PHOTO! PHOTO!

Best Rimmer pic yet. Suit looks amazing. Cat too.

Oh. Yes.

That looks painful:

Roasted cat

Correct me if I’m wrong, but that looks like the RD sleeping quarters window in pic 1.

i was thinking it was either red dwarf sleeping quarters or the entrance to the cockpit in starbug . could be anything thought i guess. great pics

The larger version of picture 4 is an interesting mismatch. He looked so smart in the small picture too… ;)

Lister mourning the death of Kockanski?

i never been a huge fan of kochanski, but that would be quite sad

On closer inspection it looks more like a book than a picture.

>On closer inspection it looks more like a book than a picture

I don’t believe those uniforms are authentic.

No, those photos are looking fantastic. just six and a bit weeks to go…

Does Rimmer’s collar look a little thinner than in the previous pics..?

I don’t think that is the series I-II sleeping quarters. assuming the crew are absence once more, why would Rimmer and Lister still be there, wouldn’t they have gone back the Officers Quarters?

Can people stop going on about Chris Barrie having no hair, now?

after having a quick look at both the sleeping quarters and starbug cockpit it dosent really look like either. though of corse all these years later the would be redesigned, the lister pic is very interesting

Chris’s hair is too long for a hologram.

Both Chris and Craig are looking like the old Rimmer and Lister. This has made me very happy.

> Those are very, very high trousers. Is he going fishing?

Doesn’t Danny himself make a joke about Simon Cowell trousers during one of the commentaries?

>Both Chris and Craig are looking like the old Rimmer and Lister.

Indeed. I think that is the most Rimmerlike I’ve seen Chris so far.

The “H” looks smaller on the first picture.

The set in the background of the first picture looks like the entrance to the Star Bug sleeping quarters.

I think the Lister photo is terrific, and arguably just as intriguing as any of the location pics.

They’re all fucking lovely pictures, though.

>Both Chris and Craig are looking like the old Rimmer and Lister.

What, they’re both looking like both characters? How’re they doing that then?

I would argue, though, that Chris’s hair looked a lot greyer up in Weatherfield.

Danny’s always aged well, I think.

What do you mean, “Danny’s aged”?

The first one has to be my favourite, with Craig and his book following shortly behind. The first thing I thought was that he was sat on a golf course…

Everything just looks *right* doesn’t it?

That first one just looks like it could’ve been taken from the ‘Making of’ book. Beautiful.

This is a serious amount of greenscreen we’re seeing here. I hope there’s at least one full set, e.g. Starbug quarters, and everything’s not just being filled in with CG. With the show being made in this way it’s little wonder there are no audience recordings.

I thought Craig was sat on some kind of sports pitch..
On closer inspection it looks like his boot has scuffed the grass up similar to a loose carpet. I would say that this has been created rather than it being an existing grass or artifial grassed area (it would be lethal to play sports on there uless it was something like bowls)..
There are what appears to be white lines behind Craig in the photo similar to a six-a-side goal area!

Maybe it’s a mock up of Tranmere’s training pitch ‘Craig Charles this is your life’
(J/K)

> This is a serious amount of greenscreen we’re seeing here

There’s no way you can say that based on these pictures.

>And what’s the book? Given the way things have been going lately, it could turn out to be a copy of Infinity…

No Irish, No Niggers (10th anniversary edition)

The Log.

Ah, just lovely.

Love the pic of Chris/Robert. We need more like this.

Hang on.

Craig dressed up reading from a book. Poetry perhaps? What’s that noise?
I wonder if we’ll get a Ghostwatch crossover?

(And with that I have just ruined Seb’s potential enjoyment of the specials)

Great that’s all we need, Evet Fielding screaming Fuck! Ghost! Everytime Kryten is on camera.

Yvette Fielding wasn’t in Ghostwatch.

Technicality alert!

Did you know that if you remove the first four and the last two letters of “Ghostwatch”, you get what James is.

And if I removed your head, you’d be twice as funny.

This is all getting very nasty isn’t it?

Not at all, I’m a twat and Ian looks great headless.

http://twitpic.com/1ov8a
A rob and dan close up

The thought occurs that maybe Craig Charles is just taking a break on the set and is occupying himself between takes.

>The “H” looks smaller on the first picture.

Could it be because his forehead is bigger? Seriously, yes, the “H” looks smaller.

>The thought occurs that maybe Craig Charles is just taking a break on the set and is occupying himself between takes.

That crossed my mind. I don’t want to believe that, so maybe I’m seeing what I want to see, but for some reason that photo just doesn’t look candid to me. The book even looks like a prop, doesn’t it? Well, it’s a hardback, anyway.

> And if I removed your head, you’d be twice as funny.

This actually made me do a LOL.

> http://twitpic.com/1ov8a
A rob and dan close up

Awww, bless!

> Could it be because his forehead is bigger? Seriously, yes, the “H” looks smaller.

Yes, to both.

Everything just looks *right* doesn’t it?

This.

And there’s just something *about* that Craig picture with the book. So many intriguing things about it. This is all a perfect trickle of information to keep us all on tenterhooks. I’ve not enjoyed myself so much with fandom for fucking ages.

Hmmm… something about the Craig pic is making me think ‘Observation Dome’.

Ahhhh. Chris looks great in that picture. Such a Rimmer-like look on his face. Thinking Craig’s book looks like a diary or journal of some sort?

Could be Lister reading a diary at the start, sort of like a narration to open the specials to resolve the cliff hanger in ‘Only the Good’ and to quickly brush away the fact that characters are now gone.

> I’ve not enjoyed myself so much with fandom for fucking ages.

Me neither. I’ve just about managed not to get my hopes up or down too much so far, but having seen these intriguing new photos, particularly the one of Craig, I can’t help thinking we might very well be in for something really special and epic and ohh just fucking brilliant!

Slight downer is that there hasn’t been a really special, epic or fucking brilliant episode of Red Dwarf since Rob Grant left. But I too am hoping…

> Slight downer is that there hasn’t been a really special, epic or fucking brilliant episode of Red Dwarf since Rob Grant left. But I too am hoping…

I’d say Tikka To Ride comes close.

Parts of VII certainly were ‘epic’. It struggled on the ‘fucking brilliant’ side though. Tbh I thought that both Tikka and Stoke were great on broadcast, but then Ouroboros put me on a big downer for the rest of the series. I hated that Rimmer wasn’t in it.

Rimmer was in Ouroboros though, in flashback form. I know what you mean though. It FELT Rimmer-less (and to me, so did Blue).

Ouroboros wasn’t too bad considering it was Rimmer-less and introduced a new character/cast member. A few good lines in it, not amazing, but okay. It was from Duct Soup onwards that the damage became clear.

Tikka always feel pretty ‘epic’. Re-watching series VII recently (well the first few eps) it made me feel quite a bit of sympathy for the level of abuse it received.

Clearly a lot of things don’t work, but there’s a very ballsy attempt to take the show forward. That glorious shot of the engine turbine just screams movie. Unfortunately it’s just undermimed by the lack of Rob and the lack of Rimmer.

Purely in terms of ideas, and leaving aside the execution for the time being, JFK being the 2nd gunmen always felt like a classic Dwarf spin to me. Likewise Rimmer graduating into the new Ace was such such a romantic way to write out the character. It’s a similar feeling for me as when New Who references Old Who.

It’s just a shame the material in the 2nd half of SMAC isn’t up to the first ten minutes or so.

Cassandra is a very good episode of Red Dwarf. Yes it is.

Absolutely right. I was thinking of starting a thread this morning where we each picked out one moment which for us was ‘classic dwarf’ and one moment where we cringed/screamed at the TV and despaired at what had become of OUR show.

The first moment that came to mind for Good Dwarf was from Cassandra. Bobbie’s delivery on the line “It’s written on this mission directive…”

More or less everything about Cassandra feels like a classic-era episode. The knock-around humour between the characters, the inventiveness. It’s even got that little moral speech by Lister at the end.

If BTE comes out as strong as Cassandra then I’ll be very happy.

>Cassandra is a very good episode of Red Dwarf. Yes it is.

This. It just makes me wonder why there weren’t more episodes that properly used the Canaries idea.

because we cared more about CGI dino’s and the idea of the crew watching girls in the shower

One of the biggest shames of Series VIII (and definitely Cassandra) is that Killcrazy and all the other peripheral prison characters existed.

More or less everything about Cassandra feels like a classic-era episode. The knock-around humour between the characters, the inventiveness. It’s even got that little moral speech by Lister at the end.

And a fourth wall breaking plot hole when he mentions Future Echoes.

> And a fourth wall breaking plot hole when he mentions Future Echoes.

He doesn’t mention Future Echoes. He mentions the previously-encountered future echoes. “Holly, is this a future echo?” The naming convention was established in the original episode, recalling it is no more a fourth wall break than, say, Cat said ‘This place is worse than Rimmerworld’.

“We’re deader than the second half of Polymorph II: Emohawk!”

The best photo ever - http://twitpic.com/1p8tx

Ah, you beat me to it. It’s fucking great.

One of the biggest shames of Series VIII (and definitely Cassandra) is that Killcrazy and all the other peripheral prison characters existed.

Sorry, but while I think the prison idea and ALMOST every character associated with it is bloody stupid, I can’t agree on Killcrazy. He’s FUNNY. He’s not very Red Dwarf, but nothing in VIII is very Red Dwarf, so you might as well just grab at the Actually Funny bits where you can.

> Sorry, but while I think the prison idea and ALMOST every character associated with it is bloody stupid, I can’t agree on Killcrazy. He’s FUNNY. He’s not very Red Dwarf, but nothing in VIII is very Red Dwarf, so you might as well just grab at the Actually Funny bits where you can.

This.

Also given the move of bringing back the whole ship it was disappointing that the old crew was almost entirely ignored. I know we got Mac and at a snip Chen & Selby, but where was everyone else? We were instead introduced to the likes of Ackerman, Baxter and McLaren none of which meant anything to us. Okay so Todhunter etc would have aged, but so had Mac and they brought him back. Plus there had been numerous other characters named throughout the series.

Take Brannigan the ship’s psychiatrist. We didn’t know what he looked like, so surely he could done the psych evaluations. Perhaps it’s hypocritical that I moan about the backwards referencing in Doug-Only Dwarf and then moan about a lack of it in Series VIII, but using fandom in gentle ways is a far better use than hinging entire episodes on it.

> Sorry, but while I think the prison idea and ALMOST every character associated with it is bloody stupid, I can’t agree on Killcrazy. He’s FUNNY. He’s not very Red Dwarf, but nothing in VIII is very Red Dwarf, so you might as well just grab at the Actually Funny bits where you can.

NOT THIS. Killcrazy really is desperately unfunny.

A Lister, Chen, Selby and Petersen episode(I’m sure they could have got Mark Williams for one episode), where they go on a pub crawl of all the ship’s bars would have been amusing.

Okay, it probably wouldn’t.

I take back what I said, this is the best picture ever - http://twitpic.com/1pcvj

> NOT THIS. Killcrazy really is desperately unfunny.

Surely not in comparison to the likes of Baxter?

>NOT THIS. Killcrazy really is desperately unfunny.

If you don’t laugh at the bit where he runs headfirst into the door frame, there’s no hope for you.

Admittedly he doesn’t have many other good bits, but that one’s enough by VIII standards.

Killcrazy:

Good - Killcrazy/doorframe interface.

Bad - Tyrannosaurus Rex ‘little arms’ sequence.

Yeh, I thought the character was great, wether he was in keeping with Dwarf tradition is another thing..

He was basically a twat and as such was played well.

Killcrazy as a nickname suited him well..

> If you don’t laugh at the bit where he runs headfirst into the door frame, there’s no hope for you.

Oh, it is quite amusing, but it really doesn’t justify the rest of his awfulness.

And now Jake Wood is in EastEnders.

What a comedown.

> Okay so Todhunter etc would have aged, but so had Mac and they brought him back

> I’m sure they could have got Mark Williams for one episode

Worth noting that neither Robert Bathurst nor Mark Williams were available to come and film on Series VIII. Had they been, I suspect both would have made significant appearances.

The question is, what are their schedules like at the moment? ;-)

That would have been awesome, Petersen would have been a great secondary character.

>Cassandra is a very good episode of Red Dwarf. Yes it is.

This. It just makes me wonder why there weren’t more episodes that properly used the Canaries idea.

I agree. I loved the idea of a little prison commando squad going out on various missions. Cassandra was brilliant, and I didn’t mind subplot with finding the time-drive (although that guy’s out of synch acting was hammed up way-hay-hay-hay to mu-hu-huch.

Kill Crazy. I quite liked him. He was a silly one dimensional character, but that was the point.

In fact, while I wasn’t really a fan of the idea of the whole crew being resurrected by nanobots, I quite liked all the new characters. Most of the things I dislike concerning series 8 are more plot based than character based. Well… except the excessive ham, but the main characters were guilty of that to some extent too. Cue Rimmer and his ‘hilarious’ de-stiffening treatment. (Although the numbed leg shamble was amusing.) The out of synch punch up was great though.

How did this turn into another series 8 debate? Heh.

> Worth noting that neither Robert Bathurst nor Mark Williams were available to come and film on Series VIII. Had they been, I suspect both would have made significant appearances.

Doh. Previous post fail, I was aware of this and I’d assume both would have been pretty pricey too. I meant to add that maybe a couple of them could have been re-cast. It’s the characters who are part of the folklore more so than the cast, and Kochanski had allready been re-cast by this stage.

although that guy’s out of synch acting was hammed up way-hay-hay-hay to mu-hu-huch.

LIke the sad bastard I am i’ve been wanting to see how that would lookwithout the gaps.

Luckily that awful out of synch guy is followed by my favourite gag in the Series, it is stupid and shouldn’t be but it is played so perfect by Robert with his last line, it is where he says “I have an excellent place to conceal it” and in the next shot it is them all walking in and Rob has a raised Kryten head, I always laugh so much at that.

See the gag to make me laugh the most in the scene was the Turkish entry in the Eurovision Song Contest gag by Holly. Always make me laugh when he goes “and you STILL look like the Turkish entry…”

>Luckily that awful out of synch guy is followed by my favourite gag in the Series, it is stupid and shouldn’t be but it is played so perfect by Robert with his last line, it is where he says “I have an excellent place to conceal it” and in the next shot it is them all walking in and Rob has a raised Kryten head, I always laugh so much at that.

I hate that bit. I also hate the bit where Kryten’s hand inflates. WHAT THE FUCK?

>Kill Crazy. I quite liked him. He was a silly one dimensional character, but that was the point.

As someone to use for throwaway gags, he would have been fine were it not for the fact that pretty much all the characters, core or otherwise, were also one dimensional by that point.

He doesn’t mention Future Echoes. He mentions the previously-encountered future echoes. “Holly, is this a future echo?” The naming convention was established in the original episode, recalling it is no more a fourth wall break than, say, Cat said ‘This place is worse than Rimmerworld’.

He says “Remember Future Echoes”. It should be “Remember those Future Echoes” or something similar to not break the fourth wall.

Not if he was thinking of it in an episodic context. As in an episode of their life defined by something (in this case future echoes) I mean, which just happens to be an episode of a TV show we are watching.

“Remember? Future Echoes.”

Luckily that awful out of synch guy is followed by my favourite gag in the Series, it is stupid and shouldn’t be but it is played so perfect by Robert with his last line, it is where he says “I have an excellent place to conceal it” and in the next shot it is them all walking in and Rob has a raised Kryten head, I always laugh so much at that.

I like it too. It’s exactly this kind of stupid gag which makes me prefer VIII over VII, in fact.

I must leave this dead horse alone.

>He says “Remember Future Echoes”. It should be “Remember those Future Echoes” or something similar to not break the fourth wall.

I always heard it as “Remember? Future Echoes.” I’d bet my left nut that this is how it was intended. Why would they suddenly refer to an episode title?

“Remember ‘Beyond a Joke’?”
“Oh right the one with the tank”

> He says “Remember Future Echoes”.

No he doesn’t.

And even if you feel the delivery swings that way - which I don’t believe it does - you can’t seriously think it was written to be that way.

As yet another thread about something else turns to a debate about VII and/or VIII being lacking or defendable, I cant help but feel a warm glow looking at the new pictures from the currently in production Dave Specials.

Oh how at the very least this new dwarf will add a further dynamic to this age old debate. Whether opinion is pro, con or smiliar on these new episodes once airred, in just over 6 weeks VII and VIII in particular, are going to be getting either a new shining example that puts them to further but newly focussed shame, or a snotty 2nd cousin that they can look down upon finally to help them get their self esteem back, or a much needed friend to stand along side them a little to the front and help deflect a few punches for a while.

It true Dwarf style though, from the little sneak peaks, these new episodes look like having more than enough new approaches to set yet another era of dwarf, slightly apart. Green screen red camera earth set red dwarf im very much looking forward to discovering.

I hope it’s got some good laughs, isn’t too knockabout and has a fair bit of heart. While the Corrie pics had me worried about my middle assumption, these latest photos seem to indicate we’re in for at the very least, an interesting 3 episodes.

Actually - and this isn’t an order, merely a request, and I realise I’m as guilty as anyone - if we could try and keep discussion in this thread related to the specials, rather than just a VII/VIII conversation, it’d probably be for the best.

Of course, how VII/VIII were recieved - both positively and negatively - does have *some* bearing on hopes for the specials, so talk in relation to that is fine!

I received series VII and VIII on the television, via an aerial.

One thing that has me feeling optimistic about these specials is Doug`s comment on one of the DVDs about regretting losing the pathos in the show later on. This was definitely a problem in Series VIII imo and had generally been disappearing for several series before that as well. Obviously it is too early to say exactly what the tone of the new eps will be but it would be nice to think that the sadness and seriousness could return to some extent.

Also as Doug has had 10 years to come up with ideas for the show, surely he must have something impressive up his sleeve.

>Doug…must have something impressive up his sleeve

Resist the temptation.

http://twitter.com/bobbyllew/status/1260565530

For any late night UK tweeters, Red Dwarf has just wrapped for the day. Phew

1:15am? That is late…