Chris Barrie

It turns out that Amazon Instant Video has basically all of Red Dwarf, including seasons and specials that I didn't even know existed.  So I've been happily devouring it all over again, and I noticed something that I was unaware of the first time around, when it came out in the late 1980s.

At the time, it was very clear that the audience was intended to identify with the character of Dave Lister, the "sole surviving human being," and the other characters were just foils for him to react to.  And that was fine.  I sympathized right along with the slacker slob, and hated his dead holographic bunk mate Arnold "Smeg-head" Rimmer (played by Chris Barrie), just as I was supposed to.  And now, from my changed perspective, that's still true, although it's clearer that the character of Lister is occasionally even more of a rat bastard than Rimmer, if perhaps not quite so superficially dislikable.

However-- I also can't help noting, on a more meta level, that Chris Barrie was/is a vastly superior actor.  For example, in several episodes, for a variety of reasons, Barrie was called upon to imitate or in some way play one of the other characters (mind swapping, memory alteration, damage to his holographic circuits, etc.).  And it was frequently brilliant.  He captured their physical mannerisms, their vocal inflections, often uncannily.  And in the episode where Rimmer and Lister swapped bodies, this was made rather starkly evident-- Craig Charles, the actor who played Lister, was just basically himself with Barrie's voice overdubbed, but Barrie really became Lister, in a manner becoming an actor on a (frankly) much better show.  Honestly, Red Dwarf is fun, but wow, was it also bad.

So here's to you, Chris Barrie, the unsung hero (at least as of season 4, I've still got a ways to go) of Red Dwarf.  He's done other things, including some supporting roles in big-ticket movies, and one long run as the star of a show I've never heard of (probably because it was only on BBC) called The Brittas Empire.