Chris Barrie

Listen: Chris Barrie & Craig Charles on Red Dwarf

Here, Barrie and Charles talk about their acting careers, the panel show Space Cadets, their time on Red Dwarf, favourite moments, 'challenges' on set and returning for Series X in 2012.

The Wright Way, a sitcom about a punctilious health and safety officer, should itself carry some sort of health warning. It left me with a raging headache; I left it about halfway through. Critics, like the captain on a sinking ship, should really stay to the very end, but I am a middle-aged man with a sense of his own mortality, and this was 15 minutes I would never get back.

The show is written by Ben Elton so, as you would expect, there are some good lines, neat turns of phrase and a solid narrative structure. However, it is a long way from his best work, with far too great a dependence upon the supposed hilarity inherent in brand names. Horlicks, anyone?

But even if he'd scripted a masterpiece of Blackadder proportions, it would still have been scuppered by the performances, which are uniformly terrible. It is as though the entire cast has come straight from an evening class in sitcom acting for beginners and can't wait to try out their comedy voices. Nobody, but nobody, behaves like a human being.

Worst offender is the show's star David Haig, who has chosen to give his character Gerald a hideous nasal twang all too reminiscent of Chris Barrie's in The Brittas Empire, a sitcom I also found unwatchable. Gerald is a boring person, but the show has fallen into the trap of actually making him dull company for the viewer.

It is often said that a successful sitcom is one populated by characters you want to spend some time with. Gerald, meanwhile, is a character I would like to spend some time with in a locked room, armed with a baseball bat.

The horror of the acting is compounded by a laughter track evidently laid down in a lunatic asylum. Mildly amusing lines are met with an ear-shattering explosion of guffaws, while slightly clever sight gags receive the kind of rapturous ovation that Pavarotti spent a lifetime chasing.

So, to sum up, I didn't like The Wright Way. But had the cast played the characters instead of the comedy, uninterrupted by such a hysterical soundtrack, I suspect it could have been quite watchable. We will never know.

It is with relief that I can report that Ben Elton's new comeback series is hilarious! It is a classic situation comedy with great jokes and ... and funny characters who ... who ...

No. I'm sorry, it's no good. You see, it really is no good; in fact, it's a stinker. David Haig plays Gerald Wright (hence the title!), an annoying man who wants everything done a certain way. It's a perennial sitcom trope, done beautifully by Richard Briers in Ever Decreasing Circles, for instance, or 
decently by Chris Barrie in The Brittas Empire. He's a health and safety inspector for a local council, the department "that introduced the static seesaw and the horizontal slide [and said] babies must wear helmets when breastfeeding near the swings".

But what makes it a stinker are the jokes, which feel as though when the BBC moved out of Television Centre they found an old box at the back of the cupboard labelled "Leftover Sitcom Gags 1973". They are ancient, is what I'm saying, they have whiskers on them.

The main running joke involves Wright trying to wash his hands under a bathroom tap and soaking his trousers, and then someone coming in and thinking he's wet himself, and then shoogling about under a hand dryer and someone else coming in and thinking he's doing something filthy. And this happens three times.

Haig tries to make things sound funny by stretching and emphasising certain words - not a stammer, but a sort of word-mastication which would be excellent for someone trying to practice shorthand or audio typing dictation, if anyone still does that nowadays.

The show's token nod to modernity is that Wright lives with his daughter and her female partner (played by Beattie Edmondson, daughter of Elton's old chum Adrian - how cosy). He has to buy a present and they suggest a shop called Girl Shack - wait, Girl Shack? In 2013? I take it Chic Chicks or Trendy Togs or Burdz Boutique were all taken?

Finally, there is the catchphrase: "Don't get me started!" which Wright says when particularly exasperated. This is very nearly "Are you 'avin' a laugh?" from Ricky Gervais' spoof sitcom When The Whistle Blows. Sorry, Ben: this isn't 
the one that's going to win over your critics.

Chris Barrie: How he can play all the Red Dwarf crew

Red Dwarf star Chris Barrie has said that he can play all four of the main characters on the show.

This is the second time that digital channel Dave has brought back the crew of a certain Jupiter Mining Corporation space ship that's three million light years away from Earth.

The first return of Red Dwarf (the three-part Back to Earth broadcast in 2009) had its moments, yet was considered a slight anticlimax. But now Red Dwarf's returned with Series X, it's gone back to basics. Shot in a studio and in front of a studio audience (that's not canned laughter, despite what some people will tell you), has the gambit paid off? Well, I'm proud to say that it smegging has!

The characters really are just as great as they were before. In this first episode, the despicable hologram Arnold Judas Rimmer (Chris Barrie) becomes so resentful that he crashes - due to self-created malware. He becomes even more frustrated when he encounters the crew of another spaceship, which is supposedly lead by his brother Howard. Meanwhile, the slobbish last-human-alive Dave Lister (Craig Charles) is trying desperately to order some rubbish product over the phone.

The 'situations' were expertly delivered and gags landed too. Even the more subtle visual humour - Cat (Danny John-Jules) walking behind a shot holding a huge map of the ship they are on, for example - doesn't fail to tickle your funny bone.

I do miss some things, though. I miss both Kochanski and Holly, and I miss the fact that there used to be no ad-breaks in the middle of the show. But other than a few picky issues, it's great to see Red Dwarf back.

The rust-bucket mining ship Red Dwarf has been off our TV screens for light years but tonight it returns for a tenth series as if it's never been away. The crew's all present and incorrect - Rimmer (Chris Barrie), Lister (Craig Charles), Cat (Danny John-Jules) and Kryten (Robert Llewellyn) - with the comedic nonsensicality as sharp as ever. Swedish moose and a stray spaceship loom large in the opening adventure.

A return for the cult sci-fi comedy. This 10th series follows on from the three episodes which went out on Dave in 2009. The original cast of Lister (Craig Charles), Rimmer (Chris Barrie), Cat (Danny John-Jules) and Kryten (Robert Llewellyn) are reunited but sadly the spark has long since gone. This opener to the six-part run, written by original creator Doug Naylor, finds the crew distracted from their usual prattling and squabbling when they encounter an abandoned spaceship and Rimmer's long-forgotten brother, Howard.

Red Dwarf: the cast reveal all about Series X

David Brown visits the set of the sci-fi sitcom and talks to Chris Barrie, Craig Charles, Danny John-Jules and Robert Llewellyn about the return of the show.

Podcast: Red Dwarf X special with Chris Barrie

Chris Barrie joins us live from the set of Red Dwarf X to give us a little bit of an insight into the brand new series.

'The Brittas Empire': Tube Talk Gold

If you're one of our readers who was old enough to watch proper telly in the late '80s and '90s, you'll probably recognise Chris Barrie as Rimmer from Red Dwarf. Not this writer, though. In my eyes, Barrie is a nasal leisure centre manager first, a neurotic space hologram second.