'Smeg' wasn't the only insult Rob Grant and Doug Naylor came up with...

In this exclusive extract from a new unofficial guide to Red Dwarf, billed as the 'most comprehensive work yet on the beloved sci-fi comedy', writer Tom Salinsky, right, revisits the birth of the enduringly popular show, and discusses how its writers had to get creative to satisfy the BBC censors.

The first draft of Rob Grant and Doug Naylor’s science-fiction sitcom Red Dwarf was written in 1983 in a holiday cottage in Wales donated by Doug’s father. This getaway, which seemed the perfect place for some creative isolation, nearly doomed the project when the two men had a near-fatal car accident halfway up the mountain. For Doug, who lost a leg in a car accident when he was just seven years old, this must have been doubly traumatic.

Who knows what expletives they might have let out as they lost control of their vehicle, but they probably wouldn’t have been broadcastable. That created a problem because the very thing that would differentiate Red Dwarf from almost every other science fiction show on television, was class.

 Recalling jobs they’d had in their younger years, including working the night shift at a mail order company, Rob and Doug conceived of their heroes as sitting at the bottom of the hierarchy – unlike so much American science fiction which was only concerned with the captain and the senior officers, or fantasy wizards like Obi-Wan Kenobi. There was less to choose from on British television, but the heroes of Blake’s 7 all sounded like they went to Rada and most incarnations of Doctor Who so far had been erudite bohemians or eccentrically dressed establishment figures. Everyone in science fiction, it seemed, was either professional, upper middle class, or classless.

The closest thing the BBC had ever done to Red Dwarf was Douglas Adams’s famed Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, which had only lasted six episodes on television in 1981, partly because it was so difficult to produce. But the key joke of that series, in any medium, is that Arthur Dent is comfortably upper middle class and out of place. He’s essentially walked off the set of The Good Life or Yes Minister and onto the bridge of a starship – that’s what makes him funny.

Rob and Doug wanted something much more, well, down to Earth. They wanted a relatable, working-class hero, like Harold Steptoe or Fletcher from Porridge. But how can you write a relatable working-class hero who can’t swear? The Young Ones pushed the boundaries of good taste with cries of ‘bastard’ but that was about as far as they could go, and it wasn’t enough.

On Porridge, writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais had solved the problem of BBC teatime profanity by repurposing the Polari word ‘naff’ as a general-purpose swearword that would offend no one. After a short while playing around with various vowels and consonants, Rob and Doug came up with ‘smeg’, which they claim has nothing to do with either male genital hygiene or high-end Italian home appliances (although Rob also recalls learning the word ‘smegma’ from Tracey Ullman at a post Three of a Kind Chinese meal).

Today, Red Dwarf fans proudly proclaim their own status as ‘smegheads’, testament to the success of this linguistic innovation. Although, this sanitisation didn’t stop 19 viewers from calling the BBC complaint line, following a feature about the show on an edition of Points of View in October 1988, to object to the word on the grounds that it had ‘sexual connotations’.

Several more revisions later, the script was sent to the two most powerful men in British comedy: John Lloyd and Paul Jackson. Both read it and liked it enormously, and for a while, there was talk of a co-production, even of the show being made by the Spitting Image production team, but in the end, it was under the aegis of Paul Jackson Productions that the script was sent to the BBC.

From the beginning, Rob and Doug had wanted this to be a BBC show. Almost all their professional work had been on the BBC, save for Spitting Image, where they still felt they had been poorly treated. And – crucially – being on a publicly funded channel meant they had a full 30 minutes to play with, instead of having to make time for commercials.

BBC Head of Light Entertainment Gareth Gwenlan rejected the project. Paul Jackson was both offended and surprised. This was a good script, it was exciting and different, and surely, he had proven himself to be a safe pair of hands? With support from Rob and Doug’s agent, the script was submitted again and rejected even faster. Jackson’s worst fears had been concerned – as good as the writing was, there was a deep-seated suspicion about science fiction at the BBC, which was very difficult to overcome.

Rob says he would have given up at this point, but Doug was tenacious. They asked for and got a meeting at BBC Light Entertainment and prepared a long speech about how everybody loved science fiction, how the most successful movies of all time had been science fiction, how shows like Star Trek had enormous fan bases, but this was all waved away by Gwenlan as ‘our cousins across the pond’ as if no British person had ever gone to see Alien or enjoyed Close Encounters.

Eventually, Gwenlan proposed a compromise that would lure a conservative BBC audience into watching a television sitcom set anywhere other than suburban England. What if, he proposed, the series opened with a shot of a sofa in front of a pair of French windows, but then we keep pulling back to reveal that it’s a sofa and French windows on board a spaceship? Rob and Doug’s response is not recorded.

As the meeting wore on, Gwenlan began to realise that he was losing the argument. Okay, he conceded, maybe the BBC should do a science fiction sitcom, and if you want to write it, I’ll give you a commission. With balls of steel, Doug Naylor pulled out the script for Red Dwarf and dropped it on the desk like Eddie Murphy dropping a microphone. ‘Here it is. We’ve written it.’

And so it was that the BBC rejected Red Dwarf for a third time.

Along with ‘smeg’ and its various derivatives, other terms of abuse created by Rob and Doug include ‘gimboid’, ‘goit’ and, in one episode, ‘gwenlan’.

• From Red Dwarf: Discovering the TV Series by Tom Salinsky, which will be published  on Monday.  It is available from Amazon, priced £15.76 – or from uk.bookshop.org, below, which supports independent bookstores.

Published: 27 Sep 2024