Red Dwarf, the finest sci-fi show ever made, is currently available on Netflix, and so I've been rewatching it! The humour's actually aged better than I thought it would; the audience laughter feels very dated, but the characters are still fun and Arnold Rimmer in particular is a magnificent comic creation. Not many of the jokes actually take me by surprise, as I watched my Red Dwarf DVDs several thousand times in my early teens, but I'm still enjoying myself.
(A perplexing discovery: I was recently poking around my bedroom at my parents' house and unearthed a transcription of a Red Dwarf episode I'd apparently done by hand. I have no recollection of this, but I must have done it directly from the DVD. Probably through constant pausing and rewinding to check what the characters said; I have a feeling it didn't occur to me to put the subtitles on. Why on Earth did I feel the need to write out an entire Red Dwarf episode? Was I planning to put it on as a play? With exactly one handwritten copy of the script?)
The writers of Red Dwarf don't entirely seem to know what to do with the Cat. At some point I began picturing him as a normal non-humanoid cat hanging around on the set, and suddenly he made a lot more sense to me; of course he just shows up occasionally to do cat things and then vanishes for long periods.
Rimmer/Lister was one of my earliest 'ships. I suppose it laid the foundations in my heart for Mark Corrigan/Jeremy Usborne of Peep Show: two men, one uptight and neurotic, the other slobbish and laid-back. They live together and they really don't get along most of the time, but ultimately they're closer to each other than they are to anyone else. The difference is that Lister (the slob) is presented as the relatable one in Red Dwarf, whereas I feel you're more expected to identify with Mark in Peep Show, and Lister is fundamentally a decent bloke, whereas everyone in Peep Show is fundamentally terrible.
A few weeks ago, I discovered a men's magazine from 1939 in an antique shop. Flicking through it, I came across a page of tiny print advertisements. Many of them were claiming 'YOU CAN GROW TWO TO FIVE INCHES TALLER IN JUST TEN DAYS', presumably using growth technology that's been lost to humanity since the 1930s.
My favourite of the advertisements:
This wonderful invention not only makes the trousers hang straight, but does so in such an ingenious way with immediate results that your own friends forget, and others never know, that you are bow-legged.
(A perplexing discovery: I was recently poking around my bedroom at my parents' house and unearthed a transcription of a Red Dwarf episode I'd apparently done by hand. I have no recollection of this, but I must have done it directly from the DVD. Probably through constant pausing and rewinding to check what the characters said; I have a feeling it didn't occur to me to put the subtitles on. Why on Earth did I feel the need to write out an entire Red Dwarf episode? Was I planning to put it on as a play? With exactly one handwritten copy of the script?)
The writers of Red Dwarf don't entirely seem to know what to do with the Cat. At some point I began picturing him as a normal non-humanoid cat hanging around on the set, and suddenly he made a lot more sense to me; of course he just shows up occasionally to do cat things and then vanishes for long periods.
Rimmer/Lister was one of my earliest 'ships. I suppose it laid the foundations in my heart for Mark Corrigan/Jeremy Usborne of Peep Show: two men, one uptight and neurotic, the other slobbish and laid-back. They live together and they really don't get along most of the time, but ultimately they're closer to each other than they are to anyone else. The difference is that Lister (the slob) is presented as the relatable one in Red Dwarf, whereas I feel you're more expected to identify with Mark in Peep Show, and Lister is fundamentally a decent bloke, whereas everyone in Peep Show is fundamentally terrible.
A few weeks ago, I discovered a men's magazine from 1939 in an antique shop. Flicking through it, I came across a page of tiny print advertisements. Many of them were claiming 'YOU CAN GROW TWO TO FIVE INCHES TALLER IN JUST TEN DAYS', presumably using growth technology that's been lost to humanity since the 1930s.
My favourite of the advertisements:
This wonderful invention not only makes the trousers hang straight, but does so in such an ingenious way with immediate results that your own friends forget, and others never know, that you are bow-legged.
