Red Dwarf is probably the ultimate example of the brave little British sit-com that could – beginning in a low-budget, under-the-radar way, transforming itself several times along its lifespan, sometimes with better results than others, and winning fans on both sides of the Atlantic, while absolutely tanking as a proposition when an official US version was made.

Twelve regular series (sort of) and a feature-length special of the show have so far been aired since it first crept out into British geeks’ consciousness in 1988, and while there was recently talk of new scripts being worked on, we understand that a new series has now been at least shelved, and possibly cancelled altogether, which would probably mean that the broadcast show has reached its end. 

That means the time has finally arrived to give audio-geeks the treat they’ve long been hoping for – a collected audio version of the televised episodes.

Red What-Now?

For those who are genuinely new in this part of space, Red Dwarf is a science-fiction sitcom, set on board a giant interplanetary mining vessel, the “Red Dwarf” of the title. After a deadly radiation leak, only a single crewmember survives to be revived from penal stasis, three million years later. 

The human species is probably extinct, and Dave Lister (Craig Charles) was always a no-talent bum and the lowest form of life on the ship. He is joined in the ever-after by the hologram of his bunkmate and very-slightly-superior, the neurotic military obsessive, Arnold Rimmer (Chris Barrie), the moderately demented supercomputer with the human face, Holly (Norman Lovett), and the last, idiot survivor of a species of humanoid cats that grew up and died out in the ship’s cargo hold during the intervening millions of years (Danny John-Jules), the offspring of Lister’s pet moggy (which was the reason he got put into stasis in the first place). 

It’s a cold, lonely, meaningless, godless universe, and Lister is trapped with Rimmer, who for him is the worst human being in the world, but who Holly has determined is the best person to keep the last viable human in the universe sane against the harshness of the universe’s reality.

Everybody up to speed? Good, good – by the time the first four series are done, much of this will have changed, but that’s where Red Dwarf starts.

Beginning At The End

The first bunch of episodes we get is a generous four series long, though hardcore Dwarfers might find that an odd choice in itself.

The first two series of Red Dwarf were crushingly low-budget, bleak, high concept and focused on the notion, regularly stolen from Jean-Paul Sartre, that “hell is other people.” The success these two series garnered meant more budget and a much faster pace from series 3-5, before another shift in the storytelling saw the crew lose Red Dwarf altogether, along with Holly (by then played by Hattie Hayridge), and reduced to very local star treks on board a shuttle craft called Starbug for Series 6.

As such, it would make more organic sense for the sets to be split into Series 1-2, Series 3-5, 6-9 (including what could be loosely called The Kochanski Years), and…the rest. But you would have to be a Rimmer-style detail-orientated smeghead to really turn your nose up at getting four series per release, and let’s, for the sake of argument in a conflicted world, assume that that’s not us.

Moving right along, why buy Red Dwarf Series I-IV Soundtracks on audio? Simply put, the quality of the imagination in these first four series is absolutely red hot. They combine a mordant British sitcom tradition of a bunch of losers trapped together with nothing much to do but get on each other’s nerves with all the wild potential of a science-fiction universe, particularly one in which one of the team is a rabid alien conspiracy theorist and the universe remains determinedly empty of much by way of genuine alien life.

Big Ideas, British Laughs

In the first series alone, beyond the Big Idea that a single human survives the extinction of the species and finds himself trapped in close confinement with the worst person in the universe, rendered in an unthumpable form, there are episodes on the effects of relativity close to light speed, the nature of a holographic life, an atheist having been written up as “God” in the mythology of a species for which he was inadvertently responsible, viral mutations in three dimensions, and the only thing worse than being trapped with other people turning out to be the horror of being trapped with yourself.

Right from the off, then, Red Dwarf combined science-fiction high concept storytelling with down-to-earth human and philosophical high concept storytelling.

Series 2 leaned more heavily into the promise of the sci-fi concept, with the introduction of Kryten (initially played by David Ross), a butler-robot who Lister strives to teach to break its programming, while Rimmer treats it (with a touch more human honesty) as the menial slave it was built to be. The series also plays with memory as programming in Thanks For The Memory, time and space travel in Stasis Leak, and the ever-popular paradigm that is parallel dimensions in…erm…well, Parallel Universe. That final episode of Series 2 is a particular joy, introducing us to the crew of an alternate Dwarf, most of whom are female – including a female version of ship’s computer Holly, known as Hilly and played by one of Norman Lovett’s comedy circuit contemporaries, Hattie Hayridge.

All Change!

Series 3 was very much a case of “all change” in the look, feel and energy of the show. The mournful opening credits were jettisoned in favour of a high-octane electric guitar version, Kryten returned to become a main cast member, though this time played by Robert Llewellyn, Holly was still Holly but had had a “sex change” inspired by Hilly, and so was played by Hayridge, and there was a general feel that behind the scenes, there was money, and in-universe, the “boys from the Dwarf” had realised that their lives didn’t have to absolutely suck their souls to death – there was a shift to more luxurious accommodation, and they began using Starbug to break away from the monotony and emptiness of the Dwarf itself.

Technical innovation allowed for more science-fiction storytelling in Series 3 – the first episode took the crew to a “backwards” Earth, which involved a lot of ingenious reverse filming, while Polymorph not only began a new phase of Red Dwarf legend, but demanded an (admittedly shonky) large-scale creature effect to deliver the emotion-vampire. The effect smacked of what would happen if the BBC ever tried to remake Alien, but it still marked an expansion of the show’s visual imagination. 

Other episodes that series showed a greater confidence in both the writing team and the acting team, with Bodyswap involving Rimmer and Lister speaking from inside one another’s bodies and matching body language to each other’s usual performances. Meanwhile, an arguable highlight of the series, Marooned, was a tight two-hander between Charles and Barrie, and it ended up as a masterwork of characterisation under strain, with a joyous Red Dwarf payoff that destroyed any schmaltzy notions of growth or d’etente. 

Ace!

Series 4 was for the most part a series that maintained the new high bar of Series 3, with only one real leap forward in terms of building the legend of the Dwarf. That said, it was a solid string of episodes, which brought Kryten a kind-of love story, explored the chronic depths of grimness in the soul of Arnold Rimmer – something explored early in episodes like Better Than Life, but refined significantly in Justice and Meltdown – flirted with hard science-fiction in White Hole, and, in that notable leap forward, expanded on the principles of Parallel Universe to bring us the much slicker concept of interdimensional travel that was Dimension Jump, while also bringing evermore eternal legend of the Dwarf Ace Rimmer (the Rimmer that our Rimmer has always dreamed he could be) into our lives. 

Of the two initial sets to be released, it’s fair to say that this first collection is probably the more satisfying overall, the hit rate higher as both the writing and acting teams challenged their boundaries and built new legends. When, for instance, the grimness of Rimmer’s psychology was revisited in Rimmerworld (Series 6), it felt more like something that had been explored a lot before than it did any especially new concept, because by then, the show had milked it at least three times in its first four series. 

So, absolutely, Red Dwarf Series I-IV Soundtracks is worth getting, most especially if you’re a hardened Dwarfer looking for a hassle-free way to revisit the show without digging out your discs. 

Soundtracks Be Soundtracking

One word of warning, though. The word “soundtracks” is written right there on the box. That means you get the sound recording of the shows, with no interference or voice-over to describe actions or design. 

While initially, that has minimal impact (and is undoubtedly the way seasoned Dwarfers would want the thing to be handled), it can lead to an increasing number of sight gags for which you simply “had to be there,” so you can fill in the blanks, like the jettisoning of Rimmer from the Starbug cockpit in Backwards, rendered here as just a sound effect. It also means that, for instance, the high-speed explanatory scroll of all the changes between the end of Series 2 and the start of Series 3, with which Series 3 opened up, is just a music break here, with all the important information lost in the wind. 

Things can get more challenging still in episodes like Backwards, which depended for a lot of its fascination on the visual trickery of the filming method, Polymorph, where the monster now has to be simply imagined, and Meltdown, where the sight of a bunch of humanity’s humanitarians limbering up to go to war is lost to us as Rimmer prepares to sacrifice them to his plan for total victory.

But the point of releases like this is probably not to make late-stage converts who have never seen the original episodes. Those episodes still exist of course, and can be watched in a number of formats. The point of the audio soundtracks is to make those episodes available to hardcore audiophiles, so there’s an easy-carry way of remembering the laughs, the philosophical fun, and the rapid evolution of Red Dwarf across its lifetime. 

As that, the Red Dwarf Series I-IV Soundtracks is a smegging triumph, and you’d be a total goit not to get it immediately. Hop to it, Dwarfers – lickety split! Tony Fyler 

 

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