Interior Designer Where do you get a 23rd century starship cockpit when you need one? Mel Bibby knows - he's the man responsible for the look of Red Dwarf from Series III onwards. Just don't mention the studio audience...

How did you get started in set design?

I went to art college first off, doing fine art - paintings and sculptures and stuff - and in the prelim year of that you're supposed to decide what you want to go into. The college I was at, which was Rochdale College of Art, had the same initials as the RCA, which was very good - you put that on your CV and everybody assumes it's the Royal College! (Laughs)

Ellis Lowry - the painter who did matchstalk men, all that lot - was a friend of the principal's, and he used to come around and crit the students' work; and his advice to me was, 'Wouldn't you be better off in design as opposed to fine art?' Which was basically I nice way of saying, 'You're crap at fine art, but get into design if you can.'

I got into interior design from there, which covered exhibition design and various things. Then the first job I got was as an exhibition display manager for a year, which is very repetitive once you've done the business. Then I did various other bits of exhibition design and stuff.

Then a couple of friends of mine told me that a BBC job had come up in Birmingham, for an assistant designer - which I went for and didn't get. But I must have done a reasonable interview because a job came up in Manchester, and they wrote to me saying 'reapply.' Which I did, and I got. That was 25 years ago.

What was the first show you worked on?

As an assistant, when I first went in, it was It's a Knockout. Which was good fun, a very good grounding. It was a travelling circus - one week you'd be in Portsmouth, the next week you could be up in Scotland. Organisationally it was very, very good.

What else have you worked on?

I was doing quite a lot for Paul Jackson - who was instrumental in getting Red Dwarf on the air in the first place - around that time. Lots of things that nobody'll remember such as Happy Families, which was written by Ben Elton. I was doing Filthy Rich and Catflap at the time Red Dwarf came up; Paul wanted me to do that. I said, 'I can't, it's too much commitment to too many jobs.'

I didn't do the first two series as it turned out. I was doing a lot of comedy at the time - Morris Minor and the Majors with Tony Hawks. Which was a big, disastrous epic! (Laughs) A whack comedy with music thrown in. Like most things I worked on, it ran one series and was then dropped. Red Dwarf is the exception.

From a drama point of view, [I've done] Common as Muck, about the dustbin men. Making Out, about the factory girls. Various other small dramas. And various other jobs too numerous...