New 'Red Dwarf' Episodes Might Be Shipwrecked By Budget, According To Craig Charles
If the thought of new adventures with Lister, Rimmer, Kryten and the Cat nibbled at your brain, it’s gonna be that way for a while
Get ready to spike that mango juice. The journey to get classic British sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf’s next three-episode special series made has hit some major roadblocks, according to star Craig Charles.
The actor, who plays Dave Lister and has done so since the series’s 1988 premiere, gave Radio Times a rather grim prognosis, saying "I’m not sure that it will come back, to be honest.” He then explained exactly what’s going on, seeing as the declarations of new Red Dwarf for 2025 were made in May and it’s now January of 2025. “I know that the deal that we had to make it this year looks like that might not be happening now. I can't really say any more on that because I don't know much more, but I just know that there have been lots of conversations about cost, and I think [the episodes] might be too expensive." He then clarified: "It's not that we don't want to do it, it's a case of we're trying to get it done... [it's] happening in television all the time at the moment, there doesn't seem to be that much money around." I am not knowledgeable enough about the general British television scene to know what the full situation is with allocation and shortages to further explain, and the source didn’t do much either.
Red Dwarf was created by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor. It sees Lister stranded three million years into deep space on the mining ship the show is named after thanks to a radiation leak that killed the rest of the crew. His only companions are the hologram of his frenemy bunkmate, Officer Arnold Rimmer, played by Chris Barrie, the enigmatic Cat, who is a humanoid descendant of his cat he snuck aboard and played by Danny John-Jules, the ship’s senile computer, Holly, largely played by Norman Lovett, and the mechanoid (android) Kryten, played by Robert Llewellyn. It ran for six initial six-episode series from 1988 to 1993. It first returned for two eight-episode series in 1997 and 1999. Ten years later in 2009 came the miniseries Back to Earth, followed by three six-episode series in 2012, 2016, and 2017, last culminating in a TV movie The Promised Land in 2020.
It was in May that Llewellyn revealed "We've all agreed to do more. We're not going to do a new series but we're making something and it should be fun." He elaborated two weeks later with"We knew we were going to do more Red Dwarf and we're actually now doing it in the middle of October to the middle of November this year. A 90-minute special, three half-hours. So yes, we are making more. I can't believe I've agreed to do it, I'm insane. I'm much too old." Clearly without a settled budget the project suffered multiple setbacks that pushed it the two to three months already. It also meant a clear answer on where it would be broadcast was not available either.
To update on the streaming situation in the States, Red Dwarf actually left Tubi in June, just a few weeks after the original report. It’s sprung up nowhere new in the seven months since, so it’s basically been a BritBox exclusive in the entire time since.
Source: RadioTimes