Tag Archives: Red Dwarf

The Most Disappointing TV of 2020

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2020 will be remembered for a great many things, few of them sanguine. The year began with Australia burning, and ended with Donald Trump trying to smash democracy using other people’s money and temper tantrums. Wedged between those two terrifying totems was the coronavirus, an invisible and deadly assailant that first inexplicably robbed us of our toilet paper, then our freedom, then our collective sense of objective reality. That spectre of lost lives and lockdowns is still with us, and the virus itself only seems to be getting stronger, more deadly and more widespread, like some hideous airborne variant of Mrs Brown’s Boys. As a consequence of the endless upheaval, there wasn’t much to do in 2020 except panic, and watch TV. Thankfully, there was plenty of panic to go around, and a veritable smorgasbord of terrific TV to be sampled.

But that’s not why we’re here today.

Today, I want to talk to you about the shows that made me wish for some kind of retroactive coronavirus-related production disruption that would wipe from existence whole seasons of said shows, and, most mercifully of all, expunge them from my memory. I’m talking about the shows that felt fittingly 2020, in that they were a heinous assault on mankind itself.

The Middle

First, let’s look at a handful of shows that for one reason or another teetered on the cusp of entertainment oblivion, but never quite plummeted, or else started to nose-dive but managed to pull the stick back to achieve if not quite a loop-the-loop then at least a level flight.

Early in the year, Armando Ianucci’s hotly anticipated, space-based comedy Avenue 5 certainly elicited more bangs than whimpers; unfortunately, the bangs came as a result of people slamming their heads off of the nearest solid object in pained bewilderment that an Armando Ianucci project could be so insipid. I think much of the problem lay with the uncharted territory being explored, by creator and audience both. Ianucci usually satirises existing institutions and power structures for which we have countless frames of reference, even if we find ourselves ignorant of the minutiae of their functions. Without much foreknowledge we can get what he’s trying to do and trying to say, and who he’s trying to say it about. We understand the archetypes.

In Avenue 5, set aboard a futuristic luxury space-liner, the institution and target was more opaque, and it took some time for the pieces to fall into place, more time than many viewers were willing to extend. Which is a shame, really, because after a somewhat shaky start – initially, the characters felt oddly broad, and the humour fell a little flat – the show unfolded into a delicious, hilarious farce. Its message on the madness of crowds was moulded, I would guess, with the rise of bumbling populist power-mongers and their slavishly devoted minions in mind, but the year’s events transformed the show into a prescient, scathing, very timely satire on how societies behaved, and continue to behave, during the coronavirus pandemic. Hopefully the second season can hit the ground running… if the coronavirus doesn’t stop them from filming it, that is.

Red Dwarf could easily have ended up slap-bang in the middle of 2020’s dreck list, but it managed to dodge that fate largely thanks to low expectations. Few expected it to be good, even – perhaps especially – childhood fans like me. It still pains me to say it, but Red Dwarf hasn’t been truly noteworthy since its sixth season. Every few years it returns with just enough nuggets of what made it beloved in the first place to justify its continued existence. It’s like a slightly shambolic, age-faded uncle whose hoary old jokes you tolerate because he used to tell you funny stories when you were young. And so it proved with Red Dwarf: The Promised Land, a feature-length special that largely squandered the long-anticipated return of the cat people, especially with its damp squib of a generic villain, but squeezed a lot of laughs out of Lister’s reluctant ascension to godhood (and Rimmer’s reaction to it). There were also a few stellar scenes the dialogue from which wouldn’t have felt out of place in the show’s golden era. Red Dwarf needs to re-learn that it’s always at its best when it trucks in pathos, and lets the laughs flow from character rather than trying to force them through innuendo and crudity.

And now, as promised, the year’s biggest failures and most crushing disappointments.

How the West was Lost

Westworld season one was a brilliant piece of story-telling: dense, rich, mysterious, confounding, thought-provoking. Its second season took a few stutter-steps and stumbles – adding fuel to the fire of those who’d derided the show for over-staying its welcome rather than taking a one-and-done approach – but still turned in powerful, and emotionally resonant sequences and episodes. Then came the third season. Gone were the slow-burns and puzzles, here to stay were the whizz-bangs and non-stop robot ass-kicking. The difference in tone and quality was as pronounced as the difference between Alien and Alien vs Predator 2; Terminator 2 and Terminator: Genysis; and a kiss on the cheek and a thunderous kick in the balls. Westworld has become more like a bad, generic Terminator sequel than the inventive and reflective mind-bender it was when it began. In mulling things over before writing this article, I realised I’d completely forgotten Aaron Paul’s prominent role in season 3; I only remembered once I started grabbing screenshots. This highlights the season’s worst, most unforgiveable, crime: it’s forgettable.

Star Drekking

I was accompanied on my voyages through adolescence by the starships Enterprise, Defiant and Voyager, a triumvirate of overlapping Trek shows (The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager respectively) that got me hooked on televised science fiction, and opened my mind to the richness and possibilities of its story-telling.

Sci-fi these days, though, can’t be allowed to revel in its cult status. It’s a multi-billion-pound industry thanks to the likes of Star Wars and Marvel and Disney. Sci-fi is now for the masses, and they want blockbusters, all of the time, whether the screen is small or cinema-sized: big explosions, big emotions, big lens flares, and loud and manipulative musical scores.

Star Trek: Discovery is a case in point. It looks great. Some of the visual effects, particularly in its third season, have been breath-taking. But I can’t help but feel that the aesthetics have been dialled up at the expense of the writing, and somewhere along the line the show has lost its grip on what makes Star Trek ‘Star Trek’. I know times change, and with them budgets, attitudes, audience habits and technology. What might have worked in the 60s (even the 80s) wouldn’t necessarily work today; a lot of it definitely wouldn’t. I know Star Trek has evolved, and has to evolve, to stay relevant. I just wonder if the show has changed too much, to the point where Star Trek: Discovery isn’t just a bad Star Trek show, but a bad (or, if I’m being generous, a mediocre) show, full-stop.

I say this not only as a borderline fuddy-duddy who looks back fondly and perhaps with a sense of protectiveness on the halcyon days of Jean Luc Picard and Benjamin Sisko, but also as someone who watches, and often critiques, an unhealthy amount of television. I’m not operating in a vacuum here. I know what a good Star Trek or, more broadly, a good sci-fi series looks like, and I know what a good TV show looks like. And Discovery doesn’t look like any of it.

Season three saw our plucky crew following Michael through a wormhole into the far-future, acting as custodians of data that a malevolent AI had tried to use to end all sentient, organic life in the universe.

The season started well, with an opener that was entertaining and luscious to look at, if a little vacuous and whizz-bang, followed by an effective episode that saw the crew having to extract the ship from a tomb of fast-replicating ice. Things quickly went downhill after that. The season’s premise, that the Federation of the future was a spent and rag-tag force, a shadow of its former self only kept alive by hope and goodwill, was a strong one, though, as usual, Michael Burnham’s habit of instantly saving the universe just because she’s Michael Burnham rather robbed the story, and the new universe, of its chance to grow in depth and complexity.

Myriad complications face the crew in this new far-future universe, chief among them the cataclysmic event that occurred 120 years before the Discovery’s arrival. This was ‘the burn’, an unexplained phenomenon that caused all dilithium in the galaxy to spontaneously combust, killing untold thousands and rendering most spaceships incapable of fast interstellar travel. Again, fantastical and implausible as this notion was (and I clearly say that in my capacity as a qualified astro-physicist…) there was great potential here for complex conflict and drama that was unfortunately side-lined in favour of slick and shiny whizz-bang, and the sacrificing of all ancillary characters and themes on the altar of Michael Burnham.

You could lay some of the blame for Discovery’s problems on its serialised format – the shift away from the standalone episodes that were once Star Trek’s bread-and-butter – but that would be to deny Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s phenomenally successful forays into that type of long-form story-telling. Even when dealing with war and hopelessness and loss DS9 never lost its essence, its hope, its intrinsic sense of the wider canvas – and franchise – in which it existed.

It helped that DS9 had layered, flawed and fully-fleshed-out characters. Discovery has, at its core, Michael Burnham and Saru (I loved Georgiou, but she’s been spun off into her own spin-off series now), maybe, at a push, Book, Stamets, and Culver, and I wouldn’t include any of them, barring Saru and Georgiou, in the top 50 of Trek’s best characters. I’m still not entirely sure of the names of most of the bridge crew. Very few supporting characters enjoy much in the way of development in this show, and if they do it’s either to service the plot, or service the universal constant that is Michael Burnham – usually the latter. This is not an ensemble show: this is the Michael Burnham show, with occasional not-so-special guest stars.

Season three had so many cynically manufactured emotional beats it was almost a percussive symphony, a dirge scored to the background wail of crying. Jesus, they cry a lot on this show, a lot more than any group of people I’ve ever encountered in life or fiction. And they affirm each other a lot, too, whether it’s earned or not. There were so many bullshit inspirational speeches that I started to think I was watching The Walking Dead In Space. Hugging and crying, crying and hugging, feeling and being in touch with feelings. Signalling to the audience, ‘You should feel this NOW and now you should feel THIS’: telling not showing; shouting not whispering.

Whereas Trek spin-offs like The Next Generation had consultants on hand to advise on the plausibility and logistics of the scripts’ speculative science, Discovery is content to cleave closer to mood and magic. The emphasis is always on feeling over thinking. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the revelation that ‘the burn’ was caused by a sad and angry Kelpien child reacting to the death of his mother under extraordinary (and extraordinarily stupid) circumstances. I’m afraid so. This is no longer a science-fiction show. It’s like something written for the CW by someone who used to write fantasy for children, and doesn’t really like Star Trek, or science-fiction, all that much. I never get the sense, like I did with previous incarnations of the show, that the characters live on the ship. The ship doesn’t feel like a home to them; more like a spaceborne feelings’ factory, or a mobile exposition unit. When the characters appear on-screen – usually running, frequently crying – it’s as though they’ve just entered stage left. Not real people but actors, ciphers. Surface. It’s all just surface.

If you want good small-screen sci-fi, watch The Expanse; if you want good Star Trek, watch 80s and 90s Star Trek, or even watch The Orville, a gem of a show that’s managed to capture the ethos and feel of a modern Star Trek show while remaining resolutely its own thing.

Whatever my interpretation of (or ‘feelings about’ if you want a little sliver of irony) Discovery, a crime hasn’t been committed here. It’s just a TV show, and if people enjoy it or take comfort from it, then who am I to judge them? In any case, I’d take Discovery over Star Trek: Picard any (and every) day of the week.

Christ, Picard felt like a kick in the nuts; a kick so hard it sent my nuts thundering up my body like two errant pinballs, which then ping-ponged between my skull and amygdala until my brain died. Sometimes, as Fred Gwynne said in Pet Sematary, dead is better, and that’s certainly the case here, both in relation to the show itself, and to the fate of Jean Luc Picard at the season’s end.

On reflection, all of the things I enjoyed about Picard season one were rooted in nostalgia. I liked the opening dream sequence aboard the NCC-1701; I liked Picard reuniting with Riker and Troi; I liked seeing Hugh and Seven of Nine again; I liked Data’s (now second) final death scene. But I only liked them in the same way that I would like the sudden waft of a smell that reminded me of being a kid and visiting my dearly-departed grandparents. Running with that memory-sparking theme, then, I would have to say that the experience of watching season one of Picard is like someone reanimating your dead grandparents and having those hitherto sweet, wise and gentle figures hurl foul abuse at you, screaming until they’re hoarse that the world is an irredeemably ugly place and we all deserve death, before beating you senseless and attempting to extract one of your eyes with a dessert spoon (unless your grandparents were like that when they were alive, in which case please pick another analogy from the pile). Gone, also, is the Picard we remember from active duty; here instead we have a walking fan-fic who’s presumably been written by an overly sentimental sado-masochist. The Picard of this show is just a broken old man who seems to spend most of his time being told to fuck off.

I know genre shows like The Expanse and Battlestar Galactica have upped the ante, opening the door to dealing with adult themes and content in a commercially successful way, but Star Trek shouldn’t try to compete with them on that battleground. They’re their own thing, and Star Trek is its own thing. By all means re-invigorate Star Trek, but, again, don’t lose sight of the sort of show it is and always has been, and don’t transmogrify it into ‘Quentin Tarantino in Space’.

Star Trek: Picard is gritty, dark, spectacularly and incongruously violent, full of swearing (people say fuck in Star Trek now), sombre and miserable. It falls light-years short of the success and quality of The Expanse, and in so courting that audience-base at the expense of its life-long fans fails at being a Star Trek show. The worst of both worlds, if you like.

Oh, Doctor Who. What’s happened to you? I was never a huge fan of the show as a child. I was aware of its place in the cultural consciousness, knew the contemporary doctors of my era, and enjoyed it whenever I watched it. I was too young to deduce the death throes the show had entered into under the helm of controversial show-runner Johnathan Nathan-Turner, and didn’t particularly mourn its passing when the original run ended in 1989. As an adult, I enjoyed the show’s new iteration, starting with Christopher Eccleston and running all the way up to Peter Capaldi. As I had started writing for Den of Geek I thought it criminal I wasn’t fully au fait with the show’s long history, geek behemoth that it is, so took to bingeing it from the very beginning. My kids came along for the ride, and fell in love with Doctor Who, almost to the point of fanaticism. They now know every era, every doctor and companion, and almost every story from the Classic series to the present day, up to and including the 13th Doctor, played by Jodie Whittaker.

And this era is the one they’re least enthusiastic about. I feel the same. Again, the special effects are, in most cases, better than they’ve ever been, but everything just feels a bit flat, from the performance of the central character to the villains to the alien worlds and wonders we’re invited to explore. It’s like the showrunner Chris Chibnall, despite being a fan of the show since childhood, has forgotten the essence of what Doctor Who is. The show has become more like a series of facile morality plays with sprinklings of Quantum Leap than a show about a space cowboy rolling into town in his rusty blue wagon, righting wrongs, fighting evil and trying to leave the universe a better place than when he found it.

This latest season was an improvement on last year’s season 11, but that’s like saying Jeffrey Epstein was an improvement on Jimmy Savile. In fairness, the opening two-parter, Spyfall, was actually a lot of fun, and I loved the new, wild-eyed, scenery-chewing Master (Sacha Dahwan). The Haunting of Villa Diodati, too, was a strong outing, with an intriguing premise and a commendably eerie atmosphere. Graham, played by Bradley Walsh, was, as always, a rare chink of light in the darkness, a warm and engaging companion. Jo Martin’s incarnation of the Doctor, pursued to rural England by the Judoon, was a similar joy to watch, proving that the Doctor’s gender isn’t the real, or at least the greatest, problem with the current manifestation of the character. But, despite little flashes of competency here and there, the season got bogged down in boredom, preachiness, and insipid story-telling, very much wearing its politics on its sleeve, shaped like a giant mutated fist. There was also Orphan 55, one of the worst ever episodes of Doctor Who, perhaps one of the worst ever episodes of anything ever. And that’s before we even consider the canon-smashing sledgehammer of the season’s closing two-parter that makes Jodie Whittaker’s version of the character not the 13th, but approximately the 1,000,013th.

This show is dying, despite its occasional grand gestures and increasing attempts at fan service, and I don’t think I care anymore. And my kids don’t either. Which should be a little worrying for the BBC, given that my kids, and thousands like them, are the show’s primary target market.

Spitting Image is the spitting image of a very bad show. I used to love the series when I was younger, and now find myself wondering if the ‘satire’ was always this broad, the jokes always so cheap. Much of the problem lies with many of the show’s targets being beyond parody, especially Donald Trump, who is already a malevolent puppet. Elsewhere in the show, though, the writers seemed content to take lazy, tabloid-style pops at their targets, most notably Harry and Megan, a duo, and a representation of them, sure to please the Daily Mail crowd. Just leave them alone, for Christ’s sake. The characterisation of Joe Biden, too, could have been ripped from tweets written by Trump himself. And as much as I loathe Prince Andrew, having the punchlines to his appearances be literal punches and head-battings rather lowered the satirical tone to sub-Punch-and-Judy levels.

I liked Dominic Cummings’ pulsating-headed alien, and, contrary to my comments on Prince Andrew, it’s always a joy to see James Corden being viciously beaten, but beyond that the show either punched down, or couched its punches in soft velvet gloves. Puerile, unfunny and a wasted opportunity for some political satire with some real heft.

What shows do you think missed the mark in 2020? Or do you disagree with my sh*t-list? Tell me in the comments below this article.

Geeks may rule, but *that* ‘aint cool…

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Being a geek, or being interested in geeky things, isn’t the albatross around the neck it used to be when I was at school. As a teenager, I hid my love for Star Trek like it was a secret identity. Not a sexy secret identity like Superman’s, but one that if discovered would almost certainly prevent me from losing my virginity before the turn of the millennium. The third millennium.

I remember sitting in the opticians with my mum when I was about 15 or 16. I was browsing through an Argos catalogue when I spied the complete first season of Star Trek Voyager on VHS. I hinted that it might make a nice gift for a space-loving chap such as myself, but my mother never gave it any serious consideration, preferring instead to launch into a tirade about how I didn’t appreciate the value of things, and how her parents had never bought her box-sets of popular American science-fiction programmes when she was a girl growing up in the Glasgow tenements. I think the closest she’d ever got to flying saucers was when her mum got angry and threw plates at her.

About half-way through this parental primal-scream, the shop door tinkled to announce the arrival of a new customer. It was a girl from my class at school. She took a seat next to us. This wasn’t good. Mum was still in full, red-faced swing, a few ‘and another things’ leaping from her tongue. I couldn’t let this Star Trek-shaped secret get out. I mustered every sliver of verbal dexterity I possessed in a desperate attempt to derail the subject of conversation.

And I failed.

Miserably.

Have you ever tried to stop a mother from talking, much less a Glasweigen one? After a few awkward hellos, my mum turned to the girl, jabbed a finger at the Argos catalogue and said: “He wants me to buy him these bloody Star Trek videos. Look how expensive they are!”

She might as well have said: “Honest to God, I don’t know how I’m going to stop him from wearing his granny’s knickers to bed every night, and touching himself as he watches Prisoner Cell Block H.”

The girl was now an Athenian herald, sure to take news of my plummeting sexual stock back to school, where it would be met with frenzied murmurs of ‘… Jamie…Jamie…which one’s he again?’ This was the bitterest pill to swallow. The realisation that I probably didn’t have stock to plummet in the first place.

How times have changed.

Not in terms of my sexual stock, you understand, which still remains low, but in terms of the things that impact on a young lad’s sex appeal. These days, admitting you like Star Trek isn’t going to stop you from boldly going to bed with someone; admitting you like Star Wars isn’t going to stand in the way of you getting a good Chewie.

It’s a brave new world for the geeks of yesteryear. Superhero movies routinely gross billions at the box office. Sagas like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones are almost universally adored, or at least universally respected. Sci-fi shows and comic book adaptations are everywhere. Fewer and fewer people are confusing Star Wars with Star Trek while wearing dismissive sneers on their faces.

Arguably, geeks have inherited the earth because technology has finally caught up with the dreams, visions and what-if-eries at the pulsing core of geekdom. Fans have finally been able to say to a scornful population (whose perspectives on sci-fi, superheroes and fantasy worlds had perhaps been shaped by stereotypes like Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons): ‘See? This is what’s been happening inside our heads all these years. This is what it looks like. It’s pretty cool, right?’

So geek is now cool.

Except… not all of it.

Oh god, not all of it.

Even factoring in mainstream acceptance, there are still elements of the best sci-fi and fantasy shows, and moments within them, that make me want to take up sports, bin my books, burn my DVD collection and never contemplate the fantastical or the high-concept ever again; there are things out there that must remain hidden from new geeks and the yet-to-be converted; things with the power to turn me back into that embarrassed, shame-ridden boy sitting in my local optician’s, ready to curl up into a ball that’s roughly the same size as the smallest letter on the bottom line of the eye-chart.

Strap yourself in. This ‘aint going to be pretty.

Kling-a-long-a-ding-dong

I watched the first season of Star Trek Discovery last year, and while I enjoyed it, it didn’t instantly convince me of its Star Trekkiness. It seemed to owe more of a debt to the 2004 series of Battlestar Galactica (and perhaps even The Punisher) than to its franchise forebears. Some of the violence is nauseatingly brutal, with frequent scenes of bloody torture and merciless bone-crunching. The characters even swear. OK, it’s not a Star Trek first. Data once uttered the word ‘shit’ to comedic effect in the The Next Generation crew’s first cinematic outing ‘Generations’, but until 2017 that was – to the best of my knowledge – the one and only swear word that Star Trek had ever dropped.

Now, not only do Star Trek crews say shit, they say ‘fuck’, too. The ‘f’ word?? In fucking Star Trek? What mirror-universe trickery is this? I can only posit that the creative team behind the show must once have been teenage Trek fans and found themselves sitting in a version of my opticians’ office, timidly browsing through a catalogue of Star Trek box-sets, terrified that their shameful secret would be exposed, and vowing to themselves: ‘When I’m eventually in charge of this show it’s going to have tits and it’s going to have blood and broken necks and shagging and people saying ‘fuck’ all the time, and everyone’s going to think it’s edgy and hip, by God! And the geeky kids who watch it are going to be drowning in sexual effluent – AND NOT THEIR OWN THIS TIME, DAMMIT!’

Despite being self-conscious as a lad, I always thought Star Trek was cool. Well, OK, not cool, exactly, but worthy, cerebral, exciting. If only the majority of people in my school and neighbourhood would set aside their preconceptions and give it a chance I was certain they’d grow to love it.

But not if they ever, ever, ever, EVER tuned in just as a bunch of Klingons started singing. Then all bets were off. They’d be left thinking to themselves that they’d accidentally started watching a documentary about angry German death-metal fans, or the final of the Eurovision Song Contest. Finally convincing someone to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation and having them randomly select an episode with lots of Klingon sing-alongs is the equivalent of talking about how cool, friendly and funny your best friend is to a group of new acquaintances at a formal occasion, only for your friend to turn up dressed as half-Ike Turner, half-Tina Turner, and caked in human shit from head-to-toe.

Mind you, any episode from the first season of TNG would have a similar effect on the uninitiated. Almost without exception the episodes were hammy, crummy and execrable, and in one infamous instance really rather quite racist – looking at you, Code of Honour.

Deep Space Nine was – and still is – my favourite incarnation of Star Trek. It quickly became a gritty, dirty, rough-and-tumble, serialised saga filled with flawed and imperfect heroes and relatable villains, an obvious spiritual predecessor to the revived Battlestar Galactica… but let’s not forget that it, too, began its life as, well… shite. The first season episode, Move Along Home, in which some of the principal characters become trapped in a weird alien game that can only be defeated by playing hopskotch and singing daft otherworldly nursery rhymes, is so cringe-worthy that even a young Russel Brand would’ve been killed by all the vicarious shame compressed and distilled into its ferociously fucking awful forty minutes.

Red Face in Space

I loved Red Dwarf as a lad, and was never happier than when out in the playground imitating the cast and trading catchphrases. I used to tape episodes from the TV so I could watch them with my grandfather, a continuation of a sci-fi-watching tradition that had started with repeats of Lost in Space and Land of the Giants. I had a deep, symbiotic relationship with Red Dwarf, as we all have with our favourite things, be they TV shows, football clubs or Gods.

My grandfather’s laughter wasn’t just a vindication of the writers and a salute to the comedic chops of Craig Charles et al; to me it signified acceptance, validation. As we bonded over those half-hour nuggets of space-based hijinks, my being became indivisible from Red Dwarf. If he hadn’t have liked it as much as he did, or actively hated it, I would have taken it as a personal insult, and left my grandparents’ home nursing a psychic wound an inch deep around my soul.

Watching Red Dwarf slowly die from 1997 on-wards was like finding out that all of my favourite childhood entertainers had been prolific child abusers, which isn’t just an extreme analogy, because most of my favourite childhood entertainers were prolific child abusers. I remember watching an episode from season seven with my Dwarf-sceptic sister and becoming increasingly angry at the show for being shit, and at my sister for not laughing anyway. Then came season eight – aka Chuckle Brothers in Space – featuring slapstick that was about as funny as watching your gran being beaten to death by angry werewolves with cricket bats.

After season eight the show was quickly and quietly (and completely understandably) dropped by the BBC, only to be resurrected ten years later on the satellite channel Dave. Red Dwarf’s come-back special was Back to Earth, a made-for-TV movie told in three parts. Creator Doug Naylor took the bold step of removing not only every shred of laughter from the new show, but all of its humour, too, replacing it with a mixture of existential dread and Coronation Street. Fuck, it was dreadful.

Seasons ten and eleven were a mixed-bag, but in their defence there were a few diamonds strewn among the rough, just enough to justify the show’s continued existence. In season twelve, though, Doug Naylor successfully squandered every dollop of goodwill he’d managed to build up by dropping a single episode that was so gut-grindingly, skull-breakingly, world-endingly awful that it made all of the shittest episodes he’d made up until that point seem like comedies co-written by Steve Coogan, Graham Linehan, Billy Connolly, Trey Parker, Matt Stone and the Marx Brothers combined.

It was so bad it made Mrs Browns’ Boys look good; truth be told it made having your eyes punched in by a spike while a crocodile rips off your cock look good. That episode was, of course, Timewave, signalling to even the show’s most ardent fans that it might be time to wave goodbye to the show forever. Red’s dead, baby. Red’s dead.

Oh, come on, was it really that bad, Jamie? Really?! WELL YES IT WAS, ACTUALLY, YOU DOUBTING THOMAS! So exquisitely terrible that if a nuclear missile were to wipe out half the planet as you watched it, the end of mankind wouldn’t be the worst thing to have happened to you during that half-hour; so bad that my grandfather came back from the dead to throat punch me for ever making him watch this shite when he was alive.

If you haven’t seen Timewave, I beg you not to seek it out. I don’t even want to describe it, lest the plot when written down opens a portal to Hell or something. Trust me and just forget it ever existed. It’ll make you hate not only Red Dwarf, but puppies, kittens, freshly-baked scones, rainbows, laughter and even your own children.

I worried about being exposed as a Star Trek Voyager fan, but being caught even talking about this episode could set back a teenager’s sex life by at least 65 ice ages.

An arrow through the ear

I stopped watching Arrow during its fourth season, so who knows, perhaps it broke free from its strange blend of cheese, grit and ridiculous character trajectories to become a slick, gritty Nolan-esque powerhouse… 

I always thought it was funny that there wasn’t anyone in Oliver’s orbit that didn’t eventually become a crime-fighting, vigilante superhero, complete with their own brand-name, trademark and costume. The roster was as impressive as it was improbable: the dude who used to be his driver, his ex-girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend’s sister (who is also his ex-girlfriend), his sister, his sister’s boyfriend, his employee (and now girlfriend), his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend. At this point, I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that in season five a new janitor started at Queen Consolidated and within two episodes was fighting off baddies with a titanium broom and calling himself ‘The Sweeper’.

If you’ve watched shows like Daredevil and Punisher with their cavalcade of brutal, hyperkinetic, technically impressive fight scenes, then you probably find it hard to appreciate Arrow’s fight scenes, which in comparison look like they were staged by a local Morris dancing troupe.

By far the most embarrassing element of Arrow, though, was the Canary, aka Laurel, the ADA, not only the least likely and least plausible crime fighter among Oliver’s friends and relatives, not to mention the most irritating character by a country mile, but also the crew-member with the very shittest ‘power’. Her method of dispatching the baddies was to open her mouth and shake her head around like a nursery teacher pretending to be a dragon, while making a noise that sounded like a vacuum cleaner with tonsillitis.

Canary, you have failed this.

Shitty.

O Batman, Where Art Thou?

Gotham the series was a bubbling mish-mash of tones, vibes and characters that didn’t quite manage to simmer into a particularly flavoursome or satisfying pot of soup, lacking pep and sustenance. It didn’t taste awful. Some sips were quite tasty, even sometimes had a bit of a kick, thanks to a sprinkle of salt here, a dash of pepper here, the Penguin with a rocket launcher there… but in a medium awash with such a glut of delicious televisual fare it regularly failed to justify its existence.

However, despite occasional bouts of cheese-scented preposterousness, it was rarely cringe-worthy. It’s actually pretty hard to come over as embarrassing or ridiculous when you’re already a show about people in costumes trying to kill each other in the campest ways imaginable.

There were exceptions. Like when Ben Mackenzie was called upon to play anything other than stoic. In a set of sequences near the end of the second season Ben Mackenzie was called upon to play the face-morphing baddy Clayface masquerading as Jim Gordon. Mackenzie’s acting technique was to channel a sex-addled Popeye after an entire brick of cocaine, which admittedly sounds awesome when I describe it like that, but really wasn’t. It made me cringe to the point where I wanted to take a whole brick up my own nose, but an actual brick. The kind you build houses with.

Doctor Oooooooh, that’s nasty

The first 26 seasons of Doctor Who gave us some truly great science-fiction, a vast multitude of episodes and ideas that were thoughtful, imaginative, resonant, frightening, exciting, funny and unapologetically weird. It also gave us potato-headed monsters, great snuffling genitalia beasts and men wrapped in tinfoil chasing screaming women around cardboard spaceships.

Even allowing for the technology that was available at the time, and the limited budget, some Who serials looked like they were knocked up by a gang of hobos between bouts of under-bridge boozing. There are episodes in the Classic Who canon that are about as welcome as an actual cannon would be if you found it pointing up at your arse cheeks from the bottom of the toilet bowl seconds before it fired.

I watch an episode from the early years with my kids every morning at breakfast time. They love it, no matter what they see. They’re too young, and their imaginations too immersive, to let a silly little thing like a man in a rubber suit with big googly eyes selotaped on to it ruin their enjoyment.

My partner, though, occasionally wanders in when something really, really, really shit is happening, and she always judges me for it. Like Bonnie Langford screaming as a giant cock waddles towards her; Jon Pertwee’s face bulging out hilariously as a sentient telephone cord tries to strangle him; London being invaded by the shittest dinosaurs ever imagined; Tom Baker being subsumed by a pulsating testicle; a man being eaten by an evil plastic seat; a human eye peering through the neck of the Jagaroth; Sylvester McCoy; Jon Pertwee again, singing a gibberish Welsh lullaby to a man in an unconvincing Singing Telegram costume whilst waving a dentists’ mirror in his face.

‘How can you watch this shit?’ she’ll ask me.

‘How can… YOU… watch this shit?!’ I sputter, flouncing out of the room, all red-faced and agog.

It’s still tough being a geek sometimes.

And don’t you forget it.

Please feel free to recommend your own most cringe-worthy moments from otherwise serviceable fantasy and sci-fi shows in the comments below, or over on the Facebook page.

The 5 Worst TV Shows of 2017

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I watched a lot of TV shows in 2017, a fair dollop of them crap, but none so utterly, irredeemably crap as the five failures below.

PRISON BREAK

The first season of Prison Break was truly great TV: fun, funny, shocking, silly, suspenseful, tense, exciting and beautifully, insanely ridiculous. But it never should’ve lasted beyond those first 22 episodes, much less another 4 seasons, a mini-movie and a revival season.

Was there anyone in the entire world who was actually looking forward to this revival, or who expected it to be anything other than a giant bowl of sick-whisked dog shit? I can understand wanting to watch this new ‘mini-event series’ out of morbid curiosity, or because you relish the prospect of picking it to pieces as you sort of half-watch-it, half-browse-for-stuff-on-Ebay, but surely only a die-hard fanatic of the first order, or a victim of failed brain surgery, would anticipate new Prison Break with any sense of relish.

My expectations started low – we’re talking sub-basement-level flat in Hell’s deepest underground multi-storey – and still they were unmet. Prison Break is a show where anything can, and does, happen, so ultimately nothing matters.This is a show where being electrocuted to death and having your head chopped off is no barrier to a return. It just requires waiting for the right preposterous, credibility-stretching conspiracy to come along.

Don’t get me wrong: the show’s bat-shit crazy, devil-may-care, fast-moving, twisty-turny-ness was one of its greatest and most entertaining assets in the beginning, but now it just feels tired and forced and lazy and formulaic. Plus, it’s more painfully obvious than ever before that the two brothers can’t really act for shit. Lincoln spends this season lumbering around the Middle East with all the grace and charisma of a zombie oak tree, while Ed Kemper is probably more effective at emoting than Michael (and I mean Ed Kemper as he is now). The prison break is boring and short-lived; the secondary characters hollow and unconvincing; the villains one step below panto; the Yemeni setting poorly realised and possibly border-line racist; and the various twists even more maddeningly preposterous than usual.

From the moment Lincoln survived being smashed through a windshield at top speed, to T-Bag’s unemotional ’emotional’ moment with his dying son, I sat completely and utterly spellbound – by my own fingernails. I kept wondering how long it would take to scratch my own eyes out with them.

Oh, and on a closing note, writing and production team: good work on the big showdown and shoot-out at a Yemeni train station: you know, Yemen?… The country that DOESN’T HAVE ANY FUCKING TRAINS.

Read my article about Prison Break seasons 1-4 HERE that was published by Den of Geek in 2013.

POWERLESS

Powerless boasted strong production values, a talented cast (most notably Danny Pudi of Community-fame) and an absolutely on-point, almost perfect title sequence – all of which was ultimately completely useless, because whatever else Powerless had or was, it simply wasn’t funny. And ‘funny’ is a pretty essential component when you’re making a comedy series. It was cancelled after only 9 episodes of the first season had aired.

I guess there have been a lot worse shows than Powerless, but it’s a tragedy that what could’ve been a zany, fresh and inventive comedy looking at life through the lens of a bunch of regular Joes in a WayneTech subsidiary working to protect the little guy from the constant battles between superheroes and supervillains became instead a lacklustre, generic workplace comedy that struggled to conjure up more than a handful laughs (tiny, breathy ones at that) and a smattering of smiles (flat, joyless ones, too).

Still, while the 9 episodes I watched were undoubtedly shite, maybe the show could’ve grown into something special given more of a chance. Shame on you, Powerless. But shame on you, too, American network television.

RED DWARF

The twelve-year-old me who spent his days regurgitating Red Dwarf’s catch-phrases and impersonating its characters would be very angry with fat, hairy thirty-seven-year-old me for placing Red Dwarf on this list, but never mind: I’m reasonably sure I could take twelve-year-old-me in a fight.

It’s fair to say that Red Dwarf has had a wildly uneven hit-rate in recent years; from the mild disappointment of its sheeny-shiny, oh-so-cinematic seventh season, to the post-lobotomy lock-down of its lads-and-lager eighth season; from the abominable Back to Earth, to the show’s present incarnation as a darling of Dave, the show has never quite made the case for its own cancellation, but neither has it given much cause for unbridled celebration.

That’s not to say that latter-day Dwarf has lacked classic episodes – there have been some triumphantly funny episodes, even in the midst of the most middling of seasons – but that still only adds up to 6 truly great episodes out of 31. You wouldn’t be happy to get a score of 6 out of 31 in a test, unless it was a test to see how attractive Kevin Spacey found you on a scale of one to 31. Still, despite the show’s somewhat scatter-gun run since the late 90s I felt weirdly, unfathomably optimistic about season XII. I should’ve known better, or at least lowered my expectations.

While the first episode and the last two episodes of the season were pretty good (or at least ‘good enough’), the third episode – Timewave – was so embarrassingly, blood-curdlingly awful that it made me want to remove all traces of Red Dwarf from my memories with a rusty axe.

Rob Grant’s pointless and puerile attempt to reflect the current political climate by placing the crew on a ship where all criticism was outlawed was the unfunniest thing since… well, since nothing. It’s literally the unfunniest thing that’s ever been produced, and that includes genocide and Mrs Brown’s Boys. It’s the single worst episode of any show I’ve watched this year, and quite possibly the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life, and that includes granny porn.

Timewave effortlessly earns Red Dwarf its slot in the top five. It’s so bad it’ll keep Red Dwarf on this list every year for the next ten years, even if it never returns to air.

Read my honest and optimistic look-ahead to Red Dwarf series XII HERE that was published by Den of Geek in 2017.

THE WALKING DEAD

Never before has all-out warfare been so mercilessly, miserably, unforgivably dull. The Walking Dead has been shedding healthy flesh at an alarming rate since the beginning of its sixth season, and now shambles twice-yearly into our schedules a rotted husk of its former reassuringly-gory glory. While even in its younger, better days it was never in the same league as shows like The Sopranos, Mad Men, or The Wire, The Walking Dead was at least exciting and emotionally resonant, and capable of turning out some truly powerful, haunting or barn-storming episodes. Season 8, thus far, has been full of action, but devoid of feeling and substance.

Rick is an infuriatingly inconsistent protagonist at the helm of an infuriatingly inconsistent show. Well, perhaps it’s not infuriatingly inconsistent anymore, because use of the word ‘infuriating’ would signify that I still cared about the content or direction of the show. And I don’t. I really, really don’t. Negan is a crushing bore of a bad guy (mishandled and miscast); the Saviours/war narrative continues to unfold without any concessions to logic, sense, physics or geography; the (Poor Man’s Mad Max) People of the Trash Pile are too dull to be kitsch, and too fucking ridiculous to be a credible threat; and there are too many characters on the show, especially when they’re all so thinly-sketched and bent so easily to the will of the plot. Game of Thrones gets away with having eight billion characters, because it’s a very well-written show and as a consequence its characters are deep, well-rounded and interesting.

I used to care about the show, I really did, but now I wouldn’t care if Carol and Daryl formed a Romeo-and-Juliet-style death pact and shot each other through the head, at the same time as Negan sewed Rick’s severed zombie head onto the neck of Ezekiel’s dead tiger. I didn’t even care about Ezekiel’s tiger, and I’m usually a sucker for animals in on-screen peril. And I certainly didn’t care when it was revealed that Karl had been bitten. Actually, that’s not strictly true. I did care, but only because I’m pretty sure he isn’t going to die, and I really, really wanted him to. In summary, then, let the tiger die. Let them all die. Let the zombies come back to life so they can all die again, too. The Walking Dead’s a dead show walking, and I wish they’d pull the plug so I wouldn’t have to keep watching the bloody thing, masochist that I am.

Read my own blog posts about a) Negan himself HERE, and b) season 7 of The Walking Dead HERE.

And my article about the decline of the show HERE published by Den of Geek in 2017.

THE MIST

Hey, it’s the beautiful, elven-looking woman from Vikings, and Clay Davis from The Wire; you know, the one who says ‘shhheeeeeeiiiiiiiittttttttt’ all the time. And Frances Conroy, of Six Feet Under and American Horror Story fame! Oh, and it’s a Stephen King adaptation; an adaptation of an adaptation, I may add, of a film of which I’m rather fond. Mist, monsters, madness, religious mania, a good old-fashioned struggle for survival: what could possibly go wrong?

Well… everything, in fact. Everything. Not even the massive foghorning beasts that lumber from the mist in the cinematic The Mist could rival the horror of this now-mercifully-cancelled misfire (and I mean ‘horror’ in its most pejorative sense here; I’ve just realised that ‘horror’ can serve as a compliment when discussing actual works of horror. There’s no compliment here, believe me). Most of what emerges from the mist in this adaptation comes in the form of hallucinatory supernatural visions , which – a few notably bat-shit moments aside – get incredibly boring almost instantly. Whilst a great deal of the action unfolds in the local mall (the short story and the movie were set almost entirely in a mid-sized supermarket) the series loses vital focus and tension by spreading its characters out across the town. I understand that having a bunch of characters rushing to a focal point for a big, meaty finale, especially when some of those separated characters hold different pieces of an explosive secret, can be thrilling to watch, but not if the writing and the acting has never moved you to care about any of the characters.

The ‘plot’, such as it is, is redolent of those post-watershed, too-hot-for-TV episodes that British soap operas occasionally indulge in, complete with sketchy characters you can’t seem to bring yourself to give a fuck about, heaped servings of am-dram histrionics, and narrative contrivances powerful enough to make your eyes roll back in your head like jackpotted Vegas slot machines. In the end, The Mist is just a bunch of people chasing each other down smoky corridors with spades, or being pursued by duff CGI, as you check the clock every 90 seconds, wondering why you aren’t doing something more worthwhile with your free time, like cheese-grating all the skin off of your face and feeding it to your cat.

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TV Review: Red Dwarf, Star Trek Discovery, The Orville

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Red Dwarf is like that uncle who used to make you laugh to the point of pant-wetting when you were a child. You hailed him as a comedy genius, and constantly recited his routines to all who would listen, and to all who refused to listen, too. His visits brought light and laughter into your life, and you anticipated them with levels of excitement usually only reserved for Christmas.

Years passed. You got older. Your uncle’s visits became less and less frequent. One day, completely out of the blue, when you were busy doing something excruciatingly banal and thoroughly adult, probably putting up a shelf or something, there was a knock at the door. ‘It’s your uncle!’ came the cry. You ran to the door, almost injuring yourself in the process. ‘He’s back!’ you cried, grabbing the door handle and yanking it open… ‘My hilarious uncle!’… and there he was, standing in-front of you, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt with a light-up neon bowtie spinning around on his collar. He pulled his face into a gurn, and then brought his face a few short inches from yours. “BOOOOOOBIIIIIEEEEESSSSS!” he screamed, before loping off and around your house like a maniac, occasionally farting as he went. You later found him slumped in an armchair, staring out of the window.

A little part of you died that day.

After he left, you had a good, hard think about it. Maybe he was never funny; maybe you only thought he was funny because you were a kid and, well, everything’s funny when you’re a kid. Someone saying ‘socks’ is funny when you’re a kid. You prepared to jettison every fond memory of his visits and the laughter they brought; a time to put away childish things, and all that. But then you dug out some old home movies; watched him at work in his prime. And he was funny. God, he was funny, just as funny as you always remembered him being. So what the hell happened to him? Did he have a full mental breakdown?

You later hear that he was checked into a sanatorium, possibly never to re-emerge.

But he came back, your well-loved wonky uncle, like you always hoped he would, and you felt eager and hopeful again, despite all evidence pointing to more pain, disappointment and heartache on your part. And do you know what? He was better. He wasn’t quite the uncle you remembered, but neither was he the goofy, slavering imbecile who’d cast a worryingly unfunny shadow across your soul and doorstep. He kept coming back after that, each time stronger, more coherent, funnier. Last week, a near miraculous thing happened. Your uncle, despite his age and the trauma he’s been through, was almost – not entirely, but very, very, very nearly almost – indistinguishable from the man you remembered.

What I’m trying to say, as I wrestle with this rather tortured and over-long analogy about a mentally-ill uncle, is that the opening episode of Red Dwarf’s twelfth season, Cured, in which the boys from the Dwarf encounter the frozen figures of Hitler and Stalin in a disused moon-base, was something of a relief and a delight. The cast seemed to be back in the full swing of their characters, there weren’t too many laboured puns or clichés, the sci-fi premise behind the episode was interesting without over-shadowing the jokes, and the episode made me laugh out very loud a hearty handful of times. Sure, some of the sequences in Cured – particularly the threat montage and the overlong guitar jam – felt a little rushed and perhaps fell a little flat, but overall I don’t think the episode would’ve felt out of place in the show’s fourth of fifth seasons. Red Dwarf may never recapture the thrill of its heyday, but each time it returns it builds a stronger and stronger case for its continued existence.

I’ve been boldly watching Star Trek since I was a teenager: I started by gorging myself on cassettes of the Next Generation lent to me by a friend, which led me to seek out the seminal exploits of Kirk and Spock. Later, I fell in love with the rag-tag, war-torn crew of Deep Space 9. Janeway was next, whose adventures I really rather enjoyed, give or take a few Kes’s and de-evolved lizard people along the way and … next there was… em, you know, Enterprise… and stuff. It was… well. I guess Captain Archer’s dog was sort of okay?

Maybe it’s an inevitable consequence of getting older and becoming less passionate in general, but when news broke of Star Trek Discovery’s imminent arrival I never found myself getting particularly excited. When the trailer was released, and it seemed to suggest that Discovery would be another Star-Trek-for-People-Who-Don’t-Like-Star-Trek generic space romp in the vein of the recent ‘reboot’ movies, even less so.

But, expectations be damned, it’s bloody good.

It’s different, of course: bigger, slicker, grittier and glossier, but every Trek series – whilst remaining true to the central Roddenberryian vision and ethos – has been drastically different from those preceding it, and always a product of the time in which it was made. Star Trek is about the future of humanity, sure, but that future is always given shape and voice by contemporary concerns. Discovery is about tough choices, moral relativism, a clash of cultures and the ethics of war. Shades of grey abound. In fact, there are enough shades of grey in Discovery’s opening few episodes to make Captain Picard’s hot tea and the entire canon of Deep Space 9 seem positively technicoloured in comparison. That’s one inevitable consequence, I suppose, of making your lead character a mutineer and a war criminal who’s sentenced to life imprisonment at the end of the first episode.

Sonequa Martin-Green is terrific as the aforementioned mutineer, former Starfleet officer and Vulcan-raised orphan Michael Burnham. The Walking Dead never really afforded Martin-Green the opportunity to showcase her full range and talents; here she’s mesmerising, compelling, tackling with aplomb the tricky task of playing someone who’s both human and Vulcan, and all at once both more and less than either.

Having Burnham front and centre allows Star Trek to do something it’s never done before: have a captain who’s something of an asshole. Captain Lorca (Jason Isaacs) may be the Doctor Who Number 6 of Star Trek, but Burnham ‘aint no Peri. (Incidentally, though it places me in a minority, I really like Colin Baker as the Doctor, so my comparison isn’t intended as an insult to Jason Isaacs or his character).

Discovery also gets top marks for its reinvention/retconning of the Klingons. Like this new incarnation of Star Trek itself, its Klingons share a through-line with the past, but are for all intents and purposes shiny and new. They look more like Cenobites than the 80s/90s-era Klingons we’ve come to accept as the official standard of the species. And they’re other-worldly, and eerie, and menacing, and interesting, something they haven’t been for a long time. Throughout the life-span of The Next Generation and Deep Space 9 the Klingons – with their stiffness, pomposity, laddish bragging and love of drinking – came to possess all the terror and nuance of an obnoxious drunk uncle at a party to celebrate grandma and grandpa’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. My apologies to uncles, who appear to be getting something of a rough ride today.

If Star Trek Discovery isn’t Star Trekky enough for you, then you can always seek out The Orville, Seth MacFarlane’s new sci-fi doesn’t-really-know-what-it-is-edy. Despite the show’s mind-bending ideas, improved CGI and novel blend of sci-fi tropes and dick jokes it looks and feels exactly like early-90s Star Trek – which of course is no accident, given that the show’s creator and captain Seth MacFarlane is a life-long fan of the show, and forged his vision for The Orville through collaboration and consultation with such heavy-hitting Trek luminaries as Rick Berman and Jonathan Frakes.

And do you know what? I like it. It combines two of my favourite things: nostalgia and puerility. I’m still not convinced about Seth MacFarlane’s ability to carry a live-action show, but his Captain Mercer is growing on me with every episode, and the characters of Bortus (Peter Macon) and Isaac (Mark Jackson) have already proven themselves to be deep wells of dramatic and comedic possiblity. Keep making it so, Seth.

You can read a piece I wrote about Red Dwarf series X and XI for the lovely people at Den of Geek here.

Red Dwarf X-pectations

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Red Dwarf X premieres on Dave tonight at 9pm. In a few short hours we will know if that ‘X’ signifies buried comedy treasure, or if it will make us all think of a solitary dead eye on the corpse of a cartoon character that’s been drawn by a three-year-old.

And, yes, I know it’s Roman numerals for ten, before some clever cunt who genuinely thinks I’m some sort of drooling malcontent tries to point it out.

Lister and the Cat.

Red Dwarf was my favourite comedy as a youngster, and memories of the show are inextricably linked to memories of my childhood, and of growing up. I shared favourite quotes and crap cast impressions with schoolmates (I did an impressively shite Kryten). It’s fair to say that each new episode was ‘event TV’, and fellow geeks and I would spend the day after transmission reliving the entire episode to the point of suicidal tedium.

When the first series was released on VHS in two-parts I scrimped and saved summer holiday money to get my hands on it. £13.99 for three episodes at a time in good old combustible, snappable video format – and no Monster Munch for a month – but it was worth the sacrifice.

From the series 4 glory days.

And what a show: Smeg, Talkie Toaster, two Rimmers, the first Kryten (‘They’re dead.’ ‘But I was only away for a minute.’), Lister having twins, the Better Than Life video game, the fried egg, chilli, cheese and chutney sandwich, the Committee for the Liberation and Integration of Terrifying Organisms and their Rehabilitation Into Society (or CLITORIS for short), Lister eating dogfood and burning books, inflatable Rachel, a self-destruct system that dispenses chocolate bars, Gandhi with a machine-gun, Kryten dating a blob, Lister fighting a curry monster, Kryten having a penis, Rimmer going nuts in a Gingham dress, Mr Flibble, group hallucinations thanks to aggressive marine life, Lister marrying a mutant, Rimmer being able to touch again, the Polymorph, Ace Rimmer, Dwayne Dibbley!

So many classic moments and characters have been etched into my brain. I was so obsessed with the show that I was moved to write this in my diary when I was 16:

“I brought down Red Dwarf with me that I’d videotaped the night before, because Papa likes it. I don’t mind watching it for the second time, as instead of concentrating on the programme, I like to concentrate on the reaction of the person watching it. Let me explain why: if you enjoy a certain thing on the television, it must contain elements you can relate to, therefore each one you enjoy reflects a facet of your personality. Every time my grandfather would laugh at one of the jokes, I would take that as a personal victory. It’s not as simple as merely saying, ‘Oh, he enjoys the show,’ because on some level his laughter is telling me, ‘Oh, he likes me.'”

I think it’s clear from reading that diary excerpt that I was a bit of a wanker. And incredibly creepy. After all the bizarre staring I subjected him to, my grandpa must have thought I was some sort of cross between Droopy and the little dead girls from The Shining. It also appears that my self-esteem was almost entirely based upon other people’s enjoyment of a 1980’s sci-fi comedy show. I must remember to write that one down for my psychiatrist.

Kochanski: Red Dwarf’s very own Yoko Ono.

Still, as much as I loved – and still love – the show, something went wrong: Rob Grant, one of Red Dwarf’s creators and one half of its writing team, quit the show after series six. It became clear that Rob was the writer responsible for the ‘com’ part of the ‘sit-com’ equation, and a noticeable dip in quality was evident following his departure. Series 7 still had some excellent moments – most notably the JFK-themed curry hunt – but the dissolution of Red Dwarf’s writing partnership, along with the decision to forgo a studio audience and film the show more like a comedy-drama, changed the atmosphere and ‘feel’ of Red Dwarf for the worse. Kochanski didn’t help either. She was shit (the character, rather than the actress) (yeah, add that rider to spare her feelings, Jamie, because she’s definitely going to be one of the three people who actually read this shite, you fucking egotist).

Danny John Jules as The Cat.

The Cat in particular became a one-dimensional retard, who seemed to spend his time pulling stroke faces and uttering the odd hackneyed and unfunny line about corduroy trousers. It was the cat’s almost sociopathic selfishness, vanity and callousness that made him funny in the earlier series, not his stupidity, which was never so much emphasised. Things picked up a bit with series 8, although I do agree with one Amazon reviewer who said that the show became like ‘Chuckle Brothers in Space.’ Also, in general, I feel it would have been better if the series had stayed with the six-separate-stories format and left the two-and-three-parters alone. I really liked the episode ‘Cassandra’, though, with the super-computer that could predict the future. It felt like classic ‘Dwarf’ again.

The pant-shittingly bad ‘Back to Earth’.

Then came the three-part special ‘Back to Earth’, broadcast on Dave in 2009, that was so hellishly bad it felt like Doug Naylor had travelled back through time to 1989 to personally spunk in my face. The entire first part – especially the tomato banter between Rimmer and Lister, and the distressingly cringe-worthy scene in which Rimmer conducted away to himself oblivious to the plight of his ship-mates as they battled a giant squid on the monitors behind him – almost made Citizen Khan look like the single greatest comedy ever produced. Fair enough, some of the ideas in ‘Back to Earth’ were inventive, if not a little derivative, but so what? It’s a comedy. It’s supposed to make me laugh, first and foremost.

Anyway, ‘Back to Earth’ was discussed on a comedy forum a few years back, and I found an interesting bit of chat about it from Scottish comedian Stu Who?.

Ok … so here’s a hypotheses … eh?

When we are younger and haven’t watched a vast amount of comedy, sit-coms, etc, we adopt some programmes which grow, with the passing of time, to be our nostalgic, firm favourites.

In their time, they were quite good, but weren’t really the classics of comedy that we think they were.

If the show is revived, we tend to compare it with the rose-tinted view of the previous series, rather than reality.

Or … in other words:

Red Dwarf was a pile of juvenile shite back then … and still is.

Discuss

I hope he’s wrong, and this isn’t just a case of me donning rose-tinted spectacles and staring at my childhood like… well, staring at it like a creepy grandchild who won’t leave his grandpa alone.

Red Dwarf was funny. Red Dwarf IS funny.

I know it’s just a TV show, and if I’d started watching it when I was 40 I probably wouldn’t give this much of a shit. I know I’m displaying a fanaticism and a personal stake in this akin to a religious fundamentalist defending his holy book. But please, please, please let tonight’s episode exceed my expectations, and blot out the years of disappointment I’ve suffered since Rob Grant left. Let the little embers and flickers of past genius that still glowed in the show, in some form or another, in the later series rage into a comedy bush fire. Let me love Red Dwarf again. Let me laugh.

Give me back my fucking childhood, Doug Naylor! And wipe that cum off my forehead.