‘Red Dwarf’ space comedy

One of the most successful British sitcoms is ‘Red Dwarf’, which had 52 episodes in 1988-99 on BBC2 television before reprising on the Dave channel in 2009 with another 22 episodes to date. As always seems to happen for any space-related series, a cult following grew up around it.

The Lancastrian writers, Rob Grant (until 1995) and Doug Naylor, developed the story-line in 1983 from sketches they had written for a BBC radio comedy show and eventually BBC North gave them studio time. The plot concerns the adventures of the spaceship ‘Red Dwarf’ and, in later episodes, its launch, ‘Starbug’. The four crew members and ship’s computer could not be more wacky and incompatible on the face of it, a key element, since we also glimpse their occasional comradeship.

Craig Charles (1964-) plays Lister, the last human on board, who was saved from the initial deadly radiation leak by being in stasis; Chris Barrie (1960-) plays a hologram of his former self, Rimmer; Danny John-Jules (1960-) plays the Cat, evolved from Lister’s pet cat over the three million years that Red Dwarf has been adrift; and Robert Llewellyn (1956-) plays Kryten the robot. Both Norman Lovett (1946-) and Hattie Hayridge (1959-) have played Holly, the computer with a supposed IQ of 6,000.

(Top image: deviantart.com / CC BY-SA 3.0)