Any British kid around in the late ’80s and early ’90s WORSHIPPED the sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf. It was a cultural touchstone that taught us about science, space, and funny stuff.
It was co-created by Salford born writer and producer Rob Grant, who died this week at the age of 70. Thus, we thought it was fine time to pay tribute to some of the show’s clever physics-based writing. Notably with the brilliant second episode Future Echoes.
Rob Grant’s World of Light Barrier Breaking Visions
Rob Grant and Doug Naylor created, and co-wrote, the show. Future Echoes aired on 22nd February 1988 on the BBC and immediately made it clear the writers weren’t messing around. This was a bizarre sitcom with a weird enough, existential premise and then an episode on time dilation hits the air.
Future Echoes follows the adventures of Lister (Craig Charles) and the hologram Rimmer (Chris Barrie). Three million years in the future, lost in deep space, Lister talks to the ships supercomputer Holly (Norman Lovett) to get them up to lightspeed and hurtle back to Earth.
Once at lightspeed, time begins to leak and the characters overtake their future selves. This leads to some unnerving confusion and other revelations.
The brilliance of Grant and Naylor’s writing is they could take a concept like that, make it accessible, and make it funny. As you can see with this very clever scene.
The idea is the characters can’t change the future echo. What they see is an inevitability, so they have to grapple with the knowledge some unpleasant things are on the way.
It creates tension, and gallows humour, through a sense of predestination.
From what we gather in our research, it’s a play on the Doppler Effect. This is where light waves compress as an object moves towards someone. Future Echoes spins that, with the future moving towards the present.
Grant and Naylor attributed Future Echoes of saving the show’s long-term possibility, as the first series was a little hit and miss. But this episode was so strong it showed the full potential to the BBC, who kept it running for another 10 years.
Season 1 of the show was filmed in Manchester on a shoestring budget. It stayed that way for the next two seasons, before season 4 was filmed in London (i.e. they got a bigger budget).
Future Echoes aired at a time when the wasn’t an established hit.
It was a bleak premise where Lister is lost deep in space, humanity is (likely) extinct, and one of the lead characters in Rimmer is dead from the first episode. Despite all that, the clever and witty writing turned this weird premise into a big hit. In the UK and over in America, too.
Similar themes were explored in season 2, with the Stasis Leak episode arguably one of the very best Red Dwarf episodes. A mixture of humour, pathos, and a sense of lingering sadness for Rimmer’s destiny (it aired in September 1988).
As kids watching back in the late 1980s, all the science stuff went over our heads. But we did accept it all without question, the strange sci-fi show with its habit of massive around with time and physics concepts.
Series 3 also began with another time-based thingy in Backwards. Aired in November 1989, this was a sign the series was evolving as it took on better production values and a more expansive take on its ideas. The episode is about an alternate Earth where time runs backwards, where Rimmer capitalises on his forwardness to wow the public with a freakshow stage act etc.
It all culminates in a backwards barroom brawl that’s pretty iconic.
Below, you can see Rob Grant discuss the episode and its direction at the BFI in 2020.
Looking back, Grant and Naylor were very keen to explore time dilation. In series 4, there’s an episode called White Hole. A hypothetical region of spacetime, and the opposite of a black hole, this thing spews time out into the universe creating confusion for the characters.
Central to all these ideas is that cast of characters.
Lister, Rimmer, and the Cat (Danny John Jules) don’t have any clue what’s going on, so rely on the android Kryten (Robert Llewellyn) to break down the concepts into understandable information. Around that, Kryten is a fusspot of an android who Lister encourages to break its programming and become more free-spirted and less obsessed with cleaning.
There’s also the supercomputer Holly, who has computer senility and is capable of feats of extreme genius, whilst also being hopelessly idiotic and unreliable.
A lot going on, then, but masterfully written by Grant and Naylor. The super writing duo from the Manchester who created an unexpected cultural phenomenon.
Marooned: Cosmic Solitude as Mainstream Family Viewing
After Red Dwarf took off, Grant and Naylor didn’t back off with exploring existential themes of colossal loneliness. If anything, the show became even more comically bleak with each passing season.
In the episode Marooned in series 3, Lister and Rimmer are left stranded on an ice planet. It’s a masterclass in great writing, a 30-minute episode based almost entirely around a conversation between Rimmer and Lister. There are echoes of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at play, with the script occasionally going into comical farce to great effect.
The episode explores the unusual relationship between the two characters. The classic odd couple barely able to stand each other, but forced to endure the relationship as everyone else is dead.
Lister and, in particular, Rimmer are very flawed individuals. Rimmer’s pomposity and neuroses are on full display. The man is already dead, yet his hologrammatic state still brings with it all his paranoia and self-aggrandisation. Chris Barrie doesn’t get enough credit for his portrayal, with Rimmer arguably the most important cast member.
It’s his Machiavellian style behaviour that seems to fuel the need for survival amongst everyone else. He does also have his moments of heroism, as famously shown in season 6’s finale when he attempts to save the crew.
Again, it’s tribute to Grant and Naylor’s excellent and expansive writing that they could take these characters, some slovenly and others OCD, and breathe life into them. They remain enduringly popular and the show is destined for eternal cult classic status, still somehow way ahead of its time.
