An interview with Doug Naylor this week, and a theatre car park in Hayes in 1995
I learnt about DNA at school. Probably. I also probably learnt about viruses, evolution and life and death. But school science lessons involved a LOT of copying down sentences from the board while not feeling anywhere near confident (or anywhere near engaged) enough to follow, let alone enjoy and connect. Home life, on the other hand, involved the far clearer teachings of the gestalt entity Grant Naylor.
Rob Grant and Doug Naylor formed their writing partnership as students, prior to working on Spitting Image (yes, including The Chicken Song), the Ten Percenters and Red Dwarf. Realising they were on the wrong educational course for who they were was an important learning experience, as was taking control of their own direction to go somewhere very different. They called themselves a gestalt entity because – as Legion would illustrate – the whole was greater than the sum of its parts (although, their bio in Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers stressed, for tax reasons they had completely separate wives). Doug’s interview with me on the Writers’ Gym this week pays tribute to Rob, whose death was announced the day before we were due to record. Doug is enormously generous about sharing what working closely with someone truly means, and how the lonelier aspects of writing – particularly our old friend Imposter Syndrome – don’t get smaller just because the spotlight gets bigger.
‘In space no one can hear you cha-cha-cha.’
One of my favourite Red Dwarf quotes was spoken by a virus turned humanoid, tap-dancing on the walkway of the edge of the Jupiter Mining Corporation spaceship while Lister tried to focus on fixing it: It’s such a neat reworking of the even by then clichéd science fiction line, a great example of the point Grant Naylor always made of not giving you the science fiction tick-boxes you expected (Doug talks about the one exception he pushed back on being Kryten). But it also, as a figment of Lister’s imagination, reflects the through line of what I really feel Red Dwarf taught me (see also anxiety, choice and freedom) is what Lister’s survival and even enjoyment of his life as the last human, three million years from home reflects all along: no amount of ‘why’ is going to improve the situation. It’s the ‘what next’ and the ‘how’.
‘Smoke me a kipper. I’ll be back for breakfast.’
Ace Rimmer. Oh God, Ace Rimmer. Chris Barrie, really. And the Ace wig. When I was in Year Eight we went to see Chris Barrie’s live show and while we were waiting in the foyer after the tannoy called out numberplate and we had to go outside as our car had been broken into. They’d taken nothing – our crappy cassette player was still in place – and I was absolutely in pieces that I wouldn’t get to meet Chris Barrie. But we went back in and we were in time and I’m not sure I managed three coherent words while my mum chatted to him about car insurance.
I digress.
Doug and I talk on the podcast about how Rimmer doesn’t get the joke of the circumstances the way Lister does: from their opening conversation of The End (Red Dwarf’s beginning), Rimmer is already in a competition only he is playing, forsaking the potential to be truly loved and respected because everyone is the enemy, the competition. Whereas Lister, the one person lower down the pecking order than him, has friends and ethics and a sense of who he truly is, beyond who anyone tells him to be. Whereas the story Rimmer tells himself is his brothers got all the looks and all the breaks. Even when Rimmer meets another version of himself in Dimension Jump, he treats him not as a chance to learn but even more desperate competition.
Rimmer has always blamed his shortcomings on not having the breaks or looks his brothers had. When he meets an alternate version of himself — a hero — it’s because he got a break the other guy didn’t. Ace tells Lister, out of Rimmer’s hearing, what the one difference in their lives actually was: he was kept down a year at school and Rimmer wasn’t:
Ace: By his terms, he got the break. But being kept down a year made me… made me buckle down. Made me fight back. And I’ve been fighting back ever since.
Lister: While he spent the rest of his life making excuses.
Rimmer: Maybe he’s right. Maybe I did get the lucky break.
The iconic quote Ace says instead of goodbye manages to be both silly and optimistic. For Ace, and for Lister, there’s always a next chapter and they’re not its victim or its subject; they’re its writer.
‘A moon cannot make light, right? And yet there’s such a thing as moonlight… but the sun can’t make moonlight without the moon. And the moon can’t make moonlight without the sun. So who’s making the moonlight?… Even though a moon cannot make light, moonlight exists. Like you. Smeghead.’
In The Promised Land, which I reviewed for Starburst Magazine after my first interview with Doug, is one of the more undisguisedly moving, scientifically and emotionally accurate conversations in the Red Dwarf universes.
A deep-dive on the same idea behind one of my favourite lyrics of all time, ‘I don’t stand in my own light’, which I’d also vote for as the best writing reminder of all time: you can’t show up perfect, but you can show up. And by simply being part of the infinite chorus of voices you’re doing more good than you ever get to find out about. On that, in case you need the reminder (and I know I do) I’ve had two people in my extended network tell me things I’ve written have really spoken to them this week. Did they press like? Did they share it with someone else? No. But the good was happening. Everything we write is moon or sun to someone or something. We might not see it from where we are, but that doesn’t mean someone else doesn’t. So keep writing, and trust there is moonlight.
Download Doug Naylor’s interview on The Writers’ Gym Podcast on Podbean, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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