My Scintillating Theory on the Recording Order of the Second Series of Red Dwarf

The first series of Red Dwarf was recorded in the same order it was intended to be broadcast. However, the originally intended fourth episode, "Future Echoes", turned out so well that it was decided to bump it up to second in the broadcast order to try and keep viewers' attention.

I think that the second series was also recorded in the order it was meant to be shown, with one exception born out of necessity. Let me explain.

Questioning Marmalade

Would you like some questions about the 1982 CITV sitcom Educating Marmalade (and its 1984 follow-up, Danger: Marmalade at Work), sorted by episode? No? Tough, that's what we're doing this week anyway.

A Twice-Weekly Serial Set In The Exciting World of League Football

Between October 1965 and March 1967, the BBC produced and broadcast 147 episodes of the football-based soap opera United! At the end of its second season, the BBC cancelled the show due to low viewing figures, and, as was common practice at the time, they wiped all the master tapes for reuse. Whilst many "missing" episodes of TV shows that have been lost in this manner have been recovered over the years, allowing us to at least get a glimpse of how they looked, United! has not been so fortunate, and not a single episode is known to survive, not even on audio. The most common context for the series to come up in these days is somebody pointing out the large crossover the show's production crew had with Doctor Who, but nobody has ever made an exhaustive list of who worked on both shows, and when.

Until now.

Re-Editing the Guilty

Here's a thing. BBC Two's new sitcom, Defending the Guilty, started life as a one-off pilot last year, off the back of which a full series was commissioned. That full series began airing this week, with the pilot repeated on Tuesday, followed by five new episodes.

That pilot, now identified as Series 1 Episode 1, is up on iPlayer here, and is identified as having been originally broadcast on 19 September 2018. The part of Nessa is played by Claudia Jessie, and Pia is played by Hanako Footman, both of whom go on to play those roles in the following five "series proper" episodes. However, according to IMDb, when the pilot was originally broadcast in 2018, those role were played by Jessica Ransom and Emily Berrington.

So all the scenes with those characters in the "repeat" of the pilot, which is also the version on the iPlayer, are reshoots (the British Comedy Guide concurs with this), necessitated when Ransom and Berrington turned out not to be available for the full series... and yet the iPlayer makes no difference between the two versions, with the original pilot no longer available to view, and the revised version listed as being the one that was first broadcast in 2018. This is probably an error rather than anything else, but you may not be totally surprised to learn that it annoys me.

The Mystery Squad and the Mysteries of the Mystery Squad

The Mystery Squad is an interesting little series of semi-adventure gamebooks, published between 1984 and 1986. I say "semi-adventure gamebooks" because the only form of interactivity is trying to solve puzzles based on illustrations; they're halfway between a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and, I suppose, an Usborne Puzzle Adventure such as Murder on the Midnight Plane.

Radiotimeslides

When casting the first series of Red Dwarf in the late eighties, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor hoped to get four "proper" actors to play the four regular roles. They ended up with an impressionist, a poet, a stand-up comedian and a dancer. When David Ross filmed his guest spot as the original Kryten in the eponymous second series episode, he was horrified to discover that none of the main cast were 'legit' actors. The original intention for "The End" was for all the ship's crew to be played by big-name comedy stars... and then for them to all be killed off, leaving viewers with "Craig who?" as the lead. These are all stories any Red Dwarf fan will likely recognise.

The Long and Short of It

That picture there is the blackboard gag used in the opening sequence for the second season Simpsons episode "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish".

It's a perfectly good joke by itself, of course, but I think there's another layer to it. That episode's particular opening sequence was the first time the show did not use the full-length intro (barring two episodes in Season 1 which faded into the start of the episode during the initial pan to Springfield Elementary School; with the re-animation of the opening titles in Season 2, the opportunity to make several different intros of varying length was taken). "One Fish..." debuts a cut-down version of the intro that only features the first appearance of each family member before we get to the driveway.

With that in mind... doesn't it seem quite likely that Bart's blackboard punishment is a metatextual reference to the shortened intro?