PatD

February 15th, 1988 featured the premiere of the one of the strangest and funniest TV series to ever hit the airwaves, Bob Grant and Doug Naylor's Red Dwarf. Obviously in the vein of Hitchhiker's Guide, it features story lines that are comedically outrageous coupled with SF premises that are grounded in a Star Trek-level of reality (most of the time). And I say features rather than "featured" past tense, because despite some long patches of nothing new on the air, the show has returned all of last year--with hopefully more to come.

I remember seeing the episode, "Meltdown" back in 1992 and laughing my young ass off at the brilliant perversity of the whole thing. ("They're tying Winnie the Pooh to the stake! He's refusing the blindfold!") I became an immediate fan thereafter. A few years later I got to meet actor Craig Charles at a Red Dwarf convention in Seattle. And in 1997 got to re-meet him along with Robert Llewellyn at a KCTS hosted event.

I thought the show reached it's peak in quality with season 5 with the capper, "Back to Reality". That episode with its wildly meta-premise and semi-serious conclusion (there's no gag at the end before the credits as they did usually) would have been a interesting way to end the series. And while subsequent series had a lot of laughs throughout, the show was definitely suffering quality-wise. ("Back to Earth", anyone?)

But, I've come to praise this series, not bury it. I've never truly encountered another TV series in my life that had left me smiling ear-to-ear on such a consistent basis as this one.

What are your thoughts?

PatD

Here's the official website's article on RD's silver anniversary.

windom

It's amazing that this show is just over half as old as Doctor Who even though episodes have been produced far more sporadically.

They even still have the same 3 original cast members for that whole time. Of course Kryten wasn't an original cast member and he was Kryten #2 anyway, but still there for the majority of it.

I haven't seen the most recent season. Who is playing Holle now?

PatD

Unfortunately, Holly is in neither Back to Earth or season 10. There's a throwaway line in BtE that says that Holly got messed up from an accidental flooding.

It's too bad. Because Holly was considered superfluous after season 5, because of Kryten. But Season VIII made pretty good use of him to chime in with a laconically sounding quip.