With Series XI currently filming, we’ve been getting occasional tweets from the cast with little reveals here and there such as Robert’s tweet showing a skeleton prop last week. While we have been largely covering these on Twitter rather than here on the site, a couple of tweets from Robert and Criag today merit special analysis here on the site as they watch Tim Peake’s real life launch into space to begin his stay on the International Space Station from an interesting and familiar looking location.
We all just stopped rehearsal to watch @astro_timpeake launch. Great stuff pic.twitter.com/VIzFDS8QNJ
— Robert Llewellyn (@bobbyllew) December 15, 2015
Watching the Soyuz launch from the cockpit of starbug Surreal or what? pic.twitter.com/1dFapp2xng — Craig Charles (@CCfunkandsoul) December 15, 2015
The return of Starbug for this series has been no secret, but this is the first glimpse that has been revealed of the set so far. We can sense you all heading to google to find images to compare it to the prior Starbug sets, so allow us to save a bit of time with a couple of reference photos:
There are a few points to mention with regards to the new set, so we’ll skip past any weak jokes releasing to Chris’ flat cap and get straight down to business:
- The photo shows a tiny glimpse of the new control sticks. Not enough to discern much detail, but enough to show that this time we aren’t dealing with the flappy panel controls we saw the last time the Bug appeared.
- The set as we see it here is unlit. There will obviously be a difference between how it appears here in the photo to how it appears in the final show.
- The view screen and wall above it are both fairly faithful to the appearance in VI.
- Given how rarely the Bug was shot from this angle between III and VIII, it seems a pretty good bet that this won’t be an angle that we will see the ship shot from much in XI, if at all. That is a real shame as the angle really highlights the similarities to the original Bug, which as you can see from the previous sets above, has changed previously, but always retained a similar sort of set up and shape.
- If we had to try and compare it further, we would probably say that it appears to be more confined but longer this time around, though of course this is difficult to say due to the placement of Chris in the photo.
- This of course remains only a small section of the cockpit, and the really well known view of the crew set up still remains to be revealed at a later date.
It also appears that we can see a tiny, section of this week’s guest set through the view screen. So before we go and with the final recording of the series only a couple of days away, let’s have a look at a few interesting tweets with regard to Friday’s recording.
Watching them put up the guest sets for Red Dwarf XI Show 6!! Holy smeg, we’ve never had anything quite like this before. #RedDwarfXI
— Doug Naylor (@DougRDNaylor) December 12, 2015
Audience seating out, guest set one in, runs the length of the studio. #RedDwarfXI — Doug Naylor (@DougRDNaylor) December 12, 2015
Art dept killing it for this week’s ep 🙂
— Ed Moore (@edmoore) December 14, 2015
All of which is rather intriguing. As you will have seen from our set reports, we believe this to have been a throughly solid series of the show, and we’ll be very interested to see how it comes to a close. It certainly sounds as if there is a definite attempt to go out with something of a bang. Be sure to check back this weekend for our final set report of Series XI and our thoughts on the episode.