Review questioned Red Dwarf’s Chris Barrie about his viewing habits and here’s a taster of what he told us. You can find out more in Issue 132, which is in shops 5 August 2009. 

Do you do that thing where you take boxsets of older TV programmes and watch them straight through?
Not really, but then again I don’t watch much TV in general. I will watch things like The Apprentice because it’s on television and my wife is a bit of a TV bird. She’ll watch The Apprentice and Britain’s Got Bloomin’ Talent, which we’ve just all about had enough of. I don’t know about anyone else but I’m just about fed up with it. Radio presenters that you have a lot of respect for start giggling ridiculously in the morning over bloomin’ Stavros Flatley and then you watch it in the evening and you’re disappointed.
There’s this family thing and this whole notion that Britain’s now becoming this blubbing sentimental nation over a middle-aged Scottish woman singing reasonably well. I think this has all happened since the passing of Diana Princess of Wales. We’ve become this nation of blubber-buns, you know? And it’s too much for me. I’ve just got to leave the room, I say ‘OK, enjoy Stavros Flatley’, I just go out of the room. Whereas The Apprentice I can quite sort of see that. Watching Alan Sugar take the mick out of these toe rags.
I’ll watch a bit of sport of course. I watched the match the other night, Man United versus Barcelona. Obviously on Red Dwarf there’s quite a big football thing going on there, with Doug being a Man U man and Craig being a Liverpool man and me being a Chelsea person.

Is there a lot of banter?
There’s quite a bit of banter. The night we were viewing Red Dwarf: Back To Earth, Craig was sending all these texts saying, ‘What are you doing now?’ ‘How’s it going?’ because he couldn’t make it. And then the following night Chelsea beat Liverpool and I sent him a text and funnily enough I didn’t get a reply. So there’s always a bit of footy banter going on.

There were a lot of Blade Runner references in the show. Did you re-watch the film before you started shooting?
We watched various relevant sections of it if we hadn’t seen it in recent times. But yes, I thought that was very clever.

Were you surprised that Spitting Image found a second life on DVD?
I find it odd that they would bring that back on DVD bearing in mind that it was so topical. It seems like it’s vintage television now. People want to see it for the sake of recalling television of the era and what really happened in the news is almost incidental. But that really does bring back the past.

There’s a brilliant question you can clear up from the forums at the IMdB. You’re not in Valkyrie are you? 
No I’m not in Valkyrie. Don’t talk to me about Nazi uniforms. I went to a WWII party three or four years ago now and I actually dressed up as a Second World War dispatch rider from the British Army. But a few friends of mine went as SS officers and their personalities changed almost within a second of putting on that hat and those black gloves and those jackboots. I don’t know where they got them from either, but they swear that they hired them. I think a little rummage around their wardrobes would reveal them. [Laughs]
But they started to walk down the high street in the middle of the road and I’m thinking, ‘What the hell? This is power gone mad here!’ I tell you what, it was a good uniform that they had but thank god they didn’t take over our country. But no, it’s not me in Valkyrie.

Red Dwarf: Back To Earth is available now on DVD and Blu-ray