Behind the scenes on Red Dwarf
Ben Machell
As a pre-pubescent boy, I would sometimes lie about having stayed-up to watch Red Dwarf to impress friends, who like me, found its combination of spaceships, Craig Charles and the word “smeghead” the last word in amazing. Today, though, in cool company, I’ll deny having ever had an interest in anything of the sort. It’s cowardly and dishonest, and not the behaviour of a man such as Andrew Ellard.
“I’ve wanted to be here since I was 12,” whispers the beaming twentysomething in glasses and a baggy black T-shirt. We are stood behind the set of a spaceship’s interior, as filming for the first Red Dwarf episodes in ten years progresses. “I was a member of the fan club, then I was the fan club magazine editor, then I was hired to do the website, then I directed the bonus material for the DVDs,” he says. Now he is employed as “script consultant”, a fair reward, you think, for sticking to his principles.
At the refreshment table, the use of a straw allows Robert Llewellyn, reprising his role as the robot Kryten, to sip coffee without dribbling on to his rubber mask. Opposite is a huge greenscreen backdrop, like a Subutteo Hackney Marshes, where a short-skirted Sophie Winkleman tries to deliver a wilfully technical monologue about “dimension cutters” to Chris Barrie (playing the pompous hologram Rimmer). Between attempts, she mutters the lines to herself and keeps warm in one of those ankle-length padded coats popular with the hard-faced women who hand out nightclub flyers in northern towns.
Craig Charles arrives in a smart coat and polished, tasselled leather loafers. Later, he’ll have the dreadlocks of his character, Lister, sewn in because he can’t change his current hairstyle for “contractual obligations”. He looks up at the big greenscreen. “It was all bluescreen when we started. But it didn’t really work because you could see those fuzzy bits around the edges,” he grins. “You know for the first few series we bought our sets from Prisoner Cell Block H.”
Visual effects have developed since then. Ellard returns and explains how in a scene where Kryten has to get inside a postbox, he suggested that the script be altered from the original plan of the robot using a laser to burn a hole. “I said: ‘no, no, no – he’s a Swiss Army robot. He’ll have a hand with a skeleton key that comes out of it’. And then you get on set and realise that someone has had to build a hand with a key coming out of it just because I suggested it,” he says, almost swooning. “I love it.”
This week we saw Sir Alan shake the teams up a bit, and set them what I felt was their most difficult task yet; design a new piece of fitness kit in a day!
More goodies found on The Times Online website to whet your appetite for the debut of the new Red Dwarf airing on Dave tonight at 9pm.
