About the show
Red Dwarf is the greatest
television show to come out of
Britain since
Monty Python's Flying Circus. Red Dwarf is now 10 years old, and has a total of 8 seasons. As for what the show's about,
Holly probably explains best:
"This is an S.O.S. distress call from the mining ship Red Dwarf. The crew are dead, killed by a radiation leak. The only survivors are Dave Lister, who was in suspended animation during the disaster, and his pregnant cat, who was safely sealed in the hold. Revived three million years later, Lister's only companions are a life-form who evolved from his cat, and Arnold Rimmer, a hologram simulation of one of the dead crew."
Other important or memorable characters include
Cat,
Kryten,
Kristine Kochanski,
Ace Rimmer and, of course,
Duane Dibbley.
Red Dwarf is the brain child of
Grant Naylor (a combination of
Rob Grant and
Doug Naylor), who in addition to writing and directing the television show, have also written two books,
Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers and
Better than Life. There is a third book, written by Grant, called
Backwards, and it's come to my attention that Naylor wrote another book entitled
Last Human. These, however, appear to be separate projects (I ordered mine from the overseas and should get them in a couple of weeks). Fans of the show will recognize two of those titles as the titles of episodes...
Not too long ago, two
American pilot episodes were filmed, but regrettably, they didn't make the grade. So for now, us Americans have to watch it on
PBS.
About the ship
The show is named after the
JMC mining ship
Red Dwarf. It is enormous and is designed to be entirely self-sufficient. They have enough
food to last millennia (although the
cats got to quite a bit of it), they have a
disco, and they have a (once) super-intelligent computer named Holly. The ship itself is powered by a hydrogen scoop at the front that collects hydrogen gas and powers the ship (so they should never run out of fuel). The Red Dwarf has several thousand floors and it can take hours in the elevator just to get to the other side of the ship. The ship is home to a large number of people, but this number is never certain. According to
The End, the first episode, it is 169. Later, the episode
Justice increases that number to 1,169. And of course,
Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers sets that number at 11,169. In any case, the lowest ranking person aboard the ship is Third Technician Dave Lister, and second to last is Second Technician (and later First Technician) Arnold Rimmer.
About the movie
Nothing new to add to
Redalien's writeup towards the end of this page except that I can hardly wait.
Well, that's all for now, folks, so
smeg off.