Red Dwarf back from the dead (Have you been trying to explain about our future selves again, sir?)

Hello? Testin', one two three. Hello?

Ye-es!

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Red Dwarf is something I discovered in high school, and then obsessed over, in the truest sense of the word, for the next eight or nine years.

Someone (who coincidentally I haven't seen since high school) just sent me this link - they're making a new series of Red Dwarf! Like, right now they're making it. As I type this, Robert Llewelyn is probably having his mask removed and complaining about it, wondering if his complaints are amusing enough to justify another book.

This is very interesting to me! Imagine if the news said, "Lucas unveils third Star Wars trilogy!" or "Turns out there are invisible Dinosaurs! How bout that?" Really interesting. Dwarf is the reason I write, and the standard I aspire to. It shaped my teenage years, my sense of humour, voice and personality. Red Dwarf.

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But here's the thing. I don't want any more.

It's not just because series 8 was a massive disappointment. And it's not just because last year's special episode, 'Back to Earth' was somehow even worse.

I don't want a Red Dwarf IX because Craig Charles, who plays Lister, is 46. I just read that in the above Daily Mail article.

At the start of the show, Lister was 25 (how old-do-I-look??) and even by series 7 (after many new seasons, reinventions and Craig Charles' unwarranted stay in prison) the guy was only 28 (and I feel a new maturity about myself. In fact, I can't even remember the last time I tried to urinate on Rimmer from the top of D Deck. Oh wait a minute... Friday.)

The credits at the end of the last-broadcast show began with "The end" - to contrast with "The beginning" on the first episode's credits. And though the show claimed it was joking... even then I figured they weren't. Or it was a half-joke. Maybe.

So - for years I waited... and co-creator Doug Naylor toiled to make a movie happen. The plot... sounded pretty bad (the baddies were called 'Homo Sapienoids') but I wanted to see it more than anything. It never happenned, for various reasons.



And then, out of nowhere, after a decade, came the all-new special, Back To Earth. And this was a really wierd experience for me - Knight will attest because I poured my confused feelings out at him several times - because it was bad. My favourite, favourite writer ever, ever had written a bad show (although there were some flashes of real brilliance in the third act).

Worse than that - with the exception of Kochanski, all the characters were old. Like, old old. I don't mean to sound like a sneering teenager, but they were old. Understand that these characters were like friends in my head - dear friends, honestly. And now... Lister was old. Kryten was old! The Cat was old and wrinkled. And Rimmer was old and wrinkled and grey and thinning... and some of them were getting fat.

And they were on Coronation Street for some reason.



I know that so far this entry has been garbled, confusing and quite frankly duller than an in-flight magazine produced by Air Belgium. But I'm getting to my point - here we go now.

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I don't want Dave Lister to be 46.

At the age of 25 he fell in love with Kristine Z. Kochanski. After that, he got stranded in space after the end of humanity and longed to get back to Earth and to get Kochanski back. He was a disgusting slob who consumed nothing but curry, lager and cigarettes, and it was funny. He spent the next few years still a slob and still in love with Kochanski... but slowly becoming more mature, more romantic. In one of the novels, he was marooned on a planet and grew a field of jasmine in the shape of two K's. At the age of 28, he met Kochanski again and lost Rimmer, the hologram bunkmate he hated, and who existed purely to 'keep him sane'. Rimmer was easily the funniest one, and he had now left the show, becoming a hero in the process. The story was coming to an end, right?


In the Back to Earth special, he was forty-something... still living on Red Dwarf, still a slob in a leather jacket, still pining after Kochanski. Rimmer was losing his hair. And the jokes weren't funny.

I like to pretend 'Back to Earth' didn't happen.

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Okay, I'm being overly dramatic!

Craig Charles says he refused to settle without a script as good as the golden age of series V and VI. Well. If he's right, I owe the Dwarf people a big apology for this blog (if indeed anyone read this far!) Part of me is very excited about new episodes.

But - a new series as good as the glory days? Or even decent? I don't see it.

It's a comedy about four or five lonely, odd young men (and a perfect woman at one point) alone on a space ship. usually in silly costumes. They shouldn't still be there at 46. They were supposed to be on Fiji by now. Or in the Ganymede Holiday Inn with moustaches. Or repopulating the human race after destroying The Rage. Or something. We weren't supposed to see them getting fat.