About Red Dwarf

I know, I didn't expect that either.

From a distance, it's not much of a stretch. In the great schism of the 1990s, when letters were sent to DWM suggesting that future Doctor Who should be as much like Star Trek: The Next Generation as possible (and then, after the TV movie, that it should be as unlike The X-Files as possible), Doctor Who and Red Dwarf were seen as pod-brothers: both BBC, both sci-fi. I never believed it then and I don't believe it now, but you probably guessed that, not least because I loathe what's come to be called sci-fi. But I did watch the first episode of Red Dwarf in 1987, as did most of the boys in my class [ADVERTSING SMALL PRINT - girls not included in this survey - boys stay on one side of the classroom and girls on the other - boys may not cross over and talk to girls because that means they're gay somehow]. Still a few years away from the idea of "Cult TV", we just thought it was funny, and different, and unexpected. Younger readers may like to note that although the '80s were exactly as awful as you've gathered, "different" and "unexpected" were still good things then.

Because that's what comedy programmes were / are supposed to be, surely? We had the pleasure of watching "The End" and saying "oh, riiiight... is that guy coming out of the ventilator shaft descended from the cat, then?".

Not untypically, the '90s acceptance of Red Dwarf as "Cult" and "sci-fi" is what slit its throat. In the beginning, Grant and Naylor perceived it as "Steptoe and Son in space". The creators of Porridge pointed out circa 1990 that the essence of sitcom is "two blokes who don't like each other trapped in a room": though both the Fletch / Godber relationship and the media's partial realisation that WOMEN EXIST have caused us to redefine our terms, it's still true that sitcom requires a sense of entrapment if it's going to work. The Grant-Naylor pushmepullyou considered "Marooned" one of the best of the early episodes, and I'd posit it as the best... but even though "Marooned" is essentially two blokes who don't like each other trapped in a room, both the scenario in which they're trapped and the nature of their conversation couldn't exist outside of a space-travelling, history-mangling context. "Polymorph" is more popular with sci-fi people, yet even this takes the claustrophobia of The Thing and uses it for laughs.

Look at the way I phrased that, and it tells you everything. "More popular with sci-fi people." Quite. Despite its authors' claim that Red Dwarf was a working-class sitcom, by the early '90s it had become Cult TV for middle-class university students. I have no problem with this, being massively middle-class myself, but the sense of delusion is startling. It began as Steptoe and Son, using science-fiction ideas to set up otherwise implausible situations; by Red Dwarf VI, it believed it was Star Trek: The Next Generation with jokes. The gulf between the two is enormous. "Emohawk" is a work of fan-fic. "Gunmen of the Apocalypse", after the first few minutes of grotesque VR-sex (a new source of humour in the early '90s), is a very bland episode of an SF series that isn't dramatic enough to be drama and isn't funny enough to be comedy. '90s Red Dwarf fans, by that stage as insular as '90s Doctor Who fans or '90s Iron Maiden fans, voted it one of their favourites. Nobody else gave a toss. (Seeing it this way, "Back to Reality" might be considered the fulcrum of the whole series, the point where comedy and SF balanced perfectly. Of course, we didn't have the term "just before it jumped the shark" in those days.)

And then, as you all know, Red Dwarf VII crossed the line. An obsession with making sci-fi TV "but funny", filmlooked for international slickness even though it alienated the casual audience and removed the last traces of sitcom from a programme that was never, ever designed to work as a "space" show... by this stage, Red Dwarf fans were already seen as the kind of gits who expressed themselves through T-shirts from Forbidden Planet rather than conversation, much as Python fans had been since the '80s. The seventh series made even them too embarrassed to admit to liking it. The eighth was an improvement - in some ways taking the Porridge point rather literally, in others ruining it all with a two-parter involving a f***ing great dinosaur and a cliffhanger that just looked silly - but it came too late. Red Dwarf had pretended to be cool with a hint of monster. It had ended up too geeky even for geeks.

[We will assume the ninth didn't really happen.]

The big surprise of Red Dwarf X, then, is that isn't awful. None of the excitement or newness of I-III, yet still, maybe something of IV-V. This isn't a review, so I won't review it: I'm more interested in its structure. The episodes are designed as sitcom in space, not sci-fi with jokes. The "exterior" shots are now CGI rather than modelwork, and you can argue amongst yourselves as to whether that makes them more or less interesting, even though the answer is obviously less. But everything within the ship is on the small scale, the almost-human level. So much so that when the episode three trailer informs us of the crew [time-travelling / entering a VR / having a mass hallucination] and meeting Jesus, the disappointment's nearly crippling. Then again, even in the early years, they were allowed one day out per series.

The point remains that Red Dwarf X has failed to be terrible simply because it's cramped, and understated, and... well... cheap. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is used to defend all manner of cackpole that didn't turn out the way its creators intended, but can we really deny that things become horribly boring when we've got the capability to do anything? You've presumably read this blog before, so you presumably know what I'm thinking about. Red Dwarf gives us a much clearer example, though. Red Dwarf VII had free reign (there was even a snide-but-backfiring comment about the ship having all the parts it was meant to have before the JMC / BBC stripped it back), as a result of which, it became self-parody. Reassign it to Freeview with what we assume is a minimal budget, and suddenly it's at least focused again.

One final question, irrelevant to much of the above, but something I find interesting just because I like to think about the way people think. If you look at early-phase Doctor Who (certainly the '60s, but leaking into the '70s), the worst thing that can happen to you - the very worst imaginable horror - is to have your consciousness invaded. The trouble is, "mind control" has become so hackneyed in the last half-century that we tend to think of it as the desperate act of a desperate scriptwriter. Yet it meant something tangible, something terribly serious, at a point when (a) psychology was only just establishing itself as a major factor in human concerns after years of being a specialist interest, (b) world powers were being shown to actively employ it as a weapon, and (c) Western culture believed in the notion of people being able to govern themselves rather than just "consuming". As That Tat Wood pointed out, one of the reasons Doctor Who writers used the mind control trope without presenting it as the work of Commie infiltrators was that Doctor Who writers were the kind of people who read a lot of books. Reading promotes an inner voice, and an inner argument. Anything that overrides that argument is a terror beyond all other terrors. Today, mind control is generally presented as A Bad Thing for fading historical reasons (Nazism and Stalinism, even though neither did as much in the field of thought-manipulation as democratic America), unless it's the work of terrorists who want to deprive you of the freedom to choose between Virgin or Sky (the CSI version of brainwashing).

Yet in Red Dwarf, the great fear is of foreknowledge, of predestination. We're trapped by who we are, and by what we're absolutely, inescapably bound to do. "Bound" in its truest sense, too, the sense that you're tied to your future. We could take the characters' own immutable shallowness to be a sign of this, but the idea of being trapped in your destiny occurs as early as the second episode ("Future Echoes", as if most of you didn't know that). It's an idea repeated throughout the series: "Justice" ends with a rant about free will that's undercut by a pratfall which suggests an apology on behalf of the writer/s for explaining the point, while "The Inquisitor" gives us a creature that makes us feel guilty for not achieving greatness. As do the parents of one lead character and the fantasies of the other, throughout the whole 25 years and counting. For further examples, look up a list of episodes on the internet - yes, like I just did - and be astonished by the number of events you hadn't even noticed that fit the same pattern.

When Doug Naylor takes charge in the is-it-funny-or-is-it-sci-fi years, this recoil from an inevitable future gets worse. The first three episodes of Red Dwarf VII are about people doing things because destiny demands it, ironically even though the audience-killing "Tikka to Ride" begins with a prologue which explains that none of the futures predicted in previous episodes are an issue any more. A year later, "Cassandra" takes the breaks off. Now "Fathers and Suns" gives us a computer (like Cassandra, female... a male concern, even if we don't realise it?) who'll doom you in advance because she knows you're going to do exactly the same thing if you're given the opportunity.

A recent study, which you can search for yourselves if you think I make all this up, analysed the human relationships in (amongst many others) Beowulf and Hamlet. It found that Beowulf, despite the surfeit of monsters, was more realistic. Why...? Because in the works we call "sagas", be they Nordic or descendants of Nordic, there's never an ending: good things happen, and bad things happen, but they'll keep happening regardless. Despite their recently-assumed moral similarity to Protestant works, they're actually closer to Buddhism, where the wheel keeps turning unless someone can eventually stop it. Shakespearean tragedy, on the other hand, is always set in an enclosed universe where an end-point will be reached, where people will ultimately suffer, where catharsis will be the objective...

...and in this respect, sitcom is tragedy. Every episode is constructed to create catharsis, suffering, and end-point. Doctor Who writers of yesteryear were genuinely mortified by the idea of other people controlling their thoughts, a fear we no longer experience, since we brush it off as being "part of modern culture" (remember, the anti-jingle rant of "The Macra Terror" is about opposition to advertising rather than opposition to some imaginary fascist elite, jingles being a new and worrying presence in British society circa 1966). '60s readers feared different things to '80s-reared comedy scriptwriters. And many of the latter might reasonably be worried about becoming trapped by their own devices.

Doug Naylor among others.