As we prepare for another adventure for the RED DWARF crew, we caught up with co-creator DOUG NAYLOR to chat about the 90 minute special that he wrote and directed…
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; would you have recognised where it’s gone?
Doug Naylor: [Laughs] No, I would be absolutely stunned! On all sorts of things. Personally, I always thought Red Dwarf was going to be a huge hit, I always was very confident about that. Maybe wrongly, but I was! And I thought it would do three series because 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 the set 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.
It’s wonderful how far each character can go while still being within the character parameters that you’ve had for all this time.
That’s one of the rules about sitcoms or comedy characters: they’ve got to remain flawed in the way they always are. They don’t change that much. But then something’s got to happen or else you’re just doing to same old jokes over and over and over. I think that’s the joy of science fiction; you’re able to take ideas like that and use them and you couldn’t do that in a traditional sitcom. People are very fond of saying “Oh, Red Dwarf is Steptoe and Son in space,” and it absolutely isn’t. I can’t say how much I disagree with that analysis of it! You can do all sorts of things with sci-fi tropes to look at characters from unusual angles that you can’t possibly do outside a hallucination or dream in a traditional sitcom. It was based on a radio show Rob and I did called Son of Cliché and a sketch called Dave Hollins: Space Cadet, which was a little bit of parody of Alien where the entire crew have been wiped out apart from one survivor and his computer. We did four or five of these sketches in Son of Cliché and then when we came down to ‘right, we want to write a sitcom for TV’, this was what we considered at the time was going to be our big one we thought wouldn’t it be great to develop the Dave Hollins thing, which was what we did And so we started off with last human and one computer, and okay, why is he the last human? Okay, something must have happened to the crew to have got killed. We were very keen not to have aliens because all science fiction series had aliens, so it was sort of back-engineered: okay, computers are generally brilliant, let’s make ours not brilliant; let’s make it senile in some sort of way. And then it was “how can we kill the crew?” and out of that evolved the idea of having a character who was a hologram. So to preserve the idea that we’ve just got one human, we had a hologram and then the idea came about through discussing how we would kill the crew that if Lister smuggled a cat on board he could evolve into something, a feline type humanoid. Okay, that would give us an unusual cast, now let’s go and write that explanation into the pilot show – and that’s what we did!
It’s great that all these years later that storyline from the first episode kept all its promises…
[Laughs] Promised Land – yeah, there you go. Well I hope it delivers and that the fans think it delivers.
What are you most proud of about The Promised Land?
That we managed to make it at all! With all the problems of Craig’s schedule, Craig turning on Morecambe Lights on Sunday night and getting back to Pinewood at five in the morning, Danny doing a stand-up tour, Robert being ill for the vast sections of it, it was just so tough but, of course, when you watch it, I don’t think you have any sense of that at all so that makes me – not just me, but the entire production team – extremely proud, because we had to work very hard. I think it was the ninth day of the shoot and we hadn’t had the four of them together for more than half a day.
You’re a brave man!
Well, I didn’t choose that let me tell you! Circumstances forced that on us but anyway, yeah, that’s probably what I’m most proud of. It got made!
What’s next for you and Red Dwarf? Will you stick with the ninety-minute episodes?
I would love to stick with the ninety-minute episodes. I think it’s really exciting. Having said that, when UKTV – because it was UKTV’s idea – suggested we do a special, there was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing with Richard asking in what way was it going to be special, we’ll need more money if it’s going to be special! And they went away and came back and said okay, we get what you’re saying, we can’t just do a long episode of a sitcom, it’s got to be special. But there was real trepidation of “why we are fixing things when they ain’t broke?”, “why are we changing from the audience show that we and fans clearly liked and want more of after Series 11 and 12?” Long story short, we went that route and it was a logistical nightmare in terms of “how do you shoot ninety minutes in front of audiences?” because you can’t possibly shoot that in two nights. But Red Dwarf has been generally 50% in front of the audience and 50% played in to that audience, so you can get their laughter on it. So then we looked at that and Richard figured out a way of how that could be possible while also being very cognisant of the fact that the cast are not as young as they once were and there’s a limit to how much they can perform live on every single evening and have any chance of remembering their lines with the very small amount of rehearsal time the schedule allowed.
RED DWARF: THE PROMISED LAND is on UKTV’s Dave on April 9th. You can read an expanded edition of this interview in STARBURST #472, out soon.
