It’s been twenty-one years since the first series of Red Dwarf; does it feel like putting the band back together?
Yeah, it feels like we’re some kind of comedy rock gods reunited to do a tour and everyone’s trying to squeeze into their pants and dye their hair! So, I’m relearning the chords to all the classics! It’s been ten years since the last series, so it was kind of weird being back together again. They’ve all aged surprisingly well; with Robert (Llewellyn) it doesn’t really matter as he wears a mask, Danny (John Jules)’s gone a bit grey but he wears a wig, Chris (Barrie) had a bit of ‘Just for men’ in his hair and I’ve survived relatively unscathed… shock, horror!
You’ve done pretty well in the meantime, getting a regular gig on Coronation Street, but all that time did you feel you were missing doing the sci-fi and missing doing the comedy?
Not really. My life had sort of moved on and I think I was the most reluctant of us all to revisit it, because it’s become such an iconic series that you don’t want to interfere with the legacy and I didn’t want to do it if it wasn’t going to be better than the ones we’d done before. So, I was quite reluctant and then Doug (Naylor) sent me the script and I was like: ‘Oh, god, the script’s so good… I really want to be a part of it’. The script’s brilliant and then it was whether Coronation Street would release me for the time to do it and they’ve been great, they let me go. Happy days!
When you look at the format of sitcoms, generally the characters don’t change that much from episode to episode because if there was real character development then the series has to come to an end. Red Dwarf on the other hand seemed to have lots of moments where the characters evolved from series to the next…
Well, The Cat’s changed over the years, he’s become more humanlike because he’s been around humans and Kryten has broken his programming and he’s a bit like a teenager now, he’s dealing with emotions and things like that. In this series, I think Lister’s moved on quite a lot. He’s a bit of a mess, he’s a bit of a wreck. He misses Kochanski and he’s gone to pieces a bit. It’s a lot more emotional performance… There’re a lot of funny scenes, but there’s a lot of pathos in it as well. I like that thing about American comedies like The Simpsons where, you know, you’re not too scared to be sad in it and stuff like that. So, it’s kind of moved on a bit like that. It’s more of a comedy drama now than a sitcom.
Not only now, but over the run of the original series, was that something that encouraged you to keep coming back to the role, because you knew there were these dramatic and emotional moments, that maybe you wouldn’t get in other comedies?
The great thing about Red Dwarf is that you always know it’s going to be well written and I just love the writing and ideas and I’m quite emotionally involved with Lister. I quite like Lister as a guy. He’s a great person to play. In the early series, Lister’s the least funny of them all and I suppose I was a bit messed up about that, but as you grow older you realise audiences are actually seeing the whole thing through Lister’s eyes – he’s sort of like the everyman . Once I’d got that into my head then all my fears were allayed and I could play him like a human being with all this madness going on around me – The Cat, Kryten, the hologram – all this strangeness going on around me and that’s the way I tried to look at it.
Quite often it’s the human character who’s the straight man and makes sci-fi work. I’m thinking of characters like Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black, the various companions in Doctor Who…
Yeah. You do need to be able to base science fiction in some sort of reality that we can all kind of relate to and I suppose that’s sort of Lister’s job – he’s the anchor for the human race in the series, to be able to see the show through Lister’s eyes…
The new mini-series Red Dwarf: Back to Earth airs on Dave over the Easter weekend…