Production

With the new series came a new direction, as Grant Naylor Productions became a reality and Rob and Doug became full-on credited producers for the show. (Although, for the last time, the show's final logo belonged to Paul Jackson Productions - Paul was in his final year as Executive Producer.)

The opening moments of Red Dwarf III spoofed the scrolling text of Star Wars - although a production error meant that the final line 'and now the saga continuums' appeared on-screen twice. The high-speed scroll was not Backwards' only moment for 'hidden' messages, however. Actors on the reverse Earth elected to speak dialogue which differed slightly - or completely - from what was subtitled or translated. Arthur Smith famously launched a tirade against whoever reversed the tape to check what he was saying while wagging a finger at Kryten!

Click to read the Backwards translations

Series III seems to have been a dangerous one for Scouse hard-nut Craig, who once again did much of his own stunt-work. Craig was dragged across 'ice' and suffered the high-powered blast of a massive fan - but nothing was worse than having to walk into a lake - backwards. Weights had been attached to the actors legs, and as he sank into the mud, his head vanished beneath the surface as scripted... except it never came back up again! The quick-thinking crew managed to save the actor from drowning.

Suffering for the effects remains a mainstay of the Red Dwarf experience - although Craig didn't put real dog food in his mouth. It was actually a corned beef and marrowbone jelly concoction, and he spat it out when the camera cut away. (Regardless, Craig has been happy to foster the myth!) However, the look of the 'mush mush' sequence in Marooned saw the scene truncated to reduce the problematic visuals, and in Timeslides the design of a glove box for holograms which allowed Rimmer to build a model kit was deemed to look too bad to use.

Perhaps worst of all, Robert Llewellyn's first day as Kryten was for Bodyswap's sauna scene. While the costume was already quite hot enough, the room made it even hotter and within seconds Robert was sweating like a 200 metre sprinter. The sequence called for him to light Craig's cigar with a lighter hidden in his finger, and the effects team ran the necessary cables up his arm - only to find that his sweat was causing a short circuit and electrocuting him! The scene, which was eventually completed successfully, was cut from the episode.

Robert also suffered from an immense difficulty to learn one particular Kryten speech - the one about Rimmer's mother being a silly old trout. For whatever reason, it just wouldn't stick, and eventually Mike Agnew put it down on a cue card - only for everyone to forget about the card during the shoot! Mike made a valiant attempt to go for the board, but Robert had already completed his line by the time he was crawling across the set floor. Robert had to step over the distressed production manager on his way out of the scene.

But even the writers aren't infallible, as Timeslides clearly proved. As production on the episode began, the scene where Lister claims he got somebody's skiing holiday picture back by mistake was discovered to have an error by none other than Craig. The skiers had scripted lines about how they got Lister's rather scary birthday snaps - which would have been fine, except, at that point in time, the skiers would not have received them yet. The lines were summarily cut. Backwards also contained some extra dialogue during the opening pilot exam sequence, cut for time - while script changes around the newly introduced Starbug saw a brief mention of 'White Midget' slip through the net in Bodyswap.

In perhaps the most significant concession made for the effects of series III, Bodyswap was the first episode to be entirely recorded without a live studio audience. The technical difficulties of having characters speaking with each others' voices was easily solved in post-production (the process being similar to when actors have to dub their own lines because of background noise), but an audience would have had to watch the cast do their scenes twice - once speaking, once silent in order to collect a separate track of background sounds.

The cast's attempts to impersonate each other - and to get the lip-movements correct - was the source of much mirth on-set. Former impressionist Chris Barrie had little trouble 'doing' Lister, but Craig's Rimmer perplexed everyone. Regardless, the final edit - complete with dubbed voices - was played to a small audience at the Paris Radio Studio, London to provide a laugh track.

The most remarkable episode of the third series - certainly an episode which has topped the polls ever since - was Polymorph. The episode took a huge amount of editing, particularly around the boxer short sequence. The audience laughed so loud and so long that Chris Barrie was forced to stand still for minutes until things had died down enough for him to say his line. Meanwhile, Ed Bye - with characteristic confidence - continued to insist that the scenes in the cargo bay would look just like the final shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Red Dwarf III was the first series to feature the official logo of show. Designed by DeWinters in London, the elliptical image has become utterly iconic - and a variant even turned up on the winter costumes worn for Marooned. After one meeting with the company, well before the third series was to be filmed, Doug Naylor was exiting the DeWinters building when he bumped into Hattie Hayridge, who reminded him that if ever they wanted her, she would love to come back to the show. If only she had known what was to come...