The Comedian's Comedian Podcast - Doug Naylor

Episode Date: November 13, 2025

Doug Naylor is the co-creator of the long-running, hugely successful sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf, having written or co-written every single episode! Doug was also the Head Writer and Script Editor on the original Spitting Image, has written a number of award-winning radio shows and is a best-selling author.In this episode we dig into all things Red Dwarf, from the creation of the show with Rob Grant, the show’s continued success while retaining an outsider status, UKTV's recent cancellation of a TV film and what the future may hold... We also talk about writing his incredible first children's novel, Sin Bin Island which I highly recommend!Join the Insiders Club at patreon.com/comcompod where you can WATCH the full episode and get access to 15 minutes of exclusive extras all about Spitting Image where we talk about initially refusing to join the show eight times expanding the puppets beyond politicians and the real-world impact of the show.Follow the Pod: Instagram, YouTube & TikTok!Support our independently produced Podcast from only £3/month at Patreon.com/ComComPod✅ Instant access to full video and ad-free audio episodes✅ 15 minutes of exclusive extra content with Doug✅ Early access to new episodes (where possible!)✅ Exclusive membership offerings including a monthly “Stu&A”PLUS you’ll get access to the full back catalogue of extras you can find nowhere else!Catch Up with Doug:Doug's first children’s novel Sin Bin Island is out now wherever you get your books!You can also keep up-to-date with Doug across socials, @DougRDNaylor.Everything I'm up to:See me live (when there's dates!)… Find out all the info at stuartgoldsmith.com/comedy.Discover my comedy about the climate crisis, for everyone from activists to CEOs, at stuartgoldsmith.com/climate.See Stuart live on tour - www.stuartgoldsmith.com/comedy Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stu here. Episode 500 is somehow fast approaching. It's already in the cat. I can't wait for you to hear it. I need your feedback. I want to gather some data on your favourite episodes, your best moments, see if there's any fun anecdotes I can uncover along the way. Something must have happened in your life in nearly 500 episodes of podcasting. And as a thanks for taking part, myself and producer Callum, will be gifting an Insider's Insider 12-month membership on Patreon to one lucky respondent. You can pay this forward if you're already one. The survey's super short, all the questions are skippable, and this would mean a lot if you could just take five minutes out of your day to go and fill the thing in. Head to Stuartgoldsmith.com slash survey, or the link is in the show notes. There's going to be a very short break in September before we approach that milestone, but lots of exciting stuff in the works.

Hello and welcome back to the show. I'm Stuart Goldsmith. I believe we are five episodes away from episode 500. And this is Doug Naler, the co-creator of the hugely long-running, insanely successful sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf, which, as you will hear in depth in this episode, was a huge part of my comedy, whatever it is. Family, no, family tree, antecedency?

Yes, something like that. He has written, he Doug, has written or co-written every single episode and has directed more than 20 of them himself. Beyond Red Dwarf, Doug was also head writer and script editor on the original spitting image, which another thing I grew up with. That would have been a faster sentence earlier I grew up with. And he's also written a number of award-winning radio shows and on top of that is a best-selling author.

And in the first half of this episode, we're going to discuss Doug's first children's novel, Sinbin Island, which is about four wayward kids banished to an island. and it is absolutely brilliant. It's so rare. This happened in the Alan Davies Returns episode as well. It's so joyful to be able to interview someone when you have read their entire book

and our family loved it, as you will hear. We'll talk about screenwriting Red Dwarf. We'll talk about how that show's rhythm came from language and character, not just gags. It's an extraordinary gag-dense sitcom. And in the second half of the show, we're going to delve even deeper into all things Red Dwarf. So join The Insiders Club on Patreon, of course,

from £3 a month. You get access to the full video, you get rid of all the adverts, and you get exclusive extra content from Doug Naler all about the inside story of spitting image and what went right and what went wrong. You can find out more about that at patreon.com slash comcom pod. Here is Doug Naler, who, I mean, this is not in my habit to interrupt me introducing the guest. I found him so lovely and was genuinely thrilled and a bit like a small teenage boy, as you will now hear. Here's Doug Nailer. Welcome to the show, Doug Nailer. Oh, Stuart, it's lovely to be here.

Thank you so much for inviting me. I was interested. I was thinking on where I first encountered your work because you will be known to most listeners of this podcast as the co-creator, co-writer and later writer of Red Dwarf, which I, you know, it had, it's no exaggeration to say. I think Red Dwarf is one-off. the sort of 10 or so

pieces of comedy which has had the most profound effect on my developing personality as a teenager and I don't know if you hear it expressed that way but you must get that a lot yes not necessarily when they were teenagers

but people who love the show and continue to watch it over and over and over again as a comfort watch so when you go out and think can I write a comedy show or blah blah that never occurs to you I mean certainly it didn't to us back in the day it was like can we get something on TV if we're lucky it will be repeated twice

and then obviously have to do something else so yeah that part is extraordinary just the effect it has on people I mean I've had whole generations you know where you've had three, three generations all standing up at a comic con going, we love it. It really helps it through our mum's death. And you go, oh, wow. You don't think so much grief and sadness is attached to watching comedy, something I didn't know.

Yes. You know, we might, I'd like to return to that in a minute because of there is some, I saw a review of a recent Red Dwarf. I suppose Promised Land was five years ago now. Yeah, yeah. most recent. Yeah, yeah. And it did mention, the review at least mentioned melancholy,

which I think is really important to what knits the characters together and what makes the show work in a very subtle sort of a way. I read it and I went, hang on, is it? And then I went, no, no, it does have an element of that. Before we get onto that, I just want to ask, are you now used to those things you describe, not necessarily helping us through the death of our parent? and so it must be very hard to get used to that.

But having Don from a place where you were a couple of guys trying to get a funny show made, for now where it has this, like you say, the enormous repeat value, it has almost like Star Trek-style super fans who can quote chapter and verse, I confess, I'm not one of those. But do you remember, are you used to it now?

And do you remember a point where you were like, oh, I guess I've sort of got this now for the rest of my life? It's always staggering. You never take it for granted. Oh, you just think, oh, this group of people here are just unique. But then you meet another individual or another group of people. And it's also, yeah, so you never truly get used to it. I mean, it's so humbling.

And then you think, oh, there's such a weight of responsibility when you have to go out and make new shows. Yes. Oh, no, no, ignore all that. Don't think about that. Don't think about that. just try and do a funny show. Don't worry about all the peripheral stuff. That's really interesting.

And I want to talk about an element of that as well in relation to Sinbin Island. So by way of my kind of introduction to this podcast, let's maybe do, let's do Sinbin Island first. Because I've got loads of Red Dwar stuff to talk to you about. But I also feel you must have been interviewed to death about it. So part of my responsibility as a fan is like, how can I ask Doug something? He's never been asked a hundred times before. Before we get to it,

obviously, your PR sent me the press release, and I was like, oh, of course I'm going to have Doug Nailer. And then I was like, oh, right, he's written a children's book, his debut children's book at, I guess, are you in your, I don't want to hazard a guess at your age, but you've been around for a while and this is your family. Really, really old, yeah. Really old now.

Really, really, really. Not really, I'll really, really old. Yeah. So a little part of me was like, you know, the market for children's books is probably pretty filled with people who are famous for doing other things. Yes. That's stacked with, yes, yes. Yes. And I thought, well, I'll certainly, I'll definitely take a look at that.

That'll be interesting. And as I mentioned just before we start recording, me and my family, both my children are six and nine. And they are both madly in love with Sinbin Island. So I want to talk to you about that. They really, like, really, in a way that's like, oh, wow, this isn't just us reading them a funny storybook. She was running around the room talking about the scene where Diggs is attempting to get as many lashes as possible and stealing everyone's toast and sausages. And she was acting it out.

So I play you that really just to say, you know, this isn't flattery. We absolutely love the book. I mean, it's interesting that your daughter should quote that scene because when I met the publisher, for the very first time, that was a scene that they went, oh, we just love this. And they were, you know, two women. I mean, you know, grown up women. So it's interesting. Which is that.

Oh, yeah, for sure. So tell us about, for those of us that don't know about Sinban Island, give us the kind of the elevator pitch, if you like. The elevator pitch, it sounds like some dark dystopian novel, which of course it isn't. It's basically an orphanage for wayward boys and girls. where the four worst-behaved kids are banished to this island, where they have to survive for a week on just bread and water. In days gone by, there was a rumour that there were deadly creatures living there,

and there's also another rumour that smugglers used to use the island to ferry treasure, including magical artefacts, to the mainland. As you get past that and you get on to Simbin, it is a kind of rip-roaring, a hope, epic adventure story, but with a lot of laughs along the way and a good mystery and action stuff as well. Absolutely right. From the very first kind of page really

and the Russian doll and the concept of the Russian doll and the messages within the Russian doll, not wanting to give too much away. It really does just hook you right from the off. You go, oh wow, this is like a big hooky plot. Can't wait to see what happens. Lots and lots of surprises

by I think the time you're a quarter of the way, way through, again, not to spoil things, but there is a further discovery that changes everything. In terms of the things we can talk about, I did, I was wondering whether, given that it is an orphaned boy in a school setting and there are, is there, there is the suggestion of magical elements. Is one of the things that any writer has to face when doing that, how do I make sure this is as different from Harry Potter as possible? I know. I know. And it did sort of occur to me a bit magic boarding school and then

I thought no no no I'm going to ignore that because I know what this book's about and it's not Harry Potter and I did go to boarding school and so I know what that's about I know I can write that I know I can write and the teachers in this

are very different from the teachers in Harry Potter they're much yeah matter I think dark and just and some of our teachers will like that. Maybe it was because I'm older and back in the day you could get away with more. Our chemistry teacher regularly used to send out boys, young boys to buy cigarettes for him. And the headmaster used to give speech to smoking, caps them full strain. You know, you just

what? What? And now you look back on it, you go, that's just mad. It was a boy who broke his arm and had to walk to the hospital in his rugby boots you know do you hear hello what's going on so I kind of enjoyed that sort of mad

you know where you get demerits for you know ridiculous things I was more screamed at by the headmaster told to go to his office for walking

for walking on the lawn and he kept calling me Crawford and I said just two points that I'm not Crawford and I was walking on the lawn and he went, don't argue with me. If I want to call you, Prophet, I'll call you Crafid and don't walk on the lawn. It's like, let's go now, get out.

Do you, just on that, because I went, I didn't board, but I went to a school at which there were borders. Yeah, I was the same. I was a day boy, yeah. Yeah. And it, it kind of, this is fairly common within stand-up comedy. It absolutely scarred me. And it really, yeah, I had such a horrible time there because the teachers were all kind of predominantly

angry, emotionally repressed old men. We used to have a history teacher who I remember he'd get the attention of boys during the class by slamming a truncheon on the desk and we'd all jump out of our skins. You know, there was a real kind of... I found it very malevolent.

In defence of the school, I also sat next to a friend of mine, Duncan, who I still know as an adult. And for him, he just felt he fit right in and it was all water off a duck's back. So part of it must have been me. But I wondered about your experience of boarding school Because I wondered, when I was reading it, I was like, oh, this is someone who gets this from the inside.

Like, you know, the demerits being called lashes, for example, and you know, those kind of elements to it. Did you enjoy your time at school? And if you didn't, or there were bits that you didn't, was writing Sinban Island kind of cathartic? Or did it contain elements of like, you know, very, very late stage revenge against the system of school? Right. I just felt I mean it wasn't an area I'd ever even gone close

to doing before and I just thought oh that's that's a rich area and also I wanted I wanted to write this children's novel because it was based

on the idea of Simbin and that whole premise so it was I don't know actually it's an interesting question do they have this pent-up because I sort of got through it okay, you know.

I wasn't bullied. I did kind of observe what was going on, obviously, and did think it was, it was scary. It was scary. The smells, the food, the teachers being so eccentric. Yeah. And you look back now when you're old and you think, well, well, that's wrong. That shouldn't have been allowed to, you know,

all these things where you just go, that's just not right. But, yeah, that's what it was like. Were you a fairly happy kid? I think generally I was, yeah. Yeah, and I love playing football. I lost my leg age seven, but I got a prosthetic leg. I'm prosthetic. It sounds very posh.

It was a Mechle World War II leg, which is absolutely bloody useless. But I played football throughout my school days, and I used to love that. So that didn't affect me in any way. And I sort of, I got a book sent to me from the World War I Flying Ace, Douglas Barter. He sent, he heard about my accident, and he sent me two versions of his book. One was the adult version and one was the children's version with a letter going, I've heard that you've lost your leg.

And it is a bit of a nuisance. I think that wasn't what he said. You know, it was real stiff up the lip, World War II, P.O.W. stuff. And it was like, yeah, right, okay, it is a bit of a news, but he's right, you just get on with it. And that was a kind of inspiration. And then when I read the book, he's a real rebel because he lost both legs by basically showing off and doing all sorts of, you know, crazy air stunts just because he was so damn good. They wound up crash on his plane, losing both his legs. Then he wasn't allowed to fly until they needed Spitfire pilots for the Battle of Britain,

where they brought him back. And he wound leading the Battle of Britain. I don't think I knew that. Oh, yeah. He was a P-O-W, and he was just, he was such a rebel. It's a brilliant, brilliant film. Reach for the Sky is called, with Kenneth Moore plays Douglas Barney. And I think I'd got some of that rebel in a sort of quiet way at first.

And then later as I got older, I would only go to lessons I wanted to go to. The rest of the time, I would be in a cafe around the corner, having coffee and talking about Sartre and Herman Hess and all that. And it was a bit the same in uni. I went to uni and got bored very quickly because it was. I was doing psychology, but it was a lot of mass, and I didn't realize at the time, but I'm numerically dyslexic. And so I then thought, I've got to find something else. I like more than this, because I don't like this.

And there was an article in one of the newspapers, which talked about this guy who had written a script, he'd never written a script before, sent it up to ITV, and it was on TV tonight. It was called Paradise Island. And I thought, I went, I didn't really. it was so easy to get. Who knew?

That's that easy. So I thought, damn, I'm going to do that. And spoke to my friends in the pub. Rob Grant was there. We were going to the same university. And he said, yeah, I'll keep your hand with that. And that was kind of the start of the journey. This is, we're getting on to Rob here, and I

just want to finish us. We'd do a bit more of Simbin. That's fine. But also, just something you might find of interest if you're not already, if you haven't heard about this before, I didn't know that you had lost a leg. And it reminds me of, I think he was the head technician at a theatre that I would do stand-up gigs at. And there was a gentleman there who had a prosthetic leg, quite a, quite a metal kind of, there is, you know, some prosthesis

make an attempt to kind of duplicate skin and flesh. And this one did not. He wore a t-shirt that said, leg story, five pounds. So I just thought that might. It's entertain you because I've always... Absolutely. So I think of prosthetic legs, I think that's... What are the right, all you? You want to hear about that? Reclaiming of it, exactly.

At the risk of paying you five pounds, Doug. How did you lose your leg? Oh, I crossed the road. I was seven crossed the road very quickly. Got hit by a Coltruth. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So...

Oh, what a nightmare. I'm sorry. Did you, did that? I was in a car accident as a child. And it, again, it kind of... No one died, but we were all pretty badly smashed around. Do you think that that experience losing your leg and the accident more specifically? Did that incur any lasting what we would call today trauma?

I think if that happened to a kid today, they would be at least offered some sort of counselling and ability to cope with it. And I feel like that maybe didn't happen in your day. Absolutely did not happen in my day. No, it was really interesting. It was, I mean, there's a story. tell, which was, I was in hospital three weeks, and I lost most of it. I mean, I'm quite in small wisdom, and was treated, oh, you're very brave, but almost heroic.

I was a kind of like, I felt like a celebrity, a lot of attention, a lot of gifts, toys, you lose limbs, and you get presents, it's weird, you know, when you bloody don't cross the road in the province of the cold lorries. But anyway, so I went home, first day, my... My mum makes me a boiled egg, and then has to go and take my sisters to school. And she doesn't leave a teaspoon. And I look around, where's my teaspoon? And I can see where the customary drawer is.

I hop across, pick up a teaspoon. Then I think, no, this isn't right. I should not be treated like this. I've just lost my leg. I'm going to make a complaint. And we lived above two TV shops, and we had two flats above the TV shops. So I hopped up a flight of stairs, about 10 stairs, down across. corridor of about 30 feet and then down another flight of stairs so I could call to my dad

and tell him I couldn't get a teaspoon then we turned journey up the stairs down the corridor down the stairs back to the thumb so he came back gave me a teaspoon my mom returned from school later and she said your father's not very pleased with you and I went why what have I couldn't and she said any boy who can do all that hopping of corries and down stairs can certainly hop across to the cookery drawer and get himself a teaspoon and I thought oh wow Okay, I'm totally sussed. But I'd have been told about, I don't know what he was called then, don't molly coddling probably rather,

because I don't know tough love existed as a phrase back then. But that's what he'd been told. If he falls down, just ignore him, don't help him up, blah, blah. And in the long run, it will be better. And that was actually, I think, absolutely right for me. It's not right for everyone, but it was right for me. Yeah, golly.

Yes, I imagine that there is presumably some sort of therapeutic value to just being told, get on with it, mate, get your own teaspoons. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah. Or equally, you can do a whole big psychology thing and go, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, and when you get, you know, interested in girls later, that's going to cause issues because you're going to feel insecureing, blah, blah, blah, but I didn't say any of that, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

There is a, there is a kind of rebelliousness that ties together, I think, Sinbin Island and Red Dwarth, which has a sort of a kind of a mocking of the concept of institutions in a lot of the plots for Red Dwarf episodes there are you know I think of I mean a moment we'll end up talking about both things at once because I can't help the connections but one of the moments I think that had honestly one of the most profound effects one of one of the most profound effects on my sense of self was because I really identified with Lister because I was a kid who hated school and he was a dropout and I was like, yeah, I want to be a dropout.

He was a good guy dropout. It was a slob and it didn't matter that he was a slob because it didn't affect him. It didn't bother him. He didn't have low self-esteem. No, no. And one of the key scenes for me that I remember kind of revolving a lot around my head was the Inquisitor when Jack Doherty is playing the Inquisitor. And Lister's answer as he gets, you know, the, you know,

the premise for the uninitiated of that episode in the way that Reddorf was frequently here is a sort of a philosophical or moral concept played out in a bottle episode. It's basically a flat share

but with all of these sci-fi kind of conceptual stuff. And the idea of being judged by someone, by yourself, the Inquisitor lists his mask and he is Dave Lister talking to him. The way in which Craig Charles would deliver your lines, you know, you know what you could have become, Dave, you could have become so much

more. And his answer is, so, I think that kind of rebellious streak really programmed something in me, and I'm pleased, Doug, to have never had a salaried position. But, yeah, is that right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, never had a job, yeah. Oh, right. Right. I've nearly never had a job. Yeah, so that's interesting. Because it's really hard not having a job, isn't it? Just getting through a lot. Yes.

Yeah, yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm proud of it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think living by your wits to overly romanticise and sentimental. I basically was a street performer for 10 years

in Cotton Gardner around and then became a comic and you feel like I've got away with it here. I've beaten the system. I feel like I could look my own inquisitor in the eye and go... Yeah, yeah, and go... Yeah. So talk to me about that rebellious streak.

Because it's in Sinbin Island as well. Obviously, these are kids rebelling against a harsh institution, rebelling against the circumstances that have put them there. And something that crops up a lot in Red Dwarf is a system that, you know, the team meet on a planet or encounter something which has a system. Yeah. Do you, do you, are you aware of that? Is that a fair kind of comment on the links between the two, do you think?

Well, as I've got older, I've wondered, the thing is, I'm a really good company man working, say, for Red Wolf. So no one will work harder than me. No one will be more dedicated. So, and there is a system there, because you're working with a whole team of whatever it is, 60, and I'm directing as well, the people. So there's no rebellion there, except maybe it's because I'm in control of the whole thing, so I'm not rebellions again anything. But I started to rebel definitely at school.

I think I was kind of semi-interested in lessons, but no big deal. And I got enough GCSEs to think, oh, actually, I'm not stupid. So that's fine. I was sort of in the upper excellence. And then it was like, well, I proved I'm not stupid. so I don't really need to do anything else in terms of intelligence. I can just do kind of what I want.

As I became increasingly more rebellious in the sixth form where I would just drop him if history, I kind of enjoyed history. English, the subjects we were studying didn't interest me that much. Anyway, somehow I fluked it into university

and where it was the same thing there. And then it was when I got kicked out after two years, along with, I have to say, a third of our year. Okay. And the professor saw me, who was kicking me out, and he said, you're clearly not interested in psychology. What are you good at? What do you love?

And at that point, Rob and I had written a sitcom pilot to the BBC, had been rejected, but they said we wrote mildly amusing dialogue. And so I thought, well, I'm not good at anything, but I can't write mildly amusing dialogue. And I thought, and I do love write my marbling music dialogue. And that's absolutely, I kind of knew that anyway. Yeah, that's why I'm going to. I am going to be a sitcom writer. I would like Clement, Lefrenay and, you know, do that.

And because of that, then it was going home, telling my parents. My parents went, okay, well, in that case, you need to get yourself some kind of a job. And so you can support your comedy. writing uh we we don't really yeah uh give you much of a chance but yeah you go off do that uh and then that's what uh i did um and then it was working for a few years uh and writing and writing radio scripts and then eventually getting in and and working working all way up but that sort of that was a kind of rebellion, you know, not having a conventional job,

dropping out a university. I mean, when I was kicked out, I resat it supposedly at Manchester Polly, but I would never go in. Only for my parents. I would tell my parents I was going to Manchester Polly. I would go to the Central Library in Manchester, and they had a huge, glorious media floor

of screenplays and all sorts, and I would just spend all day reading that. okay and that was where because I've got to educate myself yeah and how am I going to get better because if at the moment it's just mildly amusing so how do I get better and then in the afternoon we had an art cinema in Auburn in Hume I would go off and I would watch comedy films I was obsessed with Woody Allen watching things like play against him and love and death and sleeper 23 times 24 or 5 times trying to work out what he was doing and why he was doing and why he

made me laugh. And which of those like reading screenplays? I remember for, I appeared on someone else's podcast which was a Red Dwar fan podcast about your favorite episodes. And in preparation for that,

I looked up one of the scripts online for one of the episodes. I think it was marooned, which I has got a special place in my heart and a lot of people's hearts as being like a really perfect example of just bottle up the characters, let's get through something together emotionally.

It's a superb episode. And I remember, I couldn't believe how joke-dense the script was. I'm not particularly a script writer. I write my own kind of joke. So I was looking at it going, a script normally this joke dense. And they aren't, really. So to see the, I remember being really taken aback by that. So I'm not quite sure what the question was, but you're talking about reading screenplays.

Were there particular examples from any of those people you've done? mentioned or others that you at the time kind of were really taken aback by did you did you read a screenplay or a script for something and you remember being particularly like oh this is how you do it neil simon neil simon read up nearly all his um you know the odd couple prisoner second avenue and it was like oh wow okay wow okay you've got to be this good to be good this is yeah and it was like it wasn't jokes it was curving the language it's how it was said it was the relationship between the characters it was i and so that just opened up the whole world um yeah there's there's something about oh so i was so having watched bred dwarf a lot as a kid and i remember

like i had it on vhs i remember the very first episode me and my little brother stumbled upon when we were kind of late teenagers right and we saw it go out it was like we were watching something else and then it came on BBC 2 and we saw the very beginning, you know, that incredible opening kind of pull away a shot. What's this? And I've just got such a fond memory of the pair of us rolling around clutching our sides. Like absolute sold on this. The years I watched it, really, really enjoyed it, rewatched lots of episodes. I then kind of, you know, grew up and had other things to do and left the house. You know what I mean? I became less kind of, you know, kind of fixated, I would say. And then just knowing that I was going to be interviewing you, I have just

recently last night and this morning, watched the promised land. And I honestly, it genuinely made me cry, partly with laughter, partly with just nostalgia, because it reminded me how much I love these characters. Right. When they read, when they convince, you know, the backup holly to, you know, go to the most recent backup file and you get this lovely feeling of, oh, I know what's going to happen. And I know exactly what's going to be the first thing he says. It was genuinely like I really, I teared up and I felt like, I don't think I'd realized Holly was so important to me as this kind of benevolent, daft, kind of father figure, I suppose, you know. Right. And, but something that really occurred to me watching it, which I certainly remember from watching earlier episodes as well, is that it is written in sort of what I think in a highfalutian crown way as kind of latsy, like games.

Each scene, I feel like this scene has a game to it. where, you know, Crichton is going, you know, trying to go in and break the news to the other cats that Lister isn't really their God. Right. And the game of that scene, it's almost like part of the delight of watching it is going, oh, that's the game of this scene, that we're going to do this a few times. Or the moment, glorious moment, when the cat goes in to disavow them all and you see him, then prove the miracles. And Danny Jules' face and you could just see it. pulling across his face and he gets converted. It's just beautiful.

When you've written episodes in the beginning and more recently, is there a sense for you that you're writing games? Or are you right? Because like I said, I'm not a scriptwriter, but I feel like you might go, that's the game of this scene and now I'm on it. The equivalent moment in stand-up is I think of it like when the planets align. You go, this thing is like this,

plon, all of these examples fall out of it. So I suppose I'm sort of asking about, the patterns in your writing whether you're like, I know that game will work or I know these characters will spark the right way. It's one of the advantages of running the show

and directing the show. So, for example, that scene and it's one of my favourites too with Danny where he's converted wasn't in the original script. I think it was just two of them. And then it was like, I think Rich, who was

a producer when Danny should have a scene here the cat's got to have an attitude to this and I went yeah you're right so what would it be and then wrote that scene and then bush it goes in and it feels like it's always been there and so and it's sort of sometimes and I think stand-ups a bit the same that once you've done something once or you've you've rehearsed it you can then add to it and tweak it and change it and make it better and stronger but for most script writers when it's just you're on, I mean, back in the day

script writers would send the script in and then watch it on TV. They wouldn't be allowed into rehearsals, blah, blah, blah. And we insisted we've got to come to rehearsals. And it was like, really? Do you? Why? Because what they were worried about was

we might try and change lines and you the writers. We go, no, no, you can't change that way, no, that's, ugh. And of course, it wasn't that at all. We wanted to be there because we want to see if what's working what's not working and if it ain't working we'll change it and add to it

or just hanging around the actors will give us ideas because because it will just it will improve and that's that so it is a kind of

work in progress in terms of games it's sort of like in that particular situation is what how we would the cat react in this situation? You want something where it's a surprise. And his reaction, of course, is, it's clear.

The listener isn't God, but with the cat being the cat, okay, he will somehow get converted. So if we could do that effectively, that would be funny. The way that the... I've got so much to ask. In terms of the characters and the interplay between the characters, do you or have you over the many, many years you've been writing the shows? Because it's a very unusual position, I think, that you're in, that you kind of, you wrote lots, you found the thing that just became wildly successful, and you pursued it and ran with it and explored all of these different angles, all of these different worlds, all of these different kind of interactions with the characters. I was wondering whether you felt, what's the phrase?

whether you kind of, whether you feel like you happened upon an archetype, you know, the, or a series of archetypes that work well, did you unearth something that was always there, or did you create a thing yourself that became a new thing? Does that make any sense at all as a question? It totally makes sense. The head of radio comedy at the time was a guy called Bobby Jay, and we'd written this sitcom called Rinkles,

which was just mad for a stand-up guy actor comedian called Tom Menard. And it was just us trying to fulfill this obligation to, but it wasn't us. And he thought, there's talent here, but they don't quite know what they're doing. So he said, boys, I want to take you out for lunch to meet Galton and Simpson. So it's like, oh, wow, okay. So we went for lunch with Galton Simpson. and Golden Simpson explained to us because I think I asked the question

where did the idea come from and they said we'd written Hancock and we were looking for something else and we weren't sure quite what it was so we started writing two guys walking down the street and we didn't know what relationship it was we didn't know whether he had brothers

whether father and son but it started off I think they were friends and then they became and we didn't rewrite they didn't rewrite it and they just kept writing the same script I've talked talk talk and then they got to father and son and they decided that they were

scrap collectors and then they went right this is the relationship we've got this so Rob and I remembered that and we were we decided what we were going to write we went to a cottage in Wales and we thought we used that Gulton and Simpson

technique we will have two characters not walking down the street walking down a corridor of a spaceship, who are they going to be? Well, one should be a kind of, because we knew he was going to be the last human in the world in the end. So we wanted him to be the lowest thing in the ship, whatever it was. And so the lowest thing in the ship, he'll be a slob, he'll be a this, he will be a rebel, he'll be, blah, blah, blah.

And then who, so that's a kind of archetype, who will the other guy be? Well, he's going to be an opposite. He's going to be a kind of jobsworth architecture. type. Okay, that's what we need. We've got those two characters. Right, go. And we started to write it using those two. So they're definitely archetypes. And do you remember the first funny thing that you have them say to each other? Do you remember the first joke that felt like, and I realize this is a long time ago now, I love asking comedians like what's the, what's the first time they felt like themselves on stage? But do you remember their first interaction that made you

feel, that made them feel like Rimmer and Lister? It was something about the chicken soup and the nozzle and he gave him the wrong ungunky pencil thing and it was that and he went does this look like a 12b

does it look anything like a 12b and he had a 12c and oh it is a 12b and we thought oh okay God that's petty don't they are so so unimportant task that they're doing And we thought, oh, there's something here. And then his rebellion, the fact he was eating and meat pie and just not being, yeah,

and saying that the service droids were more important than Rimmer. And of course, which irritated Rimmer. So it wasn't so much, it was sort of like the chemistries here. We did rewrite that scene over and over, even down into rehearsals. The version that goes out now, I think, is funnier than the original version by a long way. but that was because we knew the characters by then. Just in terms of laugh lines, there were more laugh lines, I think, in the end. So this is Doug, and his first book for children, his first children's novel, Sin Bin Island, is out now.

I love it, as you can hear from this episode, and I really highly recommend it. My kids are seven now, since I spoke to Doug, seven and nine. And if you have kids, I think probably, I'm probably, up to 12 is probably the age range between sort of 9 to 12. But a 7-year-old absolutely loved it to bits. Future Girl was in pieces. So get hold of a copy of that. Really,

a really real genuine recommendation. It's just, it's like a ripping yarn. It's full of surprises. I don't want to tell you what the surprises are. It's not time loop. Or any time anyone goes, oh, I won't tell you the genre. It's time loop.

But it's not time loop. But I also can't tell you where it goes genre-wise. So find out more about it. And I wrote a review on Amazon, you can see while you're writing your review on Amazon as well. You can also keep up to date with Doug, of course, across his socials, which are at Doug R.D. Naylor. You can find out how to see me live at Stuart Goldsmith.com slash comedy. And in red on my notes here from Evil Producer Callum, it says there are no upcoming dates on the website. So I'll probably get around to fixing that.

I normally save the website for previews, work in progress, tour shows, stuff like that. I think you can probably, if you want to come see me in a gig, you can find me on Chortle or follow my Instagram currently at Stuart Goldsmith Comedy, but more on that later. And a last reminder, I need your help please for some episode 500 shenanigans. We are just five episodes away from the big...

Oh, what is it? It's not C, is it? What is it in Roman numerals? It's half an M. I don't know what a 500 is. You'll know. L or D? One of them. Is it D? Is it like a Demi meal? I think it's D. But you can share your favorite moments, your guests you want to see, other exciting things, what have you, by taking the survey.

Go to Stuartgoldsmith.com slash survey. Hundreds of you have already done that, and it is an absolute delight. It's the sort of thing I'll save and print out, like a little old man. Who was it? Who was it? Who was it? This is like a com-com quiz question.

Who was it that used to record the show onto a DVD, not a DVD, but record it onto a, what are they even called? A CD. Record onto a CD. And then they'd burn each episode to a CD so they could play it in the car. Who was that? Was it a guest? Was it, I feel like it was someone in comedy academia. Brilliant.

Well, you can do that, but that's the sort of thing I'm going to do with this, because the results of the survey are already wonderful, and you can make them more wonderfuler by joining in. Coming up in the second half, we're going to delve even deeper in... Do you know what? I'll save this. Mentally, I'm going to log this for the post-amble, which is to do with feedback about how much I talk.

So that's what the post-amble is. Coming up in the second half, we are going to delve even deeper into Red Dwarf, and we're going to discuss Doug's creative partnership with Rob Grant, the other half of Grant Naylor, writers of a lot of Red Dwarf and Infinity welcomes careful drivers, which is the book. And I can't remember whether I read that book before or after Red Dwarf. It must have been before.

That doesn't make sense in the timeline. I should have asked him about this. But I remember the first words of that novel are, when Lister got drunk, he got drunk. And I'm sure when I read that, I didn't have the same Lister in my head as is on the telly. So who knows. But we're going to find out about his relationship with Rob Grant, his creative partnership. We're going to find out about the new Red Dwarf screenplay that Doug has written.

We'll talk about how the show achieved massive success but retained an outsider status, like the best of us. And we're going to talk about his golden rule of building out the sci-fi concept first before you then find the funny. And of course, we'll find out whether the bastard's happy. Let's get back to Doug Naylor. What different kind of attitudes or skill set or preferences did you and Rob bring to the writing partnership? All I know about writing partnerships is that traditionally one of you paces around and one of you types the thing down. It's happened with that for you. I was the pacer and Rob was the typer.

And one other, I'm pleased to have spotted that. It's got to be you can't have two typers. You can't have two paces. No, no, he didn't learn. And also, he always felt, you know, he was master of grammar. So I'm punching age. You love that. With comma, you know.

And also, probably is a much better typist than me. I mean, down to the fact that when I eventually wrote a first novel, a last human by myself, I didn't know how to put page numbers on the book. One of my favorite facts, one of my favorite facts about, you know, the Jack Reacher novels that lead child rights. Yeah, yeah. I heard him say on a podcast that he's, never understood how the word processing works. So every Jack Reacher novel is written by getting

the previous file, deleting all of the words, and then writing it fresh in the existing file because he doesn't know how to do the page numbers. Oh, nice. Well, there you go. Incredible. Yeah, that is incredible, yeah. Highfaluting company. So, so, but, so with your, with your relationship with Rob, you, you were starting, I cut you off previously a little while ago, you were talking about when you first met him. Yes. What was your first kind of experience of a sort of sparky partnership, like a creative partnership

with Rob? A creative partnership. Or the potential for a creative partnership? I mean, we were good friends and we would make jokes, you know,

I mean, I think it was the kind of the people we hung around with were witty and, you know, we certainly used to make

one another laugh. And then I heard that Rob was going to be editor of the school magazine and I said, hey, can I help you because I really like

writing, you know, blah, blah, blah. And so we became editor and sub-editor, whatever that was, which basically meant we just put together, we both wrote stuff and put it in the magazine and collated other stuff. So I guess that was the

star. And we both liked writing kind of compositions and we were both pretty good at it. But it never occurred. I mean, it's quite a jump from that to writing scripts, I guess, but it was just like there's the thing I talk about, which is

the confidence of ignorance, where but you don't know any better, you think you can do it. And we were so confident we could do it. It never occurred to us, we couldn't do it. So we did it. So when you started writing Red Dwarf together, for those first couple of seasons while the show of series, we say in the UK, keeps the seasons now.

But for those first couple of series, when the show was kind of working out what it was and we discovered Crichton and he became kind of a valuable member, all of those kind of things. When you were writing episodes like marooned, where you just kind of go, or the, I particularly remember the justice episode. I remember watching it. It was quite a younger person and thinking, oh, that is clever. They really are exploring a sci-fi concept whilst doing a sitcom.

You know, they're looking at the question of justice. And you are really exploring and pulling apart an idea, plus being really funny and having it all being really character-driven. and they were real kind of gems. What was the creative partnership like at that time? Do you look back at particular jokes and think that was very me or that was very Rob? Do you remember who's was whose line? Or do they kind of hit your radar in such a way? Well, we're sort of mashed together, you know.

It's a bit like that when you're trying to think of wall liners, if one person comes up with a one liner, then the other person will go, oh, right, we're writing one liners. Okay, how about this as an alternative? And so you just get in the mood because you get the technique. And it was the same with science fiction ideas. Rob, I think, would say that he was the science fiction expert in the early days. And that's because he'd watched absolutely every episode of Star Trek. But then, and to be fair, I, and to be fair,

I had watched a lot of them too but then sometimes it would freeze him in terms of science fiction, freezing and thinking of science fiction ideas because you go, oh no, that's a bit like this oh that's a bit like that. And I didn't have that hang up

and so a lot of the science fiction ideas in those early series came from me and also had a big book called the, I think it was the encyclopedia of science fiction which did a lot of tropes and whatever and I'd go hey why don't we do one on blah blah you know whatever and then

we come up with the idea so so I can we did both tests to yeah and and so I'm really interested by that kind of the beginnings of the thought process you'd go this is a sci-fi idea let's see if we can do an episode on that and then what's the next part of that it's like okay who would fit with that who'd be who'd be interested by the idea like Are you building it from the kind of, you've got the idea and then you build it from the character up or from the plotter? Well, I think our rule was to try and build it from the science fiction engine point of view. So it was interesting, you're talking about marooned earlier because we were about like,

there's no science fiction idea in this. This is just a day crash and this is like a sitcom. Yeah. We haven't got that special ingredient. Now, when we originally got the thing commissioned, we were told we mustn't have science fiction in it because people didn't like science fiction and didn't want it and so don't put it in it and we went absolutely that's exactly what we were thinking we lied we weren't have any science fiction in it as at all this is the classic commissioning part of like the writers go

this is my sitcom it's about judges and they go brilliant can it be about pilots yeah yes and so the solution is just say sure and then write what you were going to write absolutely yeah that's what they said. So we were told by our agents you write the pilot for them and then you go, and then you write the series for yourself, but even in the pilot you go, hang on, you've got this cat, pet turning into a whole

body of people, that's sort of science fiction. You've got a hologram, you've got a computer game, anyway. So the second show we wrote, I think, was the exam where there wasn't as much science fiction in it, and we found it tough. And then we went, oh,

we want right okay no one's looking we'll write science fiction so then we really felt okay we've hit this when we wrote future echoes and you remember that way yeah you're absolutely yeah and what was weird about that was there were no clear laugh lines it had to be sort of performed and the audience absolutely got onto it but it was a weird one to sell but anyway we did it and then from that point it was always what's the science fiction idea what's the science fiction engine um okay there are two rimmers for whatever reason and they won't get on okay fine that's um and so that was usually oh we'll land on a world that's where everything's backwards polymorph will have some genetic engineered um entity that does something oh it takes it eats emotions and what's the effect

effect of that. And that came from book I Rehn. John Cleese did with Skinner, I think he was called a psychologist where they were talking about how you need the darker emotions sometimes to balance and everything. And so

Cleese was talking about his suppressed anger and the damage that can do if you don't have normal anger. So you don't always stand up for yourself and blah blah blah you And I thought, oh, that's genius.

I love that as a concept. What would happen if, you know, one of the characters lost all their anger? What would happen if one of the characters lost all their vanity? You have complete character change. And it always seems effective when you have, when the audience know the character and then they play a different version of that character. It almost seems to work. The longevity of the show.

is extraordinary, because I think, like, it must have become, did it become harder and harder to give them things to do that explored a sci-fi concept? Because you just, you're making so many episodes, did it get harder to explore those concepts without taking them so far out of their core reality that it, it kind of, you know, what we want to see is, we want, I tell you what is it? I think from the point of view of a fan, and you might not have written for you, you might have written for yourself for the fans and there's kind of a relationship between them. From the point of view of a fan, like there are certain things I want to see. Yeah. And then there are certain situations you put them in and you go, oh, is this less like, you know,

marooned, it's sort of it feels maybe less sci-fi, but not even, like it really plays up the relationship between the characters. So in promised land, when Rimmer has turned, he's in low definition mode. He's black and white and he becomes very, he sort of has a very French existential crisis. Conversation that Lister has with him about the reflection of the moonlight, again, extraordinarily poetic. I'm like, that is absolutely prime red dwarf of these two

characters. We know that Lister, Rimmer is awful. We know that Lister likes him, or as cat says, I don't like him, but I like not liking him. You know, those are such kind of like we've all got people in our lives like that. And we see those relationships. There are certain things we want to happen.

But I'm just sort of thinking about the kind of Herculean task of going, I need to put these characters into another situation that doesn't conflict with all of the reality. Like you've built so much world. Do you know what I mean? Like there's multiple dimensions and multiple versions and time travel and time lists and everything else. Did that become hard to retain the core of the characters in the face of all of that ever-expanding world building? no i think there was a stage where i wondered if it would be interesting to explore a slightly different scenario so that was series eight uh which is probably as a mistake uh we went too far away from

our core idea was that the series where they they rebuild the ships and the crew yeah that's right yeah uh and series seven was the first one Robert left and some other writers came in and that I felt some of those shows were good but it was a bit pity and then we we were recommissioned years later by UK TV and their budget was my new and I had to write a show that was basically anything that was free needed to be in it so hence Coronetion Street set was any blah blah blah but it wasn't what I wanted to do I was trying to get back to to red wolf red wolf so we started again with 10 and i have to say the ideas have always been quite easy to come up with i've never so when we were back to basics

and promised land was another example of that is oh we haven't done this and in fact i was right i was two thirds though writing an idea was absolutely loving uh about two listeners uh list that goes back in time to rescue his younger self from Slicis and free him in order to give him the life he was never able to have. And the two ministers go on the run together as a sort of father and, you know, disgruntled son relationship. So I was writing that because the UK TV said they were going to commission another 90-minute movie two-thirds away through they'd change the minds without reading a word of it

and said we're no longer commissioned. comedy because they're not successful largely, apart from Red Wolf, which is very successful. So it's a bit catch-22. Yeah, so comedy isn't working apart from you, but we're cancelling all comedy and you didn't survive. Yeah, it's because the only thing that's

successful is you. God. And you were already two-thirds of the way through a script. Was that all on spec? Had they paid you for the script? Oh, no, yeah, they're commission. They told me to start around. That's amazing. They said, well, we'll pay you off for your work you've done. You go, oh. When was that?

How long ago was that? That was the end of last year. Okay. So is there, I mean, a million dollar question, is that like that script exists, you've got the idea. Yeah. Are there any other kind of irons in the fire in terms of who might produce it for you?

Well, we were investigating that now. Okay, okay. I think probably, and I'll need to finish it. And but because of Simba, I just haven't had a minute to finish it. Yeah. For finish it. And also, it's not the, the way I wanted to make it was I wanted to have a fully CG young Lister who looked identical to Craig Charles.

And I had a next guy working on it and he created one. And it was like, oh my God, is that CG? It looks. Jesus, that's amazing. Sounds cheap. Yeah. Well, he said we could do it. He said we could.

budget that we'd been told and there were going to be techniques so at some point it was probably going to have some form of plastic surgery or disguise but at least you could have that oh my god that's him three that's just right out of the first ever episode

like seeing Luke Skywalker in the Melancholian sort of moment of like oh my god that kind of jaw dropping so yeah and then they would have had a really yeah I think it would have been a really good relationship it. So worse, worse, worst case scenario. Well, not worse, worse, worse. I'm definitely going to do it

as I've definitely finished the screenplay and I'll desperately try and get it made as a TV movie and if not I'll turn it into an awful. The scene with Lister and remember that moonlight scene, the moon reflecting the light

and it's so beautiful. It made me think, like I was really what's the word? I was just so kind of amazed and impressed that so many years and so many seasons on their relationship is still there are still things to find there are still revelations like that there are still emotional stuff going on like there have been so we've seen them in so many different situations and not just those two characters but mostly them yeah um the fact that there are still jokes coming out of it you know

cry to him you know just robert lewellyn's face when he's uh trying not to lie about whether or not he likes Rimmer, those kind of things. I mean, just the profusion of stuff that there is still to find. I wanted to ask, do you, presumably you still love the characters, have you ever felt kind of careworn? Have they ever felt a bit careworn to you? No, no, no, no, no, no, never, never, no. Yeah, it is, it's, no, I suppose I would have had to stop.

I just absolutely love them. And it's like visiting old friends and putting on comfy, slifers or whatever. And I slip in, oh, what haven't we done? Oh, we haven't done this? Oh, right, yeah, I'll do that then. And then you just get the buzz. It is like being with old friends.

Have you written much that you, like in terms of your process, do you write much that then doesn't make the edit? Are they kind of lost, if you like? Are they kind of lost, Rimmer and Lister scenes? Where you're kind of like, oh, that's really good, but it doesn't fit in this one. I don't know, crowbar it into that one.

So there is material out there which never got made. Yes. So often, sometimes when I get stuck, I'll just, I'll have an idea like Lister's doing something stupid and Rimmer comes in and the ABA or whatever. And I'll just write it because it's easy, especially when you're writing on your own, to write something, then write nothing.

And you don't know where that can lead to. So I'll have a file of just scenes. And then I might need, oh, I need listeners doing something at the very top of the show, what can he be? Oh, okay, I can pull that out and put it in there. Or a scene or an idea that's not developed, but here's half a scene. So lots of that of gluing things together and trying to make them look in visit. So, for example, the moonlight scene was a scene I just wrote, didn't know where it was going.

and I had a file called funny Red Wolf scenes or something and my son who was the producer went through that, just reading, yeah, then he got to the moonlight scene and he went, how come the moonlight scene's not in this? They went, oh, why do you like that? He said, are you mad? You've got to have it in.

I say, it's not that funny. It doesn't matter it's not that funny. No, it's barely got you idiot. You've got to go in. Oh, I was it? Yeah, okay, right, boom. Okay, yeah. It's the placing of it.

It's not the funniest scene. It's so meaningful in terms of the story. It's the perfect place for it. Yeah, so it shows what an idiot. It wasn't in the point. It was just in my file of, yeah, Red Wolf scenes. So you have some go-to stuff. Are there particular, are they, are they, what's the question?

Do they all have the same weight to you? Does a potential, does an unused cat and rimmer scene have the same weight to you as a Lister and Crichton scene? Yeah. I mean, I measure it by how funny it is generally. Is it funny? Where are the laughs? Where will it, blah, blah, blah. Is it an unusual idea? Is there a science fiction engine in there or is it a character scene? Yeah. And some things you just go, that's funny, but that takes us so far off anything. There's no place for it. Sure. I asked in the Facebook group of this podcast, I had a lot of questions from listeners. I'm just quickly going to scan down. Oh, this is an interesting question. This is from Dan Cooper. You and Rob were enormously influential, the key to spitting images success, and you likely created a modern myth with the Ringo joke. I have to confess, I don't remember what that joke is. No, it's not a joke. In fact, I heard the Ringo joke. joke is

basically about Ringo not being a good drummer. That wasn't our joke. In fact, I think the joke is Ringo wasn't even the best drummer in the Beatles. I think...

Gotcha. And it was supposed to be John Lennon. In fact, it wasn't John Lennon. And I heard only last week. In fact, it was Jeffrey Perkins

who now died. Okay. Rimmer, as far as, Ringo, as far as I'm concerned, is and was, and always has been. a brilliant drummer. Well, thanks Dan Cooper for your stupid question,

but that wasn't the end of the question. The end of the question was, and obviously Red Dwarf, is it ever, and I think this is a really interesting question, is it ever upsetting to you that you don't get as much attention in the history of 80s and 90s comedy? Which I think you do get a lot of attention,

but I think between Red Dwarf and Spitting Image, those are some enormously influential shows. But do you get, when people think of 80s and 90s comedy, I guess they think, you know, if you think of like what were the most influential things, it would be maybe comic strip, what whatever Python did in those kind of, do you mean? Like, I... Right.

Yeah. So, so do you, how do you feel about that? Do you feel that you get the attention you deserve? Okay. So I think it's quite interesting that I'll do the show a off a bit first. We sold more VHS. and DVDs than any other

comedy show apart from Fools and Horses and we would have been Fools and Horses if VHS and DVDs didn't sort of evaporate with all the streamers so we would have bright so there's that we sold almost 2 million novels

the highest rated show ever with the biggest audience ever on BBC 2 the highest rated show ever on the only other channel we've ever been on in the UK UK TV

so having said that we've never been nominated for BAFTA yeah although we've won an Emmy and blah blah blah so it's a weird thing

we have always been the rebels we have never been so for example we were commissioned by BBC Manchester, not BBC London. BBC London never had any photographs of the cast up for the light entertainment parties.

It was almost like we didn't exist, although we were top of the charts. Yeah, right. And that fed, fed something, and I think it's why we're still going now. Yes, okay. Because it was just like,

we're going to keep going and going. And every time we keep going is just, you know, we're still here, guys. Do you, and what, what do you think is behind that? Is it to do with the Manchester roots? Is it to do with, I think a lot of people in comedy, I mean, not people necessarily as successful as yourself, a lot of the comics I speak to consider themselves the invisible person of comedy.

And that feeling never goes away because everyone's contemporaries are just doing stratospheric things around us. Yeah. Do you have a theory on why that is? and whether you would ever be able to put that feeling to bed? I don't think it's a bad feeling. I don't think it's a bad chip to have. So a useful chip.

Again, it's not a chip that hurts me. It's just, well, that's kind of amusing. I think it's largely because it was BBC Manchester, but then it became so difficult to shoot in BBC Manchester, we started to shoot in Shepperton studios. because it was just closer because most people lived in the cast lived in London. And so then we became disenfranchised from kind of from everyone. We were just our own thing.

And no one gave us notes. We just made the show, delivered the show. He went on CV, got fantastic ratings. And then, yeah, you got another one. And on we went. It's so funny that, isn't it? The idea of like we weren't given notes. We did our thing.

And so you created this. kind of incredibly successful, kind of O-Tor version of a show. It's like the exact opposite of something being workshopped to death or focus group to death. So a couple of things, just to wrap up, a couple of other audience questions. Carlya Decker says, have there been points throughout Red Dwarf where you wrote things for the actors rather than the characters? Oh, no. There would be things you would go, hey, Danny can ride a,

unicycle. Can he? Oh, right. Okay. Right. In that case, we'll get the cat riding a unicycle and he can come in and do whatever and then blah, blah, blah, and go out. So there would be things like that. Danny can you? Okay, we'll get the cat juggling and he can be juggling whatever. But never. So the thing is, the actors are quite close to the red dwarf characters and it's one of the reasons why we cast them. So it kind of all melds into one. So we're We're always writing for the characters, but we're not writing to the characters like we'll get one of the characters to do something that one of the actors couldn't do because there's no point. That's a melding, really. Gotcha. Okay. Ian Page asks, what are your favourite recent sci-fi films? Oh, gold. Blimey.

I'm enjoying Alien Earth at the moment. Yeah, me too. that's really, it feels like they've actually done something really interesting with the concept. Oh, and I did laugh when I read somewhere and he's going, oh, they've just ripped off the Red Dwarf set.

The correct guy, excuse me. We read that set on they didn't with. Jake Graham Godfrey says, if I remember right, you and Rob had a rule that there would be no aliens only things ever either created by or descended from humans. Is that right? Is that right?

That makes perfect sense. I don't think I noticed that. I think it was such a fabric of the show. It's either everything is created on earth or by humans in space. So genetically engineered mutants were created by no aliens. And the rule was basically we wanted to avoid landing on alien planet of the week, having the adventure with the Quirgles or whatever, moving on. felt it would force us to write character comedy

if it was really, you know, lonely out there. Right. Yeah, blah, blah, blah. That's it. Well, that's the melancholy that I wanted to just, we'll wrap up. But I mentioned that melancholy. It's lonely out there. He's the last man in the world.

Yeah. And so that's got to be a huge part of the success of the show that it isn't simply upbeat, funny, hugging and laughing kind of sitcom. It's about failure. The last man in the world, the last man in the earth with no possibility of ever making it home. And he's kind of a failure and Rimmer's a failure and Crichton's a dreadful robot and the cat's, you know, flawed. Everyone is so flawed.

All of that stuff grounds it in such humanity, clearly not an accident. Is it reflective of a worldview of your own or is it simply that you thought it would make the most fascinating story? I think there's two things. one is it was originally conceived in Thatcherite Britain where there were huge shopping miles of kids with nothing to do who couldn't afford to do anything just hanging around and that really left a mark on me which was you can see all the shop but you can't buy anything because you've got no money

because you haven't got a job and how lowly that was I was aware of that And then also influenced by a movie called Silent Running, which was a single astronaut on a spaceship, haunted. So there was a real sort of, I don't know what that, yeah, it just feels right. It feels right to have that dramatic base, I guess. I'm going to finish up with, there's a question I always ask everyone,

which I'll ask you in a second, but I have two questions from my son regarding Sinbin Island, which is I'm on now. We've just got halfway through, we've just got to the bit where we realize, and now part two and we're like, okay, here goes. He says, when you make Sin Bin Island

2, can you send your first copy to us? I promised him, I'd ask. Yeah, absolutely, we'll send you a about... Thank you very much. The very mercenary of him. This one, I'm just asking, because I told him, I'd ask, can you make Caviar Singleton have a metal arm? And that

It's a very, I've no idea where that came from, very curious question in terms of what I found out about your prosthetic leg. Right. Well, it's not impossible. It's not impossible. I wonder where that's coming from. I have no idea where that came from. And actually, as I read it, I went, oh, God, I hope this doesn't seem insensitive.

There's no relation to it, though. Oh, no. No, okay. I think he's probably, he may have pinched that from Adventure Time, which I don't know if you've seen Adventure Time, which is an enormous source. sweeping fantasy epic about a boy and his best friend who's a shape-changing dog and highly recommend

a bit of adventures. Oh, okay. But the last two questions, I ask this of everyone. You are very successful. Why aren't you even more successful? Because I don't work hard enough. That comes up a lot. Do you think, is that really true?

Oh, I think so, yeah. I think so. If I've worked, I mean, you look at some of these incredible novelists, Stephen King writes 2,000 words every day, seven days a week. Good God I can believe that. Yeah. So if you work that hard and obviously it makes him happy then you're going to be more successful.

You know, he's the, yeah. So that's, that's, so yeah, it's not bad luck, it's not been in the wrong place at the right time or blah, blah, blah. It's largely because there are other things I want to do in life. So I really work as hard as I work. Last question, Doug. Are you happy?

Oh, I am. Yes. Yes. I've been a bit stressed recently with having to film myself and do all the social media stuff to publicize the book. Of course. Yeah. I am not comfortable doing this. Oh, look, here's a good review.

I've got to retweet this and blah, blah, blah. I'm much happy. Just leave me alone. Let me write. blah, blah, blah, blah. I totally get. We've got to do that because it's hard because there's no there's no sort of advantage to having written and sold a lot of books in the past because apparently that doesn't count because it was Red Wolf's Science Fiction. So I'm kind of starting from scratch in a weird way. God, really? As far as some of the bookshops are concerned. Yeah. So we've got to

build up this momentum. So it's glorious to hear that, you know, your children are enjoying it and every fresh thing. Because the feedback has been absolutely astonishing so far. I think it's grossly it remains that way, from all sorts of, you know, from very young to very old. You had a lot of buy-in from me from the off. And by the time I got to the joke about was it a snake bite or was it two wasps working as a team?

I've got, right, here we can. Thank you so much, Doug. Thank you for your time. Really enjoyed it. Thank you. Really enjoyed it with. So that was Doug. Thank you so much to him for coming on.

Thank you to Evil Producer Callum and Susie Lewis, who did the logging, and Rob Smouton, who did the music. But get yourself a hold of Sinbin Island. If you have kids, even if you don't, if you're a fan of Red Dwarf, his sense of humour is really permeating throughout that. But it is such a fun kids' novel. Sinbin Island, it's called. So grab that somewhere and keep up to date with Doug

across all of the social at Doug R.D. Naylor. It would be a lot for you to keep up with him across all the socials. You should probably pick the one you most use. We could amble about that as well. That's in a funny place. Okay, socials and talking. So that's that. If you enjoyed this episode, you can get 15 minutes of exclusive extras

all about spitting image. We saved all the stuff for the Insiders Club on Patreon. We'll talk about how Doug initially refused to join the show eight times. We'll talk about expanding the puppets beyond politics. and the effect that had on the viewing figures, and we will talk a little bit about the real-world impact of the show, magnified as it was through the tabloids. So all of that is on the Insiders Club at patreon.com.com slash com-com pod.

And you can also follow the podcast on Instagram and TikTok at Comcompod and on YouTube by searching Comcompod. Just before we thank The Insider producers, a little note that, as I record this on Monday the 10th, tomorrow Tuesday the 11th, Eddie Pepitone has a new special out. he's been on the show a couple of times the bitter buddha they call it i've never called in that but he's been in the game for a while so i'm sure someone has

pound for pound eddie peppito remains one of the most funny interesting raw honest creative imaginative comics i've ever spoken to i just love his work completely so i can't wait to see a special it comes out tomorrow so you should bookmark it too i don't know if he has his own youtube i think his podcast has a youtube channel but have a google of him and you'll find it

comes out tomorrow, the 11th of November. So a huge thank you to our insider producers. I'll try and do this like the terms and conditions of an advert. Roger Spiller, I have Dave, Daniel Pauke, Simon, Sam Allen, Jay Lucas, Gary McLennan, Chris Warwick, Dave, McCarroll, Palswaddle, Alex Wormell and James Burry. And a big thank you to our two special insider executive producers, Neil, terms, Peters and Andrew Conditions, Dennend, as well to the Super Secret run. All of this applies. Good. Thank you for listening. Lovely episodes in the can. That was a Corker. Postamble coming at you,

and I even know what the subjects are. Why? Because I'm on meds. Right. Bye for now. Retain a consistent says of itself, please, at your leisure. And I'll chat to you if you're sticking around in just a moment. Here's the thing. I was going to talk to you about talking too much. The funny thing, I read a comment on a thing, and it's funny. So I'll talk to you about that. And I was going to talk to you about socials. Yeah, okay, if we do. Oh, no, in a different way to the way I did last time. For those of you who follow every postamble, which is a small but very loyal call. audience. And I feel you should have a Black Squadron-style name. If you know who Black Squadron are, I think anyone that listens to all the Postambles should have an equivalent. We can't call

you Black Squadron, of course. And that may mean nothing to you, but I think you know what it means. So let's have suggestions, please, for a name for that. Also, we should set up, I'm doing this backwards, but we should set up a channel? Like, should we, Callum, should we get you now that we've got about 4,000 people following the comcom pod Instagram account, which Callum has diligently set up and fed and done brilliant work with recently, we can have a channel with that where we can contact viewers of that about fun things. I got what I thought was a text from Joe Lyset last night, and then I realized, oh no, it's him communicating with me through his Instagram. It's funny, his one's called

Joe Lysit in your DMs. So I'm entitled to have made that mistake. So maybe we'll do a channel. But this is the key thing. One of the sterling bits of work that evil producer Callum has been doing recently has been in reviving and re-judging and re-enlivening the YouTube for Comcompod. So YouTube.com.com at Comcompod, is it? I feel like it might not be because the blurb on my notes here says, just search Comcompod. Confusing. But search Comcom Pod and you'll find it.

He's been doing some really great work with my great work in the recordings. So it's very much a copro, but he's getting the fuck round to it, which is I'm absolutely not. So, I will, the problem is, I'm always logged into that YouTube account, because it's the one I use most often, which means that when I jump on to watch, I'll give you a rundown, this is what's on my YouTube front page. I've got a trailer for Man versus Baby. Sean Brady on Sean McLaughlin's talk show, a jazz hip-hop playlist. I've got some lo-fi beats for work and study, which I don't tend to listen to on YouTube, but there they are. Laura and Wolverine versus the Revers, that's a fight clip. I do watch a lot of fight scenes. Hustle is the new heroine, a case study for the neoliberal self.

I don't believe I've subscribed to that. Various bits of news, pitch meeting, which if you're not subscribed to pitch meeting, you should be. A trailer for something called King Ivory, which looks like a sort of crime thriller bullshit I love. More lo-fi beats. Why have I got all these? it's because I was, yeah, fine, okay. It was a one-off and it thinks I now love lo-fi beats, which I don't unlove, but I feel like I'm being over-served at the moment. We've got Vicki Stone sings the Brian Cox song. That's 10 years ago, I never heard of that. I'm 53. If you're 30 or 40, watch this. That's a fitness channel.

A chaotic guide to making stuff instead of doom scrolling. God, what angle, that's good. Garth Marengi, the last Rifleman trailer with Pierce Brosnan. He was such fun in Mobland. It's worth watching Mobblet. It's. It's worth watching Mobland, but you're going to love Brosnan in that. A clip from The Boys, something about Joe Marla, and a bunch of other stuff, something called Fruithead. And comedy without errors. I haven't watched that for ages, but it's being nudged to be. That's very good.

Yeah, so anyway, that's all. My point is, my point is, you can tell with the meds, can't you, that, like, I'm getting more done, but I'm still firing off at funny angles. Oh, here we go. I can tell you more about the Eddie Pepitone show. Shush, Eddie. There we go. So his YouTube channel is Eddie Pepp podcast. So do that because he's got a really good podcast called, what's it called? Is it called like Apocalypse Soon or something? Apocalypse soon. Oh, it's brilliant and he's brilliant. So get on that. But over here, if I go up, whether this is in the normal course of my life doing yoga in the morning, you know, making coffee,

doing the milk whilst very quickly scanning YouTube shorts, God, I'm pathetic. What happens is, Oh, I've only just realized these two subjects are linked. What happens is I get the notifications for all the comments on the YouTube channel, which is very dangerous, because I end up reading the comics. Certainly on laptop, on, you know, desktop, I see all the comments in a way that you're not supposed to read the comments, and I don't. A lot of these are about traitors, which is fine. but there was this one particular clip of me interviewing lovely Mike Wozniak where I'm sat here now and it was a very short clip on which I spoke for about 50% of the clip and I cannot tell you how many comments it had of people going, wish this interviewer shut the fuck up, completely valid

and I ended up, I did what you should never do and not only having read them. I eventually replied to one and said, look, the reason, reason this is funny to me is that if I'm known for anything at all in this world, in this big bad world, I'm known for the fact that I, oh, maybe, am I known for this? Or do I just think this? Oh, this is a very fun way to realise something live on air. I think that my podcast pretty uniquely doesn't have much of me in it. So in my mind, because I don't riff on the pod and I don't, I hope I don't try and make it all about me. My, my, the way I see the podcast in my mind, and this may be different to how you see it, is that I try to sort of ask perceptive

questions and then shut the fuck up. That's part of the offer email that I will sometimes send to people. Um, so it really made me laugh that on this one particular clip, no shade to producer Kalimir, who's brilliant at choosing clips, but I talked a lot. Everyone fucking hated it, but they're all casuals. They're all people who are fans of Wozniak, would have never heard this pod. And it just made me laugh. And then I ended up in a, well, not a conversation. I commented. They replied. I commented in depth. And I haven't gone back to it. And I keep scaring myself at you. And they replied. And it's purely because I just thought it was so funny that everyone was like, geez, well, this guy shut up. And I'm like, sorry, are you familiar

with any other podcast? I think of myself as fairly silent on this show. But perhaps you'd like to rudely comment on my socials or simply email me, Stuart at Comedians. com if you feel that the converse is true and I'm a big fucking loudmouth. So that was that. And then the other bit, socials-wise, is about my use of socials. It's not my output at all. I've given up Twitter, right? X. Fuck that, Kai. I've given up Twitter, but I still look at it. Like, I don't post anything on it ever, but I guiltily still look at it because it's sort of scurrilous and it's like looking under a rock and seeing like ants crawling around that are variously, by turns, really funny, fascinating, full of amusing business and hustle ideas and horrifically right

wing, more and more and more. And I want to quit it. I want to quit. So I don't, I'm going to say, I don't think I'm addicted. And then I just, I don't think I'm addicted. But what I'm saying to you is, can you help me stop this thing that I'm definitely not addicted to? Has anyone got any tips for stopping looking at fucking Twitter? Because I feel like I have to keep abreast of various elements of the zeitgeist for work. But even though I don't post anymore on that, I tried to switch to blue sky. I am on blue sky. I've got a decent following and I like it. It's just blue sky because everyone I follow is climate related. It feels like homework. So it feels like work. So in the tiny microsecond where I'm doing a task that I've got a few minutes to look at my

phone, you know, holding my child over an open fire, whatever, something where I can be distracted briefly. I never think, oh, I'll have a look at blue sky. because it's just, in my mind, it's associated with work. These are by no means individual or unique problems. But I'd love some advice, because I don't want to fucking look at Twitter anymore. It's so awful. And there's probably an argument for, like, getting it. Is there something?

There'll be a platform where you get everyone you follow and find them on Blue Sky. Maybe there's something clever I could do with Starter packs, or I could, maybe there's like a profile I could build on Blue Sky, record switch and only look at funny and, you know, upbeat things. It's just all of it now is politics, particularly American politics. This is blue sky still. But it's like nuanced, interesting takes that I do want to read. I just don't, it doesn't replace Twitter, is my point. And I feel like such a turncoat because I sort of flounced off Twitter and I've been secretly looking at it a lot. So if you've got advice on that, I'd love to hear it.

Instagram, I find it's great and I use it and I put some. stuff on it and I've got a decent following there, but I don't, I, like, if what I'd tell you what would be really good is if I could quit everything else and just focus on Instagram, because I think Instagram is my favourite. It's just that it's so addictive. I mean, oh my God, I spent one week on looking at TikTok a few years ago and I was like, I've got to delete this. I can't do it, quite apart from the potential spyware issues, conspiracy question mark, or very definite and measured and factual spyware issues. Quite apart from all that, it was simply too addictive for me to go near, so I'm like, burn it, get away.

Instagram, I like, I follow so many brilliant, brilliant, creative people on it. Have you seen Mr. Stevie Webb? Do yourself a favourite, Stevie, S-T-E-V-I-E, so M-R-S-V-E-E-R-S-V-V-E-Wb. So, funny, and I love it, but it's just so addictive. I fear to open it, because I'll end up looking at it for far too long. So help me, please. What do you do? What are your solutions and suggestions?

and if you're a comedian who has a sort of vested interest in needing to be on socials for business purposes, I am particularly keen to hear from you because like whatever advice, someone who doesn't have to be on socials is much easier to say, hey, you don't have to do it, just walk away. And I know there are comics, often extraordinarily talented ones, who are able to swear it off. I feel like I should be on it, I should be paying attention to it. YouTube shorts as well. I watch YouTube shorts when I'm exercising, stretching out after exercising. And that's just like an additional...

I mean, who doesn't want to watch the whole of the series The Blacklist chopped up into, you know, 30 second best bits in an arbitrary order? I do, but it's nibbling away at every moment of my life. It's like the phone is such a threat. I even switched off that Boringify app I was using where it made everything grey and you had to write it down because it just wasn't didn't fit into my life. I've got a little button,

a little button in the bottom right corner that I've switched on, part of the accessibility thing so I can make the whole screen black and white. But do I use that? Do I, bollocks? It's no better than nail varnish that... No, what is it?

Nail varnish that stops you biting your nails. Because you just think, well, I just won't put that on then. Because that will get in the way of all my nail biting. Solutions, please, answers on a postcard, but definitely not via, well, or via socials. Bye. Thank you.