"The longer you leave returning to something, the higher the stakes." "Because it does feel bloody epic." "It's certainly epic making it." "It's the twists." "It's fantastic." "Yes, I think it's one of... the most interesting Red Dwarfs we've ever done." "Red Dwarf is back, under the auspices of co-creator Doug Naylor." "The writer-director is taking the show to another dimension, with filming on day one beginning at a familiar, if unusual, location." "It was a weird first day, actually, coming back to Red Dwarf." "If you'd said in 1990 or" ""Oh, in 20 years' time you will be doing this programme on the set of Coronation Street,"" "I would have laughed and said, "Get out of here."" "It was a very odd way to start really, although I had actually seen it once before in about 1982 when I was working at Granada, so I had actually stood on the street before." "Yeah, it was very odd." "Very peculiar." "Brilliant for me because it was so cold." "Everyone else was moaning." "I had a great day." "I had a ball, really." "It was like two parts of my life coming together and I was sitting back and watching this surreal event occur." "It was just great that Coronation Street let us do it, really." "I think it's unprecedented that they've done something like that." "They gave us such amazing access." "I'm not quite sure how or why they would allow us that kind of access, but it's fantastic." "What sort of godforsaken place is this?" "This is worse than Rimmerworld." "Get out of town, this is brilliant." "This is just like where I grew up, except there's less burning cars." "Joining the Red Dwarf cast were a couple of stars from Coronation Street." "Inside The Kabin was actress Michelle Keegan." "I have seen Red Dwarf." "My dad's a massive fan of it." "He's got the videos and things like that." "I knew Craig Charles and Simon Gregson were going to be doing it and my agent rang me and said they were looking for a girl, something to do one small part in it, would I like to do it?" "So, yeah, I jumped at the chance." "And along with Michelle was the other half of Craig Charles' latest on-screen double act, Simon Gregson." "I'm just so thrilled to be in it." "Craig, being a very good friend of mine, and knew that I was a fan of the show, asked whether I could be in it and..." "I am now." "I mean, I'd just turned 15 when I started working here, so this is all I've known, so this is the only other job I've ever done." "I'm just SO thrilled to be in it." "Very excited and a tinge of nerves as well." "In front of the Rover's Return, Back To Earth's highly decorated star vehicle was unveiled for the first time." "You know, a Smart car customised to look like Starbug - who'd have thought of that?" "I was sat at a set of lights and a Smart car went past and I fell in love with just the way it appeared and went across, and I thought, "That has to be the Carbug that we get."" "And then we discovered that we couldn't afford it." "I went, "No!" "We've got to have a Smart car."" "So in the end I decided to go off and buy one myself." "But we had it vacuum-wrapped, which gives it this nice green finish - much quicker than spraying." "Here you can see we've added on these hover-pads and we moulded these in plastic." "Tactical use of plumbing fittings." "Flower pot here, here and a big one here." "Just easier as you've got the shapes already, and then built into the back of the jet pack, indicator, brake light, reverse light, fully functioning." "Crack of dawn, freezing cold, below zero." "Get to the set..." "Starbug keys are locked in the car." "We're sitting there, we're waiting." "They call the AA." ""Can you help us?" "I've locked the keys in my car." ""It's outside the Rover's Return."" "The woman started to laugh on the other end." "She said, "Outside the Rover's Return?"" "I said, "Yes, on Coronation Street."" "And the woman said, "Oh, really?" "What kind of vehicle is it?"" "I said, "Well, it was silver and cream, but it's now bright green."" "Right, the keys are actually in the car... and what's going to happen now is very technical." "They're going to break the quarter-glass of Starbug." "Hooray!" "APPLAUSE" "Special effects." "Modern technology!" "What was begun as a freezing landing in Manchester concluded on D Stage of Shepperton Studios as a last-minute addition to the day's schedule." "Winkers to shut down." "Landing gear down." "Requesting landing line." "We haven't driven cars before." "We're used to driving space ships, you know?" "So all that, "Requesting landing line." "Oh, bringing her in now."" "You know, all that indicators on stuff, that I just thought was bizarre, that was done like a real kick-bollock-scramble sort of way." "We'd learned the landing scene weeks ago, to do it on the Corrie set." "Gear one!" "Applying brakes now." "Constant velocity decreasing." "So we kind of just about knew it, but it's one of those scenes that has to..." "Although it looks as if it's just someone saying something and someone going "check" afterwards, you've got to get the sense of it and the meaning of what we're doing." "Doug said, "We'll do it here." "We'll set it up, put black" ""around it and get someone to shake the car, as it were."" "Cabin crew, prepare for landing." "Request for landing line." "Check, check." "That was classic Red Dwarf." "We were crammed into one of the smallest popular vehicles on the market today, all four of us." "There were no seats as we couldn't get in with seats, so Craig and Dan were sitting on boxes and Chris and I were like this in the back." "And so they had it all on idiot boards right in front of us." "Um..." "That's me, sorry, yes, I knew that was me." "This is just..." "No, don't worry." "Take a break and we'll do it again." "The idiot boards didn't give the feed line, just your line, so everyone was just throwing in the lines when they see one of their lines come up, not realising that, they've got to wait two lines before they can say theirs." "Shepperton Studios has been the home of Red Dwarf since 1991, but the shoot began not with celebration but with a tragic revelation." "I think the first scene we did on the new set here at Shepperton was the remembrance garden." "I just started crying, which was... quite weird, because I hadn't really planned to play it like that." "I'd played it a couple of times and Doug come up to me and said," ""Craig, you're coming across really sad but it's like your grandma's died or something."" "So then I just went away and just came back, did it again and sort of let it all hang out." "It's got some emotional punch and Craig's performance in that is..." "I think it shows that he's matured in the last ten years." "I mean, it was really extraordinary, real proper...proper acting." "You know, that's a shock in Red Dwarf, some proper acting!" "Fantastic." "The garden of remembrance was just one of several virtual sets created for production." "Begun on the studio floor, completed with computer-generated imagery." "Originally, we had discussed shooting possibly 90% against green screen and having almost all virtual sets." "Now, we're probably at a stage where we're about 50% vis effects in terms of virtual sets, so obviously we're shooting actors against a green screen and creating the really big sets behind." "You can't have an enormously long set." "You physically can't built it in a studio, so we created a virtual set, so we do a thing called 3D tracking." "It allows the computer, as long as there are at least seven reference points in the frame at any one time, to know exactly where the real camera was in relation to the actors." "It is difficult." "It's very exacting because you've just got a few lines on the floor and everything else will be painted in afterwards." "It's difficult but it's fulfilling when you see it all come together and you see what they've done with it and you think, "Wow!"" "But no matter how virtual the surroundings, some things just have to be done for real." "Action on Craig." "Action on camera." "Yeah, they put me on wires and flew me about a bit, which is kind of good fun, you know?" "There's a very muscular man puts a belt round your middle and goes SKKREEHK..." "And you go OWWHH..." "But you know you won't fall out of it, so it was very comfy to be flying in it." "I suppose it was quite nice." "It showed me I wasn't in as good a shape as I thought I was in, because it really, really hurts your stomach muscles the next day, so you've got to get the right balance, you know." "They've done a bit of pole-dangling, cos I was slightly worried that the gloves wouldn't grip," "I'm wearing the equivalent of washing-up gloves, so doing chin-ups in washing up gloves." "Never advised in the gym." "And of course, I just dangled with my legs bent like that, whereas Danny did a full high bar routine like a Russian gymnast." "While Cat took to the parallel bars, Rimmer was getting more uncomfortable by the second, thanks to the arrival of his prospective replacement." "Katerina Bartikovsky, as played by Sophie Winkleman." "Brilliant casting, great performance, bringing - dare I say - a touch of glamour to the ship." "I'm working with legends." "It's very exciting." "It was very, very hard not to laugh with Arnold Rimmer today, who was Chris Barrie." "Katerina was telling him all this incredibly technical stuff and being slightly just quite scary and formidable and he has an expression that's simultaneously, more than any actor I've ever known, baffled, furious, terror-struck, scared, sort of cowardly," "and I think he's a comic genius." "Far removed from the clash of the holograms, the Red Dwarf boys had something a little more organic to contend with, in a very confined space." "You do the read-through and you're in the diving tank and get attacked by the giant squid, and it's "Da-da-da, OK, fine."" "So then we go in the diving tank, which is a completely sealed set and then we can hear people outside going..." "MUMBLES" "And we're all looking at each other, going, "What?"" "Which could have meant "action"" "or "stop" or "you've got the lines wrong" or "can you do it again?"" "We haven't got a clue." ""Sorry, what?" MUMBLES" "Action." "SHOUTING AND THRASHING ABOUT" "Will you keep the noise down back there?" "'There wasn't a lot of room for manoeuvre." "Very small space,' 'so I had to try and get my 4ft flares...' around the place without, you know, tripping over." "Really, I have to give credit to Doug because it was his..." "He went to see Mamma Mia!" "at Christmas and one of the first things he said, he said he loved the look of these..." "He couldn't describe them but, you know, the flare bell-bottom trousers, and really that was the start for the whole look for Cat's pink diving suit." "Danny's the only one I know that can get away with wearing a skin-tight Lycra suit." "Such tight buns." "She couldn't help looking at Danny's bottom." "Oh, right." "Doesn't he look amazing?" "I haven't really spent that much time..." "Go on." "Have a look." "No, really." "I think you would agree with me." "They're very toned." "I've spent too much time in the edit." "I am aware of it, actually." "In there, I'm boiling, and then the Lycra, as soon as you come out, yeah, it's like being in bloody Siberia." "Lycra changes with the temperature, so I go from, like, overheating to...freezing me proverbials off." "The fun with tentacles didn't end inside the diving bell, however, though no doubt Sophie wishes it had." "It wasn't ideal, because it was my very first morning and to get the tentacle looking realistic and sort of gooey and gross, they got real fish guts and draped them all over the tentacle." "I had to get extremely close to this tentacle and play with bits of it with my fingers, with tweezers, with all sorts of stuff, and put them in other bits of fish guts and I can't describe to you the smell, I can't..." "I've tried to think of words that could sum it up and it's impossible." "They don't exist." "Despite the smell, one more resurrected crew member would be returning to Red Dwarf." "Find out who else got his claw dirty next." "Alongside the regular gang aboard Red Dwarf, one more familiar crew member also made a computer-enhanced return in Back To Earth, with a little help from his feline friend." "I usually get to play multiple characters in Red Dwarf, you know, Riviera Kid and Duane Dibbley, and in this trilogy I get to play another character and... he's Bob the scutter." "You can take that look off your face for a start!" "Instead of saying, "Leave a space and we'll put Bob the scutter in,"" "we got Danny to act out what he thought the scutter would do, and then did the whole thing again without Danny there, allowing our animators to produce a digital version of Bob the scutter that got the best of Danny's performance." "Bob is going to look like a scutter but for the CGI man to get his movement, this is what he's going to start off as." "Not everything on board was virtual, though, with set creation by production designer Mark Harris, which included the iconic sleeping quarters reinvented in three solid dimensions." "I love them." "They're Red Dwarf sets but they're sort of... they're just upgraded." "We knew the basic layout that Doug wanted to keep - the bunks themselves, a table area in the middle." "Then we thought about updating it." "Mark looked at the shapes, blocked it all out on the computer, does all his design work like that, so you can play around, have a look at all the angles, and a big change which came about later, which wasn't planned initially," "was that we put a fourth wall in, with a window." "It's quite good, actually." "I love that." ""Malfunction." "Main frame unable to reboot."" "So posh!" "And it's a four-wall set as well, which is..." "It's quite unusual in the world of television to have a four-wall set." "Most of the sets have doubled up in some way, well, not most of them but a few of them, so this door is the same one that you see throughout the show." "And essentially now, you're just standing on half of the sleeping quarters set." "That wall was there." "The door of course was." "That wall as well." "This is the window that we had there." "Those crates are actually used, I think, in the crane control room that you see Rimmer operating the diving bell from, and we just repainted them and put them there to now become a lift." "Another section of Red Dwarf was also constructed, though on a much smaller scale than usual." "Basically, a very old technique." "It's called foreground miniature." "It's worked out very mathematically on a drawing board, or in this case in CAD, to work for a specific lens with the camera placed at a specific distance from the set." "So when it's all lined up correctly with the correct lens, it appears to line up perfectly and it looks like the corridor's going on a lot longer than it should be." "I'd been walking past the model all day, not thinking, "What's that for?"" ""You know." "I've got to remember my lines, you know."" "And then I suddenly worked out how it worked, and it's really clever." "Too weird for words." "Yeah." "Cut." "Yeah." "Yeah." "BELL RINGS" "When it's not showing new sides to the Red Dwarf mothership," "Back To Earth also pays tribute to one all-time classic sci-fi movie." "Blade Runner." "Blade Runner." "Blade Runner." "Blade Runner." "Blade Runner?" "Are we allowed to name it?" "I mean I would say Blade Runner-esque." "The team gave present-day Earth a dystopian makeover, placing a Blade Runner-style building in a key London location." "We wanted to position it somewhere iconic in London, but it is a still photo, right?" "There's no point putting that in the show as we need stuff happening." "We still have the water to animate, which we'll do digitally." "We shot a bunch of the crew on green screen." "We took all of that work and projected it with a technique called camera-mapping, over rough geometry." "It's like switching on a light projector or slide projector and projecting an image." "The second we did that, we could have movement and flew the camera round and the end shot is a really nice little move-in, we see Carbug driving in, we have people moving down there, the water's rippling and, of course, all done from a happy-snap taken on the London Eye." "Another key sci-fi moment came with the deceptively simple set for prosthetic lab Noseworld." "With Noseworld we actually decided we wanted it to be cold, so we built it outside, in a store room." "It's shot in the props store with some plastic sheet up and it looked fantastic and the actual dressing of that set was really good." "For the first two months of planning, it was minus two every day and we did have frosty breath and in the great plan of these things, the day we did it was the mildest evening there was," "but I made it look cold in the colour temperature of the lights." "The room is going to be very cold and I've got to be shivering throughout the whole scene." "He was fantastic and looked so the part." ""Cold!" "Very cold."" "You look like you're dying to go to the toilet." "That's the best way to do shivering." "Outside the main stage, a Chinatown street was being constructed on site, much to the cast's surprise." "We were in the studio shooting stuff and they'd go, "Right, we're going to do the Chinatown now,"" "and I thought it was a bit of green screen and a bit of a light hanging down and, you know, an extra, and we went out and then suddenly there was a huge crowded street." "Gather round." "OK." "I was absolutely thrilled with how well that came together, with how little we had." "It looks like a movie set but it was put together so quickly." "But once you've created your fictional street, you still have to beware of fast-moving mechanoids." "There was two bins in the way, very light plastic bins with fluffy rubbish in." "I was really belting after Craig and he did a proper controlled boot, so I came down and went, "I don't want this bin in the way because I don't want to fall over."" "I was worried I was going to go flying over it." "So I just walloped it with my foot and it went flying across the street." "Well, I didn't even stop to look." "I just pelted down the street and I did hear a big explosion." "I thought, "Brilliant." "They're putting in gunfire."" "I kept running, it's going BLACHH! "Wow, there's explosions." ""Fantastic!" "This is going to be an amazing scene."" "What I didn't realise was I had hit a big light stand that was lighting the whole thing, which fell over, exploded, fused the entire lights for a whole section of Shepperton and the surrounding..." "I mean, it really messed it up and I had no idea, so the second time" "I did a proper sort of wet liberal tap, just got it out the way." "Didn't need quite the venom that I gave the first one." "The crashing climax of the Chinatown scene took place the same night, indoors and with no chance of a second take." "It turned out to be sugar glass, which is very, very delicate stuff." "Obviously once they'd set it, you know, everyone had to sort of..." "There'd be no vibrations nearby, otherwise it would crack." "The first sheet I saw..." ""Wow, that's amazing!" ""God, it really looks like glass." And as I thought that, it went SSSHAH..." "And fell into a million shards, and I just went, "Oh, no, we're going to be here all night!"" "We'd get the first one in place...and then we'd try the second one, and before we've even got it vertical, we break it." "And then we try another one and we gradually get them in, piece by piece, over about an hour's time to actually set this, and every time one went in, we'd break the next one." "It was a bit like defusing a time-bomb." "Can we close the door, please?" "Don't want any wind." "OK." "It's so fragile, mate." "Everyone was like," ""There's one chance." "You cannot blow it on this one."" "In situations in TV where something can only be done once, they either go spectacularly well or really badly, but fortunately in this case, we had a lot of briefing from our stunt supervisor." "You know, we'd thought about it beforehand." "I was in the camp of "don't let's have stunt men - let them do it,"" "and we just have to make sure that we ask the cast in the right order, so if we ask Craig first, Craig will definitely say yes, and then we'll have a bravado ricochet goes all the way down the line." "That formation, where that's going to be Craig, then the other two have to be out the way for this guy to shoot him." "Yes, Rimmer's at the back." "I'm supposed to be breaking the glass." "'Craig's a sucker for doing all that, he loves doing all that.'" "It was safe, it was... blah, blah, blah." "But of course it's easy for me to say" " I'm not doing it." "We'd run through the open set before they put the glass in to see where we go and get the cameras lined up, and we were doing pretend breaking through glass, sort of really rubbish jumping-through-glass acting." "Then when we all saw that stuff there, we went, "God, that is frightening." It suddenly became frightening because none of us had ever done it before and we didn't know what that stuff did." "How heavy is it?" "Does it fall on you?" "Can it really cut you?" "You know, all those things." "We rehearsed it without any glass." "It was one of those things that you can't really rehearse." "As soon as the glass goes in it's a completely different thing, and so we rehearsed and rehearsed it, very health and safety conscious and all that but at the end of the day, you've got to run and jump through, pretend you're shot," "fall through another one, pretend you're shot again and go headfirst through a pane glass window." "Action." "You were absolutely headfirst." "No, that's great." "Oh, no, look at that." "It's like a normal Saturday night in Liverpool, really." "It's normally bus stops." "The hardest thing's getting the snow out my hair." "As you can see." "The rest of it was easy." "It's quite exhilarating." "You kind of do think you're going to hurt yourself, in the back of your mind, but the glass is just so brittle." "You just go crashing through it." "I thought Craig would smash all the glass when he ran through it but he just made a Craig-shaped hole, so there was this big sheet right in front of us." "We went...headfirst." "Fun, that's what you come into the business for." "You know, instead of treading the boards doing the Bard, love, you know, let's smash through a few panes of good old sugar glass." "Lovely." "That's all for Red Dwarf, because we love it." "GUNSHOT REVERBERATES" "# It's cold outside There's no kind of atmosphere" "# I'm all alone, more or less" "# Let me fly, far away from here" "# Fun, fun, fun" "# In the sun, sun, sun" "# I want to lie Shipwrecked and comatose" "# Drinking fresh mango juice" "# Goldfish shoals nibbling at my toes" "# Fun, fun, fun" "# In the sun, sun, sun" "# Fun, fun, fun" "# In the sun, sun, sun. #"