Interviews · 16 March 2022
Red Dwarf Why it's called Red Dwarf, by co-creator Rob Grant
Red Dwarf interviewed by Kevin Durham, 16 March 2022. 2m 04s on tape.
This clip is from a live fundraising event, for updates on further events follow me on Instagram To donate to the children's hospice we were raising money for please click on the link below. ttps://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Kevin-Durham In this Red Dwarf interview I ask the Co-Creator Rob Grant, why the name Red Dwarf and how many pints did it take to come up with it? Red Dwarf is a British science fiction comedy franchise created by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, which primarily consists of a television sitcom that aired on BBC Two between 1988 and 1999, and on Dave since 2009, gaining a cult following. The premise of the series follows the low-ranking technician Dave Lister, who awakens after being in suspended animation for three million years to find he is the last living human, with no crew on board the mining spacecraft Red Dwarf, other than Arnold Rimmer, a hologram of Lister's deceased bunkmate, and Cat, a life form which evolved from Lister's pregnant cat.
What's on the tape
A transcript, made by machine from the audio and tidied up. It gets names and the odd word wrong, so treat it as a way to find the bit you want rather than as a quotation. Every timestamp jumps to that moment in the video.
0:02 Pints did they need to come up with that well it was uh partly because there were two reasons partly because it was rd and it was robin. Dude that's when we thought yeah that's the one but it started out where I wanted to have something stellar in the name some some part of the uh the lifespan. Of some various stars this obviously was back in 83 and when you wanted to do research back then you had to open what we call. A book you either had to go to a library to get the book and hope that the book was in um or you had to buy it and uh on this one like we got some kind of um encyclopedia. Of space I don't think it was a junior encyclopedia nothing was and um and we went through the various life cycles of the stars and we white Dwarf.
0:56 Didn't work because there was a magazine you know a gaming magazine called whiteboard. And we we latched onto redwater because it's not as big or as powerful. As any of the other stars. But it goes on forever that seemed like a good omen to us so yeah. And bizarrely we we were down in streatham at the time. Don't think we had a local pub in stress and then we lived there for quite a so I I think it was a zero point. And then we then we went out I think later for you know I think there was a wine bar I'd hesitate to say it's stretching. There's pubs all down the high street so the official answer the question one was and no naught pints nobody got that I'm not I'm not really buying that but yeah.
1:50 It was I remember it was surprisingly easy to come up with we didn't have lots and lots of options.
