Writing

By the fourth series, Rob and Doug began to alter the very history of Red Dwarf itself. They had learned a lot from the writing of their novels, and decided an overhaul was required to remove some of their original 'mistakes'.

Thus the original compliment of the Red Dwarf crew shot up from 169 to 1,169 - a more appropriate population for a ship five miles long. The period changed too, altering the original 21st Century setting to a more realistic 23rd (we are at the start of the 21st Century now and man has yet to colonise space, after all).

Finally, a major rewrite of the past meant that Lister had now dated Kochanski (albeit for only three weeks) and been rejected by her in favour of a catering officer - as was described in the novels. It was felt a little adolescent that Lister thought himself so in love with a woman he had only ever seen and chatted to (a grand total of 173 words, according to Holly in the first series).

Perhaps spurred on by this meddling with history, the writers had begun to juggle with the past in other ways. Could one event in your past completely alter your life? And if so, could the 'bad' thing that happened - being kept back in school, say - actually turn out to be the thing that made you a better person? The result was Ace Rimmer - Ace, of course, being the nick-name our Rimmer always wanted. (At the time the writers were unaware of the sexual nature of the name - although now, apparently, one fan who uses it as his pseudonym gets a great deal of unwanted e-mail.)

The writing of Red Dwarf IV went fairly smoothly, with only the final episode proving especially bothersome. Ed Bye had balked when a script was handed to him containing what would have been the most expensive sequence in the Better Than Life novel - Garbage World and the giant cockroaches, and it was suggested that another route be taken.

Under pressure, the writers took a second chunk of inspiration from their own work and came up with White Hole. The original black hole changed colour, and Holly was a different gender, but otherwise the sequence arrived largely intact. Even Talkie Toaster was reintroduced! Newly added was the idea of droid rot. When he was asked if there was anything he'd like to see done in IV, Robert Llewellyn mentioned a Northern robot who disapproved of Kryten's love of human nature, based on a voice he had been doing in between takes. Kryten's spare heads - specifically Spare Head Three - were the slightly altered result.

A couple of changes also occurred during the time between writing and production. The notion that Camille might appear as Kochanski to Lister was discarded (although the name still appeared in the credits). In Dimension Jump, the Cat's parallel self was originally going to be a cleaner, not a priest - in that instance, pressure from the BBC regarding positive racial images was the cause.