Still Lost in Space

I can remember the first time I saw Red Dwarf. I must have been around nine or ten years old, my parents had gone out for the night and an older cousin had been slipped enough cash to give her night up to keep an eye on me and my kid brother.

Having always kind of looked up to her, when she said she wanted to watch something, I was more than acquiescent. Within minutes, I was asking questions like "why has he got a H on his forehead?" and "why has he got those teeth?". Thus began a love affair with a show that has recently made a comeback.

To those in the dark: Dave Lister is the lowest ranked member of the titular crate, a huge mining ship. Unmotivated, laid back but also sharply intelligent, his immediate superior and bunkmate is Arnold Rimmer, whose ambitions to better himself are thwarted by his own idiocy and lack of self-awareness. Through a series of events, Lister is put into stasis for what is only supposed to be a few months, but when a radiation leak kills the rest of the crew, ends up being long enough for him to safely exit. That being, three million years. Holly, the ships AI, brings back Rimmer as a hologram recreation to keep him from going insane from loneliness. They are then joined by a creature that evolved from Lister's cat, which was pregnant and safely sealed in the hold when the disaster happened. Later on, they found Kryten, a robot who had been stranded when the ship he was serving on crashed but had continued his duties to the long-dead crew.

At its peak, around series' II to V, it was as funny a show as Britain has produced, introducing a new insult to the lexicon with "smeghead". Writers Doug Naylor and Rob Grant had a knack for sharp dialogue and using sci-fi clichés to great effect. It was only when series VI moved off the ship into the smaller Starbug vehicle (used as the writers were short on dialogue for Holly, and this removed the AI from the show) that it moved into a "monster of the week" antics.

After a four-year gap, the show returned to some fanfare, though with only Doug Naylor at the helm. This and series VIII showed a major dip in form. Bringing Kristine Kochanski (Lister's great lost unrequited love) back was a desperate move and the reception may be why the BBC were less keen on more. Instead, freeview channel Dave stepped in for the Back to Earth specials, which were nothing special bar a nice little scene where Lister meets Craig Charles, the actor who plays him.

Despite that, a new, full series has arrived with the first episode last week. And... it was OK. A few laughs, but nothing major. The central cast has been trimmed back down to the central quartet after the disaster of an extended set of players in VIII. However, by giving us a hologram of Rimmer's older brother and his robot companion, it felt like we were back to the problems with VI of flying in a different problem every week, rather than just giving us the crew interacting with one another and finding ways to kill the boredom of being trapped in deep space.

On the plus side, Danny John-Jules as Cat still seemed sharp, and there was just about enough to merit further watching in the hope of improvements.