Dwarfing Through the Decades... Again

At the moment, BBC Two are repeating the fifth series of Red Dwarf. These repeats, which have been ongoing at the rate of one series a year since the first two were repeated in 2023, have given something of a second life to the Red Dwarf BBC Broadcasts Guide, one of the earliest and most genuinely useful things I ever wrote.

The continuity for these episodes have also had a lot of fun to them; "Holoship" opened the run with the same ident used for the original 1992 broadcast, and a continuity announcement based on the original, and something similar was done with "The Inquisitor" a week later, with the opening continuity riffing on a line from the original 1992 trail.

Something quite wonderful from 1997 also resurfaced the other day: a clip of some overrunning snooker coverage from 1997, with presenter David Vine confirming the scheduled episode of Red Dwarf will be broadcast following the conclusion of the match, after which the following immortal line is spoken by Dennis Taylor, in reference to Steve Davis: "From the Red Dwarf to the Ginger Magician..."

A quick check of BBC Genome dates this to 9 February 1997, and the Sunday repeat of "Duct Soup", which was already scheduled for 10.30pm, and (obviously) broadcast even later. Back in 2016 I went with the scheduled times in absence of any other information, but some of those narrative repeats were on the same day as live coverage of other events which makes it hard to be sure they went out exactly as scheduled. The continuity announcement for the repeat of "Blue" (erroneously described as being from the premiere) also describes it as airing 'a little later than planned' -- presumably due to, of all things, a live broadcast of the BBC Symphony Orchestra playing Stravinsky immediately beforehand.

Concluding the run, the 9 March repeat of "Nanarchy" was scheduled on the same day as coverage of the World Indoor Championships in Paris and Crufts, so it's quite possible that one was delayed too. But anyway, I've modified some of the footnotes to reflect this.