Red Dwarf (TV series)
Red Dwarf is a British science-fiction sitcom created and written by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor. It first aired in 1988, and eight seasons of the show have been produced to date, albeit intermittently, the last having been made in 1999. The series was also pitched for a remake in the United States, and two pilot episodes were made, both of which were utter and horrible failures.
Its basic premise is the revival, three million years into the future, of a crewman who was kept in stasis by his ship's computer until the radiation that killed his crewmates had reached a safe background level. He wakes up and finds that he is the last human being alive, aboard the aforementioned spacecraft, a huge mining called the Red Dwarf. His only companions are a holographic simulation of his dead bunkmate, a creature that evolved from cats, and the ship's computer A.I.. In season 3, they are joined by a service android, and, in season 7, by a female crewmember from an alternate universe.
Main Characters
...Race, Sex, Class and Species
The series's lead character and hero, Dave Lister, played by Craig Charles, is a Black human, whose race is never directly at issue, although the character's working-class status and rebellious anti-authoritarian attitude are central to his personality. He is a bit of a slob, and he has little to no ambition and a poor education, but he has a strong moral fiber and a great deal of courage and ingenuity, and the reason he was put into stasis in the first place was as punishment for his refusal to have his cat, which he had illegally brought on board, killed when it was discovered.
Lister's bunkmate and co-worker, Arnold J. Rimmer, played by Chris Barrie, is a White human. He is a coward and a cheater, and he had a subscription to Fascist Dictator Monthly. He is immensely ambitious and subserviant to authority, but also completely incompetent at anything he attempts. His back-stabbing behaviour and insufferable attitude make him very impopular with the rest of the crew. He likes to complain about his being dead, yet it was his error during a mechanical repair that killed the entire crew in the first place. (The J. stands for Judas.)
The ship's sentient but absent-minded computer, Holly, was initially played by a White actor, Norman Lovett, and later, after undergoing a face-sex change, by a White actress, Hattie Hayridge, and later, after an interval of absence from the series altogether, again by Norman Lovett. (There was one episode in S2 when Lovett's version of Holly pretended to be a replacement A.I. named Queeg, who was played by a Black man, Charles Augins.) Holly is an extremely intelligent computer, whose mind has become senile and peculiar from extreme old age and three million years of isolation. Holly provided the opening narration for the show in the first few seasons.
The Cat, who was played by Danny John-Jules (a Black actor), is an anthropomorphised version of a house cat, evolved over three million years from Lister's original pet (who was pregnant when he brought her on board, and safely sealed in the ship's hold, thus protected from the radiation). He is extremely vain and self-centered, but rather good-humoured. He is... a cat, and everyone calls him the Cat. His people worshipped Lister as a god, and died out in a holy war before Lister was revived, but he sees himself as superior to humans (and he finds nothing impressive about Lister).
Kryten, played by David Ross in one episode, and then by Robert Llewellyn as a regular (both White men), is a service android ("with a missing sanity chip"), who views himself as less than human and who is extremely deferential towards humans. He performs domestic tasks with a great deal of devotion. While Rimmer is happy to exploit Kryten, Lister attempts to teach Kryten how to rebel and how to think for himself.
Kochanski, played by Clare Grogan in the show's first seasons as a recurring character, and later by Chloë Annett as a regular, is a White human woman. Her initial appearances (played by Grogan) showed her as more working-class, whereas her later persona (played by Annett) had more upper-class traits, which accentuated her differences with the rest of the series's regulars.
Gender in Red Dwarf
All of the series's regulars were male in its first two seasons. As mentioned before, the ship's computer changed its appearance from male to female in season three, and stayed that way until the character was written out when the spaceship Red Dwarf was destroyed. A female castmember was added only during season 7, when the character of Rimmer was written out (temporarily).
However, especially while it had only primarily male characters, Red Dwarf has done an extraordinary amount of gender bending, exploration and sexual role-reversals, including:
- Holly's face-sex-change
- Male pregnancy
- The crew meeting their female opposites
- Female impersonation
- One character attempting to clone a female copy of himself
- An android being jealous of a woman
Because Red Dwarf is a comedy, much of this was done in order to deflate and poke fun at the male characters' own gendered vision of themselves, their prejudices and expectations. Homophobic humour, for instance, was used by mainly Rimmer and portrayed as an expression of his pettiness and bigotry.
See in particular the following episodes: