To celebrate our launch of the FIRST AND ONLY Facebook group dedicated to the almost lost to time show ‘Rob Grant’s The Strangerers’ here is an article to explain what the show was all about! If you’d like to join the Facebook community to help keep this show’s memory alive do join! And who knows – maybe we’ll start a movement to get it revived in some way?!?!?! I very much doubt it, but it should come back! Join the group here! It’s produced by our Geek Battle team!
If you were a fan of Red Dwarf in the mid to late 1990s you were in for a bit of a bumpy ride. The show went on a four year hiatus after Series 6. When it finally came back in 1997, Chris Barrie who played Rimmer only made few appearances and left the show, and the show had a distinctly different feel.
This was partly because they shot Series 7 like a movie rather than like a sitcom and there wasn’t a live audience providing a laughter track for the show. Instead we just had canned laughter, and you could tell something was off.
The bigger reason for the show feeling different was because the show was no longer being Co-written by Red Dwarf Co-creator Rob Grant. Grant, along with Doug Naylor had created the show and do-written every episode, but somewhere along the road Grant and Naylor had some kind of falling out and went their separate ways.
Naylor would continue to write Red Dwarf Series 7, and in 1999 Series 8, but the next thing we’d get from Rob Grant was his collaboration with Sky television. This collaboration led to what I believe I’m correct in saying was Sky’s first original narrative show, The Strangerers.
The Strangerers starred Mark Williams and Jack Docherty as Flynn and Niven, two inept alien cadets who are on a mission from Earth. They don’t really know what they’re doing on this mission though because their supervisor gets killed almost immediately upon the start of their mission. Fun fact is that the Supervisor was played by Milton Jones who would go on to be a well known comic and I’d been watching him appear on panel shows like Mock the Week for years before I realised it was the same guy.
The humour of the show feels nice and Red Dwarfy, but much like Doug Naylor’s Red Dwarf Series 7, this was also filmed without an audience, and doesn’t have a laughter track. That’s fine, but it feels like this kind of humour would have been better supported by a laugh track and was made during an era where almost all sitcoms had one. The Office and The Royal Family being successful examples of ones that were very recent at the time of The Strangerers that led the way not having background giggles.
The show has this strange vibe where you can’t quite tell when or where it is set and that’s very intentional. It both feels like it’s set in the past and in modern times.
A lot of the comedy comes from watching how Flynn and Niven try to understand human behaviour. The funny ways each of the aliens walk reminds me of the funny walk Kryten developed in Red Dwarf. It’s also funny to see how they try to understand things like morning glory and recognise the contents of their toilets. It’s all the silly kind of humour that Grant would bring to Red Dwarf and I’m sure any Dwarf fans who never saw this originally would enjoy it.
The show is available to watch from fans who have uploaded it to YouTube, but insanely Sky never released it on VHS, or DVD, and it’s never been officially made available for streaming.
I’m another strange turn for the show, Sky never even repeated it after its initial run. Someone can correct me on this if not true, but I thought maybe it had been shown again once, if only a very short while after it first aired. Maybe it was a same week replay that I’m recalling.
I remember checking the website for the show at the time, and maybe even for a couple of years after it aired to get news of when it may get a new series, but alas nothing ever happened. Again, if memory serves I think whoever ran the website eventually may have started teasing they would post their own ending for the show (and I don’t think I’m this update was from Rob Grant) as unfortunately the show ended on something of a cliff hanger.
Now you know what all the fuss is about, join our The Strangerers Facebook group here!
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