Lonely nights with Red Dwarf

If the very fact that something as trivial as comics books could make me feel alone in this cold universe, it stands to reason that a very, very silly British TV could also make me feel lonely on a veritable cosmic scale.

Red Dwarf has always been the epitome of TV comfort food. It's been a Friday night delight for decades, and when they bring it back every few years, I get a genuine thrill when that daft theme song kicks in.

But beyond the canned laughter and endless jokes about curry, it also captured the sheer loneliness of deep space travel and the endlessness of the infinite void. The big red spaceship has traveled off into deep space for millions of years, and found nothing. Just the endless nothingness of an uncaring universe

In all its incarnations, it's been notable that there have been no aliens in red dwarf, just the debris left behind by a long extinct humanity - genetic mutations barely reconcilable as once human and robots stuck in eternal loops of servitude.

Some things never change - Rimmer is a git, Lister is cool, Kryten is the mum and the Cat is the Cat  These universals of the show have been ably supported bu loads of great gags over the decades.

But Red Dwarf is always out there alone in the dark,going all the way out and finding nothing but ourselves staring back.