Production

"It was a very difficult ride." - Doug Naylor, We're Smegged (Series X DVD documentary).

It's rare that a series of Red Dwarf goes by without production hiccups of some kind - and it was perhaps inevitable that after so long away, there would be teething troubles involved when working to recapture the old magic. But nobody was quite prepared for the ups and downs that making Series X would entail, making for a fascinating saga that was the subject of its own, epic, two-hour long documentary on the series' DVD release.

Although the series was slated to shoot almost a year before broadcast - the only available dates for the cast making for a schedule that would have the show ready for broadcast in the "dead" season of summer unless it was pushed back to the autumn - there was nevertheless, and somewhat ironically, a tight deadline for writing and shooting that called to mind the problematic Series VI. Added to this, budget concerns, switches in personnel, the necessity of late reshoots and other unforeseen mishaps meant that it was touch-and-go whether the series would even make it to air...

To begin with, however, an optimistic mood greeted the announcement that the show would indeed shoot before a live audience. Doug Naylor had fought tooth and nail for this detail, despite the financial implications, and some thirteen years after the filming of Series VIII it was clear that an audience setup had lost none of its power to enhance the atmosphere of the show.

Some 1,800 seats across the six recordings were made available online, crashing the ticket company servers and being snapped up in under half an hour. As in the show's classic years, the standard setup of shooting complicated pre-recorded scenes between Monday and Thursday before the full live audience shoot on Friday was maintained - with fans braving a particularly cold winter to traipse out to Shepperton either side of Christmas 2011.

Warmup across the six dates was provided alternately by standup comedians Tom Price and Ray Peacock, both self-confessed Dwarf fans, and an effort was made to shoot the scenes in as close to broadcast order as possible so that the audience could follow the plot. Only Entangled and Dear Dave were significantly lacking in available scenes to shoot "on the night" - the final five minutes or so of the former were missing, while attendees at the latter were only able to see just over half of the episode; although this was made up for in part by being shown a specially-put-together rough cut of Trojan, with their reactions to this also added to the main laugh track.

While the use of a studio audience and multiple cameras was somewhat traditional, Doug was keen not to jettison every aspect of Back to Earth's production - so in a move no sitcom had ever attempted before, the multi-camera setup was shot using the hi-def, film-standard Red Epic cameras that had been employed in 2009. With camera tracks that swooped and followed the characters in and out of corridors, Series X found a visual look and feel quite unlike anything else on television.

Following the six weeks of episode-by-episode recording, a final "pick-up week" was scheduled to fill in missing or otherwise complicated scenes, or to take another pass at troublesome takes. At the same time, however, a second unit were setting up shop in the corner of Stage K vacated by the dismantled audience seating, preparing to shoot the model flybys that would make up the bulk of the series' visual effects.

Unfortunately, for various reasons, the results of this initial model shoot were not favourable. A replacement shoot was put together, with a new crew of photographers and replacement models, but could only be scheduled for April. It was therefore timed to coincide with one final round of pickup sequences - required after the extra week had itself run out of time, and made possible by Craig's return to Coronation Street being delayed (for unrelated plot-related reasons at their end!)

With Dear Dave running particularly short, a Rimmer-based subplot was scripted by Doug in the intervening period to be shot during these extra couple of days. But as the sets at K Stage had already been disassembled, it was back to shooting in front of a green screen - with high-def shots of the various sets comped in afterwards - in sequences reminiscent of much of Back to Earth's production. At the same time, a variety of smaller scenes or moments from across all six episodes were also picked up.

Hastily-assembled cuts of both Dear Dave and Entangled were then shown to an invited audience in Central London. In much the same manner as showing each week's live audience the pre-recorded inserts, this ensured that every episode had a genuine laughter track throughout, rather than having to rely on deceptive editing or the dreaded spectre of "canned laughter".

Even after this most troubled of shoots was over, however, the production crew couldn't quite breathe easily just yet. There were still a couple of stings in the tail that threatened to derail the previous six months of hard work. A late discovery upon examining footage from Trojan revealed a picture flaw that would render the series likely to fail quality control - and thus be unable to be broadcast at all...

Fortunately, after extensive further testing and corrections, the picture quality was finally brought up to the required standard. Yet even after this, another hairy moment saw the staff unable to locate the one set of hard drives that featured the backups of the entire show's rushes! The boxes eventually turned up in the lock-up of the show's line producer - necessitating a trip back from the United States to retrieve and return them safely to GNP.

Eventually, however, a complete series of six episodes of Red Dwarf X was indeed delivered to Dave in Autumn 2012, ready for broadcast in October. There had never been a production quite like it in the show's quarter-century of existence. All involved could only hope that the finished product was judged to be worth the trials and tribulations...