Better Than Getting a Life... (Red Dwarf)

Member Name: jojoegypt2008

Product:	Red Dwarf
Date:	09/12/08 (59 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Funny, brilliant, memorable, taps into a generation

Disadvantages: It's not on tv now?

Red Dwarf.... ah that's the sound of my childhood. All together now: It's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere...

Ahem. Red Dwarf was a British TV comedy series which aired between 1988 and 1999 on BBC2; it was the brainchild of Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, (who credited themselves as Grant Naylor).

The central premise was that after a radiation leak the last human to be left alive on board the mining ship Red Dwarf, stuck in Deep Space was Dave Lister (Craig Charles). He was in suspended animation at the time of the leak, and 3 million years later, the computer wakes him up....

He, together with a hologram, Arnold Rimmer (Chris Barrie) and the ship's morose computer Holly (Norman Lovett, later Hattie Hayridge), and Cat (Danny John-Jules), the result of 3 million years of evolution of Lister's pregnant cat Frankenstein, attempt to make their way back to Earth.

On the way, they pick up additional cast members, notably Kryten (Robert Llewellyn), and have various adventures.

I don't know if it's the claustrophobic setting, or the brilliance of the acting, or the script, but RD is simply one of the funniest things I've ever seen. It has taken the art of sarcastic exaggeration to its outer limits. Lister and Rimmer's arguments are the stuff of legend, and there are some episodes which are so funny, you can't even choose a favourite quote. Every time Rimmer's alter ego, Ace Rimmer appears on screen, you can't help it, you're laughing. He doesn't even have to mention the kippers.

I once learned the whole monologue of the Mind Probe computer, from series IV, just because it was too funny not to do so. Plus it makes a good party trick.

The surrealist, bathetic humour of the whole series captured the zeitgeist of my generation (born in the 80s), and it's one of those things I'll show my kids, and my kids won't understand at all...

If you like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you'll love this.

Summary: If you were born between 1975 and 1985, you must have seen it!