounting it because it's an expensive business, they had to pay for just about everything again. And there were other series around [and we] were first-timers. We were quite lucky to get re-mounted I think."
Red Dwarf begins with the ship and its entire crew going about their business, and Rimmer and Lister getting on each other's nerves. The first episode, The End, opens very much like a traditional sitcom (minus sofa). Lister and Rimmer are having an argument while cleaning out the chicken soup nozzle of a vending machine. The idea was to concentrate on the characters.
"We thought a lot of TV science fiction didn't have good characters," say the writers. "It was basically all about the ideas rather than characters, and very rarely did it have characters to relate to. You can relate to character much more easily if it's someone at the bottom of the heap, as opposed to a captain of a spaceship."
That was something Rob Grant says came from personal experience. "You are supposed to write about what you know and we certainly knew about having dull, ordinary jobs. It was modelled on when we were working the night-shift at a mail order company, loading paper into computers and taking it out again... We were on different shifts actually. We took the job to try and get some time to write together and found ourselves on different shifts, so one of us had just got up and the other was just going to bed whenever we had a chance to write."
The first episode is very different to those that followed because the crew are still alive for much of the episode. Indeed, the audience could be forgiven for thinking it was going to be a series about a fully-manned spaceship. That, says Doug, was originally going to be their central joke: "An idea at one point was to populate the entire crew with really famous actors, so it looks like 'here is this series in space with all these famous people'. And it's going to be, whoever, Mel Smith and Ronnie Barker who were in it and we wipe them all out, and at the end of the episode we're left with 'who are these guys?' And we thought we'd do that for quite a while, but obviously it was too expensive."
"I think also people would have been pretty pissed-off," laughs Rob. "They'd say 'that would've been a good series!'"
As part of the characterisation for Lister and Rimmer, the writers gave them goals. Lister's goal is to save up to buy a farm on Fiji where he'll have a sheep and a cow and breed horses (with horses and horses, obviously). He also plans to take his pregnant cat, Frankenstein. "He's really dreaming of an advert," says Rob.
The cat which played Frankenstein was later to make a star performance on the out-takes as, take after take, it refused to do what it was supposed to. "They always say don't do science fiction, don't work with animals and don't work with children and we had all three with Craig in the first show!" laughs Rob. "The cat just refused to behave, didn't it? It's funny because when we did the American show [a pilot which failed to become a series] the cat was just - I don't know what kind of hallucinogenics they were pumping into it - but it was an absolute dream-boat, it just performed beautifully."
The cat even ran away at one point and they thought they wouldn't be able to catch it! But it was Lister's underwear, not the cat, that caused Craig Charles the most embarrassment. "If you look closely, you can actually see my testicles hanging out of the side of my pants!" claims Craig, who played Lister. "It was weird because we did that take so many times and I was all nervous. People thought that it was supposed to be Lister spilling the milk all over the floor, but the milk came out so quickly. It kind of worked for Lister's character, but I remember at the time, I was nervous as hell and the cat wouldn't look at the photograph [of Fiji] and the cat kept scratching my leg. I got scratches all over my thighs."
According to Rob and Doug, they considered covering "Craig's family jewels" electronically, but instead went for an inferior take.
Rimmer's goal is to make something of himself, to become an officer, a role to which he is clearly unsuited. He can't even manage to sit the exam. He passes out and is removed on a stretcher. Rob Grant says this was again based on personal experience of "our own horror of exams and the way that there are people who do actually freeze up in them... But the idea of a guy actually being carried out of an exam, that actually happened at our school."
Rimmer, as becomes evident, will never become an officer because he dies before the end of the episode. But death isn't the handicap it used to and he is revived as a hologram. All of which might have been a bit confusing if it hadn't been for George McIntyre.
George is the first hologram to appear in Red Dwarf. After his funeral, he is guest of honour at a welcome reception in front of all of the crew at which Captain Hollister explains that he can't touch anything and has an 'H' on his forehead to stop people walking through him. George then gives a speech which was deliberately modelled on a best man's wedding reception speech.
But it didn't look much like a wedding / welcome back reception to Doug Naylor. "We had terrible problems because all the chairs in the canteen were red and I remember running around going 'this looks so... so horrific - we've got this set that looks like it's going to fall down any second and these horrible red chairs'. It just made it look so ghastly and there was no time to change the red chairs or paint them and so they had jackets hung over the backs of most of them to disguise this."
(Curiously, the version of the episode which made to air clearly shows the chairs to be silver-coloured metal.)
George was originally going to be played by Nick Maloney as an Australian. However, after the technicians strike, he wasn't available and was replaced by Robert McCulley who decided to play the character as Welsh. "That's an actors' thing," shrugs Rob. "Sometimes they think putting on an accent makes the character and that annoys me a lot. He was meant to be Australian in fact, because we wanted it to be an international vessel. We wanted to give the idea that it wasn't just white Anglo-Saxons who survived. We wanted to make it as multi-national as possible. It was supposed to be a French ship originally and we were going to have all the signs up in French, but we settled for Esperanto in the end... We had to have this Esperanto guy come round and translate all the signs for us. In fact, he was such a boring person that we dropped the whole Esperanto idea."