Quotes

What's amazing is that I'm recognised all over the world through Red Dwarf (1988). In New York City, I nipped into a store on Broadway and the owner pointed to the TV, and Red Dwarf was on! The show's enabled me to travel all over the world too, partly for fan club conventions. British fans are exceptional, but the American fans are something else. Some of them fly 500 miles to stand in line for three hours, just to meet me, then when they do they collapse. It makes you feel like a rock star! Oh, and I got to snog William Shatner when he was a panelist on Space Cadets (1997), in which I was a team captain.

[on the long-running success of Red Dwarf (1988)] When we first started, we thought we'd do two series, which is twelve episodes, of this quaint little curious BBC Two comedy set in space, and then we'd all go our separate ways. If I knew that I'd have to still take Robert Llewellyn's calls 25 years later, I don't know if I'd have taken the job!

There was never any career plan. When Red Dwarf (1988) started I thought we were doing a curious little sitcom on BBC2, I didn't think I was becoming an actor. I didn't see that 21 years later I'd still be talking about it, let alone filming a new one. For me, everything's always been an accident.

My mother was Liverpool-Irish and my father was Guyanese and they met outside a boarding house in Liverpool that said, 'No Irish, no niggers, no dogs'. They left together hand-in-hand.

[on the Red Dwarf (1988) movie that was never made] I spent thousands of pounds getting my teeth done because we were gonna be on fifty foot screens all over Hollywood.

I certainly wouldn't want to not do the series and wait for this mythical movie. I'd rather just get on making a sitcom. Red Dwarf (1988) is a sitcom. Let's keep it as a sitcom, and do more of it.

When you're doing it with a single camera on film, you've got to wait months and months before you get a reaction. When you're in front of a live audience, and people are laughing their socks off, you've got your instant review there. And because you've got that, you can relax a bit more. That intensifies your performance. Plus you've got the adrenaline.

I know The Office (2001) changed the landscape of sitcoms by doing it without an audience, but that's not the way Red Dwarf (1988) works. Because we're all natural show-offs, Red Dwarf works when we can all get in front of an audience and show off.