Sets

The sets for the first two seasons were designed by Paul Montague. The production's original choice had been Mel Bibby, who was busy on another Paul Jackson show, although he would eventually join the team for series III.

The original design remit for Red Dwarf's interiors was something akin to a submarine - dull grey interiors. Somewhere along the line, the 'grey' motif became a little too prominent and ended up as a running joke between the writers. Everything from the walls of the disco right down to the lager cans and cigarette packets were painted grey!

McIntyre's welcome back party featured some rather cheap red plastic chairs which led to a scramble to cover them with jackets and shirts. Indeed, the grey sets led to a concerted effort to find anything with a hint of colour and add it to the background - books and posters, anything that came to hand. The bunkroom set featured a window that looked out into space, although space (in this case a black backing with holes for stars provided by a backing light) remained unfortunately static and unmoving as the ship ploughed forward.

A second bunkroom set was built for Me2, but it was decided not to mimic the existing bunkroom for the sake of filming simplicity - the nightmare of two Rimmers, created only by split-screen effects, having to climb past one-another to get into bed would have been just too much. The original bunkroom already had one major set-back; having decided to include Holly on a monitor, the team realised that no monitor was built into the set. Ultimately, Holly was superimposed on the shaving mirror in post-production.

Ideas that the ship would be 'international' (and possibly French - Le Nain Rouge anybody?) were eventually shown in the design, with every level number and sign appearing in both English and Esperanto. Some corridor shots, meanwhile, were filmed in the BBC Manchester's decidedly functional-looking lighting corridors and gantries.

Perhaps the most successful set design of the first season was the only sequence to date set on Red Dwarf's outer hull in Confidence and Paranoia. The massive red wall is still extremely effective, and was constructed complete with a walkway for the Craigs (Charles and Ferguson) to do their stuff on - including a little swinging, bunny-hop stunt from Lister.