Well, my second series is finished in one of my “marathons”.   That’s Red Dwarf.  The first one I did was Doctor Who (which took 2+ years and over 880 episodes).  Red Dwarf was much lighter. Both in tone and in volume.  There were only 74 episodes there.  After finishing Doctor Who, I took a break, as that was a grind.  But after a few weeks I found myself missing the grind, so I chose Red Dwarf as my next project.

I’ll never forget the day I discovered this.  At the time, Red Dwarf had just finished airing its second series in the UK, and there were only 12 episodes total.  I was living in Philadelphia at the time, and the PBS station there was (so they said) the first in the US to get Red Dwarf.  That particular day the Doctor Who fan club I belonged to had just finished manning the phone banks for a PBS pledge drive – something we did often.  We went home to one of the members houses just to hang out.  We know from being at the station that they planned a Red Dwarf marathon late that night.  The group of us hung out and watched the pilot together, and it was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen.  I quickly left to go home to record the rest.  Given it was a PBS pledge drive, I had some time to get home before Episode 2 started (I didn’t live far away).  I set the VCR and recorded the remaining 11, and holy cow.  Fell in love.

As I’ve said many times over the years, Red Dwarf is what you would get if the guys from Monty Python tried to make Star Trek.

Took the obsession further with the next few series, as it was the early 90’s, and BBC shows didn’t make it to PBS quite that fast (took upwards of two years to get new stuff), so I would import PAL tapes and convert them.   It was the first episode of Series 3 that absolutely cemented my love of the show.  A quick explainer of this episode (entitled “Backwards”)…

As the bulk of this episodes takes place in a parallel universe but backwards… The speech of the native characters there is backwards to us.  This was 1989.  I was determined to figure out what it was, because on screen there was no explanation for most of it.  Some of it was, and when it was shown it was relevant to the plot, so they needed the audience to understand that.

At this point I was still using Apple // computers.  So what I did is I recorded all of the backwards speech from the episode, loaded it into a sound editor program (late 80’s version of something like Audacity today), and turned it around. Nearly all of it was relevant to the plot – it was what you would think it would be based on context.

Except for one segment.  Towards the end of the episode, there was a club manager who came in to fire Kryten & Rimmer from this stage show act they had put together in the backwards universe.  It goes on a for a bit, and has no text saying what he’s saying.  We get a little bit from Kryten saying they’re fired, but no direct explanation.  Even the subtitles simply say “speaking backwards”.  This was the most interest to me.  The start of it is relevant talking about firing them, but halfway through he changes gears and says..  “I’m not actually addressing you, I’m addressing the one prat in the country who has bothered to get a hold of this recording, turn it round and actually work out the rubbish that I’m saying. What a poor, sad life he’s got!”

Oh my lord, when I heard that coming out of my Apple // speakers, it was the moment I fell in love with Red Dwarf forever.  That they would put a plant in there to insult fans who were studious enough to figure out the backwards speech was bloody gold to me.  I LOVED THAT – even though it was me they were trashing in the episode.  :)

The show’s base premise is simple.  A man on a ship smuggled a cat on board in violation of ship rules.  He got put into suspended animation over that, during which point the entire crew was killed.  The ship computer let him out three million years later, where his only companions are the ship computer, a life form that evolved from the kittens from his original cat, and a hologram of one of the dead crew.  Seems simple enough, but in that concept comedy gold was born.  As the show evolved more characters came into being, and the plots got more outlandish.  But I’ll never forget the brilliance that those original 12 episodes had.   I’ve enjoyed the ride, and hope some day to see more of it.

Click here to see my marathon page for Red Dwarf.

Next up.. Star Trek: The Original Series.