New Red Dwarf Series Threatened By the Twitter Era 228
An anonymous reader writes "The announcement that the new series of Red Dwarf is likely to be shot in front of a studio audience, which hasn't happened for the show since 1998, has made one of the show's actors wary of the practicality of it. Commenting on his blog, Robert Llewellyn, who plays servile robot Kryten in the hit British SF comedy show notes: 'The fear among the producers now is that it's impossible to imagine an audience of around 400 people at the recording of a TV show like Red Dwarf, where nobody does a bit of a hint on Twitter, or sneaks a picture on Facebook or posts a bit of badly shot video on YouTube.'"
Re:This is why (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
[I]t feels like the actors have no careers any more (especially Craig Charles, who is now badly dubbing Japanese game shows for cable channels) and just want to milk sucess 30 years ago.
Craig Charles has been on the UK soap Coronation Street since 2005 [wikipedia.org]. Given it's one of the most popular shows on UK TV, I'd say his career has significantly improved since the days of Red Dwarf.
Re:This is why (Score:5, Informative)
The jump to the Starbug-only stories in Series 6 is where it started to fumble, but the writing was still high quality and they made a none-the-less fun show out of it. Series 7 is where the writing team split, and you can tell. There's less jokes and more sci-fi. It's also evident by the tie-in novels. Rob Grant (the funny one) wrote Backwards, which is by far and away the better one, focusing less on the sci-fi elements and more on the characters. Doug Naylors "Last Human" was very sci-fi heavy (soft sci-fi, but still sci-fi), very dramatic, quite dark and in some parts, it didn't "Feel" like Red Dwarf, atleast until Series 7 came along, then it did feel like it.
Despite the 2 multi-parters knocking a series 8 from 8 episodes down to 5 from the usual 6, I still liked it. They backtracked slightly towards the feel of series 1, with more prison gags, while keeping the action-oriented storylines. It was a nice balance. Then they threw it out the window for Back To Earth which, to me, was Red Dwarfs "Star Trek V" moment. I hope the next series will be our Star Trek VI moment, and that we won't end up with a Generations moment when they kill the cast off.
Re:I Hate "Humour" (Score:5, Informative)
I'm afraid, as a Brit, I find your post to be such an embarrassment to our nation that I must ask you go into a quiet room with a bottle of whiskey and a revolver, and do the right thing.
Surreal and nonsensical humour requires that you enjoy the "different", are not so concerned with what is "proper", and don't need at least 4 episodes of preparatory material before you can "get" the joke. Don't criticise what you can't understand. Let's take a brief tour of exaggeration, silliness, farce and slapstick in British comedy:
18th century: Jonathan Swift writes about midgets and giants to satirise the pomposity of Brits obsessed with what is "proper".
19th century: Gilbert & Sullivan based entire plots on ideas like a fully grown pirate being only 5 years old, having been born on Feb 29th.
20th century: in the 50s, The Goon Show goes surreal, blazing the path 18 years before Python. Spike Milligan is famous both for being surreal and for writing funny books which do not need to be acted out to be funny, and Peter Sellers is famous for his over-the-top characters. The Two Ronnies relied upon "stupid costumes, over-exaggerated characters [and] nonsensical situations" for 16 years. Eric Morecambe, also drawing in many millions of viewers with Ernie Wise for 15 years, was famous for slapstick.
We're now in the 21st century. We still have several of The Goodies, another surreal 70s show, as regulars on I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue in its 54th series, with guests such as the ridiculous and surreal Ross Noble. How much more bloody "proper" and "English" can you get than Radio Four on a Sunday afternoon?
It's about time to get down from your ivory high chair and catch up with the past few centuries of what us Brits think is funny. Don't be the guy giving the rest of us a reputation for having a stick up our arse.