SPACE ODDITY

DOUG NAYLOR, co-creator of RED DWARF and member of the STARBURST Hall of Fame, receiving the honour at our festival in 2016, talks about the brand new ninety-minute episode and the history of the show…

- Rachel Knightley

STARBURST: You’ve have had a long, incredible journey with Red Dwarf. When The End first aired in 1988, would you have been surprised by The Promised Land and how far the show has come?

Doug Naylor: [Laughs] I would be absolutely stunned! On all sorts of things. Personally, I always thought Red Dwarf was going to be a huge hit, I was always very confident about that. Maybe wrongly! But I was. And I thought it would do three series because, you know, that was what was considered to be a good run back then - and that would be it. But when I went on set and saw it for the first time, I really worried that it was going to look cheap and kind of put a lot of people off. And to be fair I think it did for quite a while. But then going forward to 2020 and seeing this it’s extraordinary. Not the difference, but the fact it’s lasted so long. And also what we’re able to do now that you just couldn’t do in 1988. There’s a whole sequence with Rimmer where he’s turned black and white and that involves rotating each frame, twenty-five frames a second, throughout a real, considerable chunk of the thing and only huge budget movies could do that in the eighties. But now because of the technology, we can do it. It still involves an enormous amount of work, but we’re able to do it.

And it’s great that it visually acknowledges the journey you’ve been on through the stages of Rimmer; that although you’ve using the new technology you’re acknowledging where you’ve come from.