Red Dwarf only got on the air because of an accounting error

Here’s a book for Red Dwarf fans to know about. Tom Salinsky‘s “Red Dwarf: Discovering the TV Series” is on pre-order and will be released on the 30th.

Tom’s Star Trek: Discovering the TV Series is highly rated, and there’s a second volume due next year, so the expectations for his Red Dwarf book are high!

If you’re a Big Finish audiobook devotee, his name will be familiar, as he’s written many dramas together with Robert Khan.

Red Dwarf might not be as international as Star Trek, but it has a loyal fan base and commands a unique space in British TV history. Did you know it’s won an Emmy and once had over 8 million weekly viewers in the UK? It’s not a competition, though; Star Trek was one of the sitcom’s inspirations.

Geek Native’s been lucky enough to secure, just for you, a unique write-up from Tom Salinksy on how Red Dwarf got started… or nearly didn’t get started!

After a battle with the BBC and a system that turned its nose up at sci-fi, it all came down to an accountant’s assumption.

The Story of Red Dwarf

By Tom Salinsky

Red Dwarf only got on the air because of an accounting error.

Comedy writers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor met in Manchester and shared a love for science fiction, especially of the grungier kind, like John Carpenter’s Dark Star. Having made their name working on shows like Spitting Image in the mid-1980s they were trying to get a sitcom of their own on the TV but had been warned by producer Paul Jackson (The Young Ones, Saturday Live) that there was a deep distrust of science fiction at the BBC, and they should focus on literally anything else. Undeterred, they wrote the pilot script of Red Dwarf – and the BBC rejected it on three separate occasions.

It was a big swing. Although inspired by traditional two-men-who-hate-each-other set-ups (Porridge, Steptoe and Son, Hancock), the plot saw third technician Dave Lister kept alive in stasis for three million years after a radiation leak wipes out the rest of the crew. Now, his only companions are a hologram recreation of his dead bunkmate, the ship’s loopy onboard computer and a creature who evolved from his pet cat. To The Manor Born, this wasn’t.

But a brilliant script is no use without a TV channel who will fund it, and so Paul Jackson reluctantly moved on to other projects – and soon found himself making Happy Families, a six-part comedy series riffing on the classic Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets. In its own way, this was just as ambitious as Red Dwarf, but writer Ben Elton and star Jennifer Saunders were more known quantities, and this series didn’t feature any humanoid felines or characters made out of light and computer code. And crucially, it was being made in Manchester, away from the prying eyes of BBC Head of Light Entertainment Gareth Gwenlan.

Happy Families was duly transmitted in autumn of 1985, and watched by nearly nobody, but although it was a self-contained six-part story shot on film, as far as the BBC was concerned it was another sitcom, and generally speaking if you got a sitcom on the air, you could have a second series to see how it developed. But Ben Elton had no interest in making a second series. And yet, there it was on the BBC Manchester budget for 1986… “Happy Families Series 2”. Suddenly, there was a little pot of money available for Paul Jackson to do whatever he wanted. And so, he called Rob Grant and Doug Naylor.

The next job was casting. Veteran sitcom writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson had impressed upon Rob and Doug the importance of hiring really good actors, rather than comedians, and they weren’t the only ones offering advice. “Whatever you do,” opined Spitting Image producer John Lloyd, “don’t keep casting those same Oxbridge faces – you know, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Rowan Atkinson, Helen Atkinson-Wood, Tim McInnerny.” Thus warned, the Red Dwarf team steered clear of all such people. John Lloyd meanwhile launched Blackadder starring Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Rowan Atkinson, Helen Atkinson-Wood, Tim McInnerny and others. Thank goodness that worked out so well for all concerned.

For a while it looked as if Alfred Molina would play obnoxious hologram Arnold Rimmer, but Jackson had become concerned that the character of the cat (described in the script as “an incredibly smooth looking black guy wearing a grey silk suit”) might strike some viewers the wrong way. Jackson remembered a spiky mixed-race performance poet from Saturday Live and sent him the script for what today we would call a “sensitivity read”. Craig Charles called him back and said “I don’t think the cat’s racist at all. I think he’s really cool. Can I audition for Lister?”

Alas, there was no chemistry between Charles and Molina, and in any case, Charles had never worked as an actor. The Cat was an easier part to cast. West End dancer Danny John-Jules swaggered into the auditions in one of his dad’s old Zoot suits and embodied the part instantly. And stand-up comedian Norman Lovett had just the right lugubrious delivery for bonkers computer Holly. But Lister and Rimmer were the heart of the show, and now Molina was starting to complain about the script. “How soon would Rimmer stop being a hologram?” he wanted to know. By the middle of the first series? By the end of the first episode?

Then Jackson remembered that among the dozens of auditionees, there was a particularly good one from impressionist Chris Barrie, who had just the right kind of background for the part. And with Barrie and Charles, that precious chemistry was suddenly there after all. This may have been aided by the fact that two fairly inexperienced actors cast to play two-men-who-hated-each-other came from very different backgrounds and didn’t get on socially. But now the cast had come together. Had they heeded Galton and Simpson’s advice to get really good actors who could mine the scripts for truthful relationships? Not exactly. They’d ended up with a performance poet, an impressionist, a stand-up comedian and a dancer. But it was right. It was working.

Good thing too, because the worst wasn’t over.

Although commissioned under the aegis of BBC North West, the show would be rehearsed each week in Acton, and then the team would travel by coach up to the confusingly named Oxford Road studios in Manchester to record the episode in front of a live audience. But while the team rehearsed, talks were falling apart between the BBC and the electrician’s union. When the day of recording arrived, the electricians had walked out on strike, and the recording was cancelled.

Undeterred, Paul Jackson got the team to move on to episode two, hoping to come back and pick up the first show at a later date. For another five days, the team rehearsed – and again they had nothing to show for it as the electricians’ strike continued. After six weeks of work, they had rehearsed the entire series and filmed nothing. It was clear that Red Dwarf was dead on arrival. For a while Craig Charles thought that the only material he would ever shoot for this amazing new show was silent footage of him in a spacesuit, painting the outside of the huge ship – footage which had been cut into an incredible titles sequence, but with no episode to follow it.

But, ever the canny producer, Jackson has been inviting top BBC executives to some of the rehearsals so they could see for themselves just how incredibly well this cast was coming together, in the hope that they might be given another go. It took around another six months of bargaining, pleading, memo-writing and arm-twisting but eventually, the word came from on high. Red Dwarf could be remounted.

Finally, a full five years after the first script had been written, Red Dwarf (also known as Happy Families Series 2) was shown on BBC2 at 9:00pm. Among those watching was John Lloyd, who was now on to series three of Blackadder and he couldn’t resist ringing up the writers to tell them what he thought. “I loved the opening titles,” he explained, “but then the show started…” Paul Jackson was much more cheerful. The first episode of Red Dwarf, one of the hardest shows he’d ever worked on, and a show nobody at the BBC had wanted, was BBC2’s third-most watched show of the week. Lift off.

Quick Links

• Tom Salinksy’s “Red Dwarf: Discovering the TV Series” is available for pre-order now from Amazon, released 30th September 2024.