Red Dwarf Reversed

For New Year's Eve, UK.TV take you through the whole of Red Dwarf - backwards!

13 December, 2002

Those crazy Australians. Everything's the wrong way round. For a start, for reasons best known to themselves they live on the opposite side of the world. And if that weren't enough, they have Christmas in the summer. I mean, how contrary can you get?

With this kind of arse-about-face logic, it's hardly surprising that UK.TV will be screening all 52 episodes of Red Dwarf in a New Year marathon in reverse series order. Yes you did read that right.

'Red Dwarf Reversed' will begin with Series VIII and work backwards. Each series itself will be in the correct sequence - so fans of three-parter Back In The Red can breathe a sigh of relief - but Rimmer's near-death experience at the end of Only The Good will now be followed by a jump back to Tikka To Ride. Series VI will follow VII, then we're back to V, and then... oh, you get the idea.

"We decided to count down Red Dwarf from Series VIII down to Series I," a spokesperson for UK.TV told reddwarf.co.uk, "as last New Year's Eve [when] we transmitted Series I-VIII we were the most watched channel over the time period... apart from Sky News, who were transmitting the bushfires."

So while Red Dwarf can't compete with natural disasters, it certainly beat the hell out of repeats of The Great Escape. And as for the funky running order: "We were debating whether to start with Series VIII, episode 8 or episode 1, but decided to start with episode 1. [We] thought it might be too confusing starting with episode 8!"

The chaos begins at 8.30pm on December 31st and doesn't let up until 3.30am on January 2nd! Also included in the schedule are the Red Dwarf A-Z and a collection of Smeg Ups where you can see all the Red Dwarf actors forget their lines, knock over sets and basically make complete fools of themselves in front of the cameras.

You can find the UK.TV Red Dwarf schedule in our Dwarf Tracker.