Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Chris Barrie, Craig Charles, Danny John Jules, Robert Llewellyn, Norman Lovett, Ray Fearon, Tom Bennett, Mandeep Dhillon, Lucy Pearman, Al Roberts.
What started out as cult viewing, a chance taken on something entirely new, has become, in its own way, one of the most quoted, highly anticipated and arguably funniest comedies to have made it to television. The perfect blend is hard to attain, even harder to keep together but like Only Fools and Horses and Blackadder before it, has come to define the way an audience can keep a programme going beyond what seems its one and only joke and become part of the national psyche, identifying with the four valiant jokers in the pack and making Red Dwarf what it is today, a national treasure to which there is no comparison.
The Promised Land, an aspiring, imaginative and colossal way of bringing the half hour space-com to what can only be seen as its next logical step, the domination of the feature length story which isn’t bound by the time restraints that television, especially in the series current home which allows for advertising, employs.
Red Dwarf has always verged on the surreal, the oddly strange and fantastic, but it has never ventured to a point where all that it has ever been has been allowed to evolve in the course of one evening whilst making sure that the older fan is not neglected with potted references to older episodes and one that has no qualms of alerting itself to a newer audience that might have stayed unaware of its brilliance had the series and characters not been resurrected. It is in this cinematic exposition that the writing becomes even more important than it has had to be before and that the cast have to be seen to go one step beyond their usual overwhelming performances.
Television is an unforgiving entity, if a television show shows aspirations to grow, to go further than it first imagined, it can, if the timing is wrong, make the programme become a mockery of its former self. Small screen history is littered with comedies and comedians that tried to enlarge its scope, thankfully The Promised Land defies any such notion of failure or concern, instead relying on the comfortable feeling of comedy security to drive home the laughs, the gags and the memories that the programme always insisted upon delivering.
A journey to the promised land delivered with style and at times the beauty of the knowing wink, refusing to cave to the demand of selling out its soul n the return of obscure riches, Red Dwarf retains its position as one of the finest comedies created.
Ian D. Hall