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Red Dwarf
1988 · TV series · 30 min episodes · 12 seasons
Created by Doug Naylor, Rob Grant
The adventures of the last human alive and his friends, stranded three million years into deep space on the mining ship Red Dwarf.
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58 comments on Hacker News
The Ouroboros in western mythology is a cautionary tale about the uselessness of the first perfect immortal being, and why humans should suffer our imperfections with insightful grace. The concept also made a great Red Dwarf episode.
LLM are more like the Mechanical Turk trick, but the person inside the machine running the con is unaware of how their actions affect the confounded observers.
Have a wonderful day =3
It's coming. I actually imagine it will seem trivial in a few years. "Better Than Life" from Red Dwarf is the next tier of computer games I guess. They wrote that episode back in the late 80s or early 90s and here we are with Google Genie 3 and the models that will supersede it.
Red Dwarf had a tiny budget initially, you just need good writers and actors
I can’t imagine Yes Minister’s budget was particular high either.
And it’s not just confined to the 70s and 80s. The IT crowd budget was pretty low, gave us some classic relatable episodes.
You don’t need a big budget. Even the “big budgets revival of Doctor Who with Edleston in 2005 paled in comparison to the budget of the most recent series, but the quality was so much better.
The BBC's Annual Plan for 2025/2026[1] is an interesting read.
They spend a lot of money (billions) on making and delivering content, but that's still not much compared to other large for-profit media companies[2].
The TV License has been the model since World War II[3], and the entire mass media landscape has completely changed since then.
The proposals to replace the TV License with ads or subscriptions are enshittification. The BBC is not a for-profit media company and should not be treated like one. It is a soft-power organization (cynically: propaganda arm) for the British government. There isn't anything inherently wrong with spreading your government's/culture's messages, especially when it's as obvious as the BBC, but it should not be expected to make money. How much is it worth that Britain stays relevant throughout the Anglosphere and beyond? Or that British points of view are available everywhere with a shortwave radio or VPN?
So fund it like it's defense spending. Maybe if the next leader of a foreign country has a fondness for Del Boy or Red Dwarf, negotiations will go a little more smoothly.
As an American, I think I'd prefer having an official propaganda arm like the BBC instead of whatever quiet public-private partnerships (cynically: backroom deals) we have instead. I'd hate it, but it'd be good to have something concrete to direct my criticism at, instead of constantly wondering if NPR is really presenting unbiased facts or the movie about our Navy jet fighters being the best, most freedom-loving planes flown by handsome rascals is just a good time.
1: https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/documents/bbc-annual-plan-2025-2026.pdf
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_Century_Fox#
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_United_Kingdom
> Working together under the name "Grant Naylor", the creators of the series collaboratively wrote two novels. The first, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, was published in November 1989, and it incorporates plot lines from several episodes of the show's first two series. The second novel, Better Than Life, followed in October 1990, and it is largely based on the second-series episode of the same name. Together, the two novels provide expanded backstory and development of the series' principal characters and themes.
If you haven't read the books, please do yourself a favour. They are far far better than the series, have much more depth and have not dated as badly. I loved Red Dwarf when it was on TV (jesus, I was 12 years old..) but I find it a little hard to watch now. Some parts are still great though.
Very on topic: Rob Grant left the show after the sixth series. I think the lack of his influence was immediately apparent, a lot of the depth was lost. Like how the transition from series 2 to series 3 got a lot more action-y, 6 to 7 started to lean more on established tropes etc (IMO).
Also of note: Grant and Naylor wrote a series of Red Dwarf novels that were surprisingly good. They really fleshed out a lot of the character behind Lister and Rimmer. One novel goes deep on the concept of Better than Life, a one episode throwaway in the show but expanded to true horror in the novel.
They split (same time as they split on the show) and wrote separate novels in different continuity in the end. IMO Grant’s was notably better.
Robert Llewellyn is just a lovely person in general. He now produces a YouTube/TV show about electric cars, but his outtakes from Red Dwarf are delightful. He stays mostly in character during the outtakes (perhaps that's easy in the suit) and he's very funny.
Some random Red Dwarf outtakes: https://youtu.be/l6VTzq5N0Mo
The earlier Red Dwarf episodes were filmed in the BBC cafeteria and other similar locations. The difference is that Red Dwarf was supposed to look grimy. They were on a mining ship with few luxuries. Red Dwarf was more in the territory of Dark Star, and played into that. (Early Red Dwarf tended to use physical models and costumes for a lot of effects. CGI has never been especially great on RD.)
I did watch Babylon 5 when it first came out in the UK. Deep Space 9 definitely had better looking effects, but I preferred B5 to DS9 on the basis of other factors.
Another great example of this is British SF, especially 20th century Doctor Who and Blake's 7, vs American SF such as Star Wars/Trek. The British version can be much bleaker. And of course Red Dwarf, which doesn't translate at all into American. (There was a single pilot episode)
Edit: someone downthread mentioned Limmy's Show and Absolutely, to which I would add Burnistoun. Scottish humor is even more grimly fatalist than English.
Funny, when I was in my 20s and not British, I knew what a Dalek was because it was just part of the zeitgeist. Tricoders are frequently mentioned as one of the life imitating art type of things that modern tech is striving to take from sci-fi to IRL. I had never even seen an episode of Dr Who, but I was familiar with it because of all the other sci-fi/nerdy stuff I was into. Ironically, I did know what someone wearing an H on their forehead meant from watching Red Dwarf, but that’s a tangent. It just seems like a strange Venn diagram where source code android and Star Trek tricoder do not intersect would be a very odd diagram
British TV is doing _great_ in the streaming era: black mirror, adolescence, peaky blinders, the crown, call the midwife, derry girls, downtown abbey; and so many great police procedurals: line of duty, endeavour, the bay, Sherlock, grace; even those Harlan coben miniserieses - the ones with at least one absurd plot twist per episode - are great fun!
While I’ll be among the first to moan that we’ll never see another red dwarf, python, tinker tailor/smiley’s people, yes minister, father ted [0] .. British tv is still producing great stuff.
It’s the “bureaucrats” in the bbc who are under threat from streaming. I’m not losing sleep!
[0] made in Britain; simply could not have been made in Ireland as was.
Eye of the beholder. I personally think Red Dwarf series 1 to 6 was great. It even charts a course of British TV decline. Series 1 and 2, low budget sitcom, class warfare and the loneliness of space. Series 3, more budget, more sci-fi, but similar writing. Series 4 and 5, more budget, more sci-fi, becomes monster of the week, but the character building from the prior series keeps it funny. Series 6, even more budget, they start to explore some more interesting sci-fi themes. This turns out to be popular, so it gets more budget again and moves to BBC 1, more cast etc. Series 7, 8 just urgh, trying to appeal to "mainstream" was stupid because it was already popular enough, it loses the serious side. Everything they've done since then feels like they're trying to force the humour that came naturally before. The actors have aged but the writing didn't mature with them.
I watched some interviews with the cast and they would joke around in the canteen between filming and find their jokes had been overheard and incorporated into the script. It had this realistic dialogue.
Red Dwarf fans can see Lister riding around on his “space bike” in early episodes which is just a Sinclair C5 with some handles and a few other things added on for decoration.
'Murican sitcoms seem primarily to be written for lowest common denominator with laugh track and all. Occasionally, you get a show written at a smarter level where most people totally miss the comedy, but they tend to last 1-2 seasons at most because of it. So I have a rule on streaming content that if it is a network sitcom with lots of seasons, I'm not going to watch it.
*Just to mention, I grew up on BBC in America on my local PBS station with shows like Red Dwarf, Black Adder, Are You Being Served, Keeping Up Appearances, Father Ted, etc. That probably explains my dislike for sitcoms
Ironically despite my central European heritage, I didn't watch Dinner for One, but I just watched that episode this December 29th, being on a Red Dwarf re-watch spree... again.
This reminds me of the butler android Kryten from the 90s tv show Red Dwarf. When we're introduced to him in the show, he is attending to the crew of a spaceship, however they have all been dead for an unspecified length of time. But apparently he's named "after a character called 'Crichton' in a play/film called The Admirable Crichton" [1].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/RedDwarf/comments/1aoio58/the_origin_of_kryten/
Wasn't this an episode of red dwarf?
One place I worked at used Red Dwarf characters, Hollister, Cat, Toaster, Rimmer etc
TV show characters can be good
I normally use Greek gods for snowflake servers
A concatenation of owner / location and device for LAN devices. JohnsPixel4, LoungeTV,
I give a little chuckle whenever someone mentions Esperanto. It's the official language in the tv show Red Dwarf and Rimmer always struggles to use it. Its a bit of an ongoing joke.
The article mentions Red Dwarf… but only in context of Rimmer.
There was a whole Red Dwarf episode devoted to AR. Has Haptics and everything.
Gunmen of the Apocalypse S06E03
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0684158/
Completely hilarious like all Season 6 episodes
This reminds me of the Psirens episode from Red Dwarf:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psirens
License fee evasion is one of the top traffic sources in the British court system, the idea that it's done "on the honour system" is mendacious. There are people in prison right now for not paying it. The BBC is at its most foundational level a state-backed company built on state power.
Doctor Who is a children's show and dates from the 50s. Red Dwarf is a comedy and hasn't been made for decades. As I said: the BBC thinks sci-fi is for children or to laugh at, and barely even that.
> it may be the most popular in your circle, or your mind, but this is demonstrably, obviously untrue
It's a few years ago now but e.g.
https://tbivision.com/2018/04/25/netflix-ordered-more-sci-fi-after-genre-hits-says-ampere/
"following the success of flagship series like Stranger Things, sci-fi and fantasy was the most popular genre on Netflix"
If you look at the list of the top shows on Netflix then sci-fi, fantasy and horror are consistently amongst the most popular shows:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-watched_Netflix_original_programming
The BBC just doesn't do these, at all.
> what ideology is against sci-fi?
The BBC was fundamentally founded on a deeply classist Reithian ideology and it has never fully discarded this culture. It thinks its primary role is to improve the public and TV/radio production is just a means to that end. Given a choice of making an expensive period drama (what it calls "culture"), an expensive lecture on climate change or an expensive sci-fi/fantasy show they will never pick the latter, it just culturally displeases their executives at a very fundamental level to do so. Netflix also has problems with ideology [1] but it doesn't hold them back to the extent of neglecting whole genres of TV/movie output (with the possible exception of news, but you could argue that combining entertainment and news isn't natural and only an artifact of bandwidth constraints in earlier eras). Netflix's primary mission is just to give people what they want to watch.
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/netflix-blackwashing-parodies
>quasi-communist
I must have been asleep the day paying for things became communist. the BBC has the same payment model as netflix, except you pay yearly instead of monthly, and it’s done on an honour system instead of at the door. total communism, man
>no sci-fi
Doctor Who? Life on Mars? Red Dwarf? Doctor Who is arguably the biggest or second biggest sci-fi show of all time. it’s certainly the biggest to remain under one name
>the most popular kind of tv show
it may be the most popular in your circle, or your mind, but this is demonstrably, obviously untrue
>ideological reasons
what ideology is against sci-fi? are you trying to claim the BBC are luddites? or that sci-fi is inherently… right-wing? or what?
>bias in news reporting
why not just cut to the chase?what you really mean is “I’m compromised intellectually by my political position”
The Metaverse concept has basically existed fully-formed, and even with that exact name, since at least Snow Crash (1992).
The wider idea was clearly floating around in the zeitgeist as the Red Dwarf episode where they get stuck in a game called Better Than Life aired in March that year, a few months before Snow Crash was published.
Red Dwarf was a documentary sent back in time.
What's funny here is the use of the word "uncrop"! I had never heard that word used before DALLE*2 was released. And I've been working in computer graphics for 30 years lol. Also I watched a lot of Red Dwarf.
Was that word known before Red Dwarf?
There’s a long running sitcom where an idiot AI is one of the main characters: Red Dwarf.
Well, an idiot AI, an idiot mechanoid, and an idiot brain upload.
And an idiot humanoid cat.
And an idiot human.
Has no idea they made more Red Dwarf episodes in 2009!
While I agree that dead trees and e-ink are far superior to reading in a terminal, it's not so bad, even with aging eyes.
In some ways is kind of soothing, as long as you have the brightness and contrast set appropriately.
Back when the internet was all text, there were people in the UK who would transcribe their favorite television shows into text files. UUCPing or cating these scripts into a local machine was the only source of British humor in some parts of the world.
I read the entirety of Red Dwarf as fan-transcribed text files on a terminal 15 years before I was able to see it in video.
That reminds me of the Red Dwarf episode: https://youtu.be/SqI41N4WGPM
> Sorry, that just turned into a rant at the end.
On the contrary, thank you. It’s the very context you wrote about that’s often missing in online conversations. Your anecdote beautifully illustrates the absurdity trap too much well-meaning tolerance eventually trips.
I’m reminded of a Red Dwarf episode (Timewave, S12E03). A crew of a space ship decided to outlaw all criticism on board, going so far as too construct a machine extracting “the inner critic” from everybody. The Red Dwarf crew encounters them and wants to leave immediately after, because, quote: “nothing works here, especially the people.”
It’s quite straight-forward that the posts’ author struggles with mental health issues. By their own public admission (and accounting for preferred pronouns) it is transgender, hates its body and is rather inconsistent and confrontational. All fine by me. I don’t care how you find happiness or whatever else. But it should be entirely possible to remark upon those facts without experiencing retribution.
Yet somehow any remark regarding their mental health state gets self-censored by the first mention of insensitivity, no doubt fearing said retribution.
I worry about that.
That kind of thinking still exists. The most recent example I can think of is Ghosts on CBS as the US version of the UK Ghosts. CBS' streaming service (Paramount+) will even recommend the UK original and you can compare them side-by-side.
(Another somewhat recent example to mind was FX's Wilfred as the US version of the Australian Wilfred TV show. Hulu picked up the Australian show so that you could compare them side-by-side. For streamers this is easy content recommendations.)
TV and Movie executives are always looking for "low risks" and "proven formula" will always be a way to lower risk. Shows and movies from the same originating country get "rebooted" all the time. Doing a fresh take across cultural boundaries is interestingly a higher risk as studios try to figure out if the original premise has legs in the new country. Some of what we see is survivorship bias: The US Office was huge so that gets mentioned a lot. But there were a lot of similar attempts that never made it past the pilot because the risks were too high or it just didn't seem to work or whatever.
Off the top of my head, similar to this US IT Crowd pilot there are also "lost" pilots you can find for US Doctor Who and US Red Dwarf. The fascinating thing about both of those attempts occurred during different points of the height of the PBS/BBC partnership. Up until about the late 90s/early 00s PBS was the most common importer of BBC programming from the UK. (That shifted when the BBC decided it could be a stronger revenue stream, starting chasing bigger bids from US cable channels, and then eventually cofounded the BBC America cable channel.) At various points in time PBS' biggest audiences tuned into Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, and Blake's 7 (among others on the sci-fi side of their programming), so even in the "old" TV era these US attempts knew there was some pre-existing audience familiar with the original UK shows through PBS at the time. So streamers have exactly created that as a "new" idea or new thinking so much as shifted the economics of it. (PBS was public funded and not making a lot of money for how popular its showing of UK shows were. Streamers are all big for-profits that use multi-cultural content for moats around their subscription fees. Including BBC America's current home AMC+.)
I can't watch Red Dwarf any more. It has aged terribly. The overacting (eg The Cat), the canned laughter to fit the TV format... I think I was just "meh" about it until I listened to the audiobook read by Chris Barrie (the actor who played Rimmer). I didn't even want to listen to it but my wife insisted that I'd love it. I did. In contrast to the TV series, the book is fresh, genuinely funny and surprisingly astute. The story is narrated by Rimmer, who is a wonderfully awful character, full of self-loathing and false confidence. I challenge anyone to listen to that audiobook without finding embarrassing parallels between themselves and Rimmer. The characters of Lister and Rimmer are more fully developed, making the TV series feel thin and pointless in contrast. I suppose it was pitched too hard at evening British TV audiences of the late 80s.
It does, but it’s also a frustrating demonstration of the access problem. It’s mostly a cavalcade of endless police/detective/murder mystery shows. It has Red Dwarf and classic Doctor Who, but the panel show selection is spotty and they don’t bother to add new seasons in a timely fashion. It does have much of Would I Lie To You but they don’t add new episodes when they air in the UK. They seem to have given up on adding new seasons of 8 Out of 10 Cats Dows Countdown.
That wasn't nearly as atrocious as I was expecting. Partly because the script is almost the same as the UK first episode, of course, but even putting that aside it was OK. Richard Ayoade is still great but also Joel McHale is a pretty decent choice as Roy. Even the actress playing Jen, although a bit annoying, wasn't too bad. And the twist that the boss actually isn't crazy is interesting.
Not like the US Red Dwarf pilot. That actually is tear-your-eyes-out bad.
The Red Dwarf pilot was also similarly terrible, and there's a great mini documentary of the making of it on the DVD bonuses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCmBRAX_V6o
Almost all the shows i watch over and over and again are ones with 7+ seasons,
90's star trek (tng ds9 voy) all 7 seasons, MAS*H 12 seasons, Frasier 11 season, Scrubs 8 season (I skip season 9 and refuse to acknowledge its existance), Red Dwarf 8 season (+ more after the revival decades later), X-Files 11 seasons, How I Met Your Mother 9 seasons, Freinds 10 seasons, Stargate SG1 10 seasons, three seasons is to little to grow a fallowing and not enough for you to rewatch
I'm not much into visual media, so I can only come up with a few examples of 'sleep' devices:
Star Trek's "Space Seed" - 200 years in sublight stasis, no mention of speed or distance. Could be 0.5c for all we know. 100 ly at Enterprise's warp 6 cruising speed would take about 4 months, which seems not unreasonable.
The movie "Alien" - stasis, but seemingly with FTL given the times and distances involved. (https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/LV-223 says it was a 2 year voyage to the moon LV-223 in Prometheus.)
The TV series "Red Dwarf" - sublight, though it did break the light barrier once. Science in general is only relevant for comedic effect. https://www.ganymede.tv/2004/04/the-science-of-red-dwarf/ .
None of these seem to be characterized as "it takes you 150 years of travel at light speed to get to a place that is 150 light years away".
Which one am I missing?
This comment has put Red Dwarf to the top of my reading list. I was an avid fan of the tv show and never thought to read the books.
I think we all see a bit of Rimmer in ourselves when it comes to preparing for for an exam.
Red Dwarf covered this as an (IMO very funny) side-plot (in the episode where they accidentally interfered with JFK's assassination).
That was the plot for "The Inquisitor" episode of Red Dwarf.
1. Don't try too hard to make science funding more efficient / market lead or whatever - just fund more - double the science budget tomorrow And again every five years for a generation. We are about to go through a societal refactoring with solar / electric / digital / climate change hitting at once. Spending a few quid to help out the fundamentals won't hurt anyone.
2. The above might upset people but string theory is a good example - partly yes people are held hostage by funding (much like it's hard to avoid being typecast as an actor). But the solution to that is to fund lots more (experimental) movies, not to hope studio heads can pick better winners.
I am perfectly happy for a slice of my tax dollar to go on someone thinking about Pram theory (#) for a decade simply because we have no idea whatsoever how to tackle the big ones in physics, so spray and pray is going to be a lot better than most other options.
(#) Red Dwarf episode. worth watching episode just for this joke.
I don't follow. That was a clip of the Cat from Red Dwarf. A British sitcom from the 80's and 90's set in space in the far future.
Maybe watch the Red Dwarf episode "Better Than Life" which is more how I could see it playing out.
Ah yes, Blender the "hobbyist" tool that's also:
* Used by NASA for a lot of their 3d modelling
* Used in Spider Man 2 for storyboarding
* Used for some special effects in Red Dwarf
* Used in Captain America: The Winter Soldier for previsualization
* Rendered the entirety of the movie Next Gen
The list goes on and grows every year. No, it won't affect the next Pixar movie, but if that's your standard then 3Delight sounds like just as much of a hobbyist thing.
Wow so that episode of Red Dwarf was actually based on this? My respect for PKD rises.
Cool. My friend's mom was a huge Red Dwarf fan (tv show) but I didn't realize there was a novel. I'll have to check it out.
But the last two words in your quote are "United States."
PBS, like all distributors, licenses content from producers of content--sometimes PBS is the producer, often it is not--for distribution inside a defined territory.
For example, Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, Downton Abbey, and Are You Being Served are all British TV shows licensed by PBS for distribution in the US. PBS can't stream them worldwide same as the BBC can't show some of the content it distributes outside of the United Kingdom.
It's a quote from a popular sci-fi TV series (Red Dwarf) that I'm sure many people immediately thought of upon seeing the title. I doubt offense was intended.
http://www.ladyofthecake.com/rdscripts/season2/Betterth.txt
My favourite easter egg of all time is in the brilliant BBC scifi comedy series Red Dwarf. In one episode the team end up in a dimension where everything is backwards. If you take one of the backwards sections and play it forwards there's a great easter egg... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNWGcYcBklE (first part is backwards, second is the same scene forwards).
Autopogo reminds me of the shoes which will walk you home automatically from the TV show Red Dwarf.
Season 2 Episode 5, can't find the video snippet online quickly, but here's the transcript. Read with a British accent if you're unfamiliar with the show!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/3duthb/smart_shoes/
Like the old Red Dwarf episode:
Lister: What's the damage Hol?
Holly: I don't know Dave. The damage report machine has been damaged.
I used to play the Space Quest series. I think it should be made into a movie or series of TV shows. You are a janitor, but not a very good one, but they can't replace you because you are in space. Your broom drifts out of the cargo hold into space, etc.
Red Dwarf borrowed a lot from it I am sure. Instead of a Janitor, they are Vending Machine Repairmans or whatever, but it has the same element of humor in it.
The British sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf had a character that was just such an interactive recreation.
Red Dwarf had a needy toaster, featured in several episodes. It even saved the day in one.
For your next challenge, try recreating the functionality from the version found in an episode of Red Dwarf: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUFkb0d1kbU
Yes, it's quite common here to have series where a season is 6-8 episodes, once a year or less frequent.
E.g. Red Dwarf have had seasons ranging from 3 (if you count "Back to Earth") to 8 episodes, with most seasons having 6, and occasional multi-year gaps between seasons.
This is off-topic, but Red Dwarf is also one of the best sitcoms. My nickname is inspired by it :)
Sorry, it was a quote from the TV series Red Dwarf. I have nothing against IF or corduroy!