Matt & Nick’s Comedy Net review

Red Dwarf series 8 episode 1

We went to see this on October1st 1998 at Shepperton Studios in Shepperton, Middlesex. Different from most Comedy Net excursions (read: death trips) we went by…train. Yes! We actually spent a staggering £38 on a Super-Saver ticket. Exeter St. David’s to Shepperton via. Almost everywhere in the entire British Isles. Also we our tickets clearly state NON SMOKING but we got stuck in smoking. The biggest bastard made this worse on earth that smoked about 40 cigarettes in a 95-minute journey. We did have rather a good game of Play Your Cards Right for Haribo®. Actually we only went via two places but it seemed like more. Reading and Clapham Junction. We have only 5 minutes to make the connection at Reading and the train arrived 9 minutes late. Now do the maths with this one and you’ll see it was unlikely. To make matters worst – we couldn’t find the platform. We were scurrying around this station and Nick actually ran out in the busy Reading high street (we think). Anyway we found some old woman who said this was the train to Clapham – how wrong was she! It was the next train up. We got on that one but she didn’t! Even though she said she was also going to Clapham so she’s probably in Kenya by now. We took an awful lot of pictures with our Superdrug Easycam. Most of them were of our diet – Fast Food and Haribo® and the tickets or ticks also featured in every shot. The journey to Clapham seemed to take about 9 days – it actually took 70 minutes. We got here we had 48 minutes to wait for our train which was 31 minutes late. So we were a bit pissed off with this. We got onto the quality Stagecoach owned South West Train, which smelt a bit, like piss and of dead animals and that was just the conductors! (Applause). When we finally got to Shepperton we had over 2 ½ hours to kill the most destitute place in the UK. It was Friday afternoon and there was no one around. Not at all like Exeter. We decided to try and get to the studios. That failed – we walked 200 metres from the station and couldn’t be arsed. So we called a cab – Lion Cars (Shepperton 252525). We arranged to meet the cab at the station. We stood there waiting for around 10 minutes before a bloke in his Escort pulled up from over the road and that was the taxi. It was an entertaining trip around Shepperton because as anyone who’s been there will tell you – the studios are the only things in Shepperton worth seeing. We got to the studios and proceeded to walk back to the Chip Shop. We bought something to eat and wandered back to the studios. I stopped in a newsagent and Nick stayed outside with the food. I think that everyone in Shepperton must be really into pornography because this shop had two shelves full of the stuff. The entire length of the shop twice! That aside I did buy a N64 Magazine to read. When we got back to the studios there was a film crew outside filming some bloke outside the Shepperton Studios sign. When they left we took about 6 photos of us by the sign – holding the ticks and pretending to be in the end creds of Filthy Rich and Catflap – or maybe that was just me! We proceeded into the studios and went to the studio bar – which must have been called something like Chalk and Cheese or Rubber and Glue. On one half of the pub there were all the smartly dressed business looking people with their mobiles and pagers, their credit cards and fifties. And on the other side there were all the Red Dwarf fanatics with their RD T-shirts, which should be called t-shits by the way. They were all talking about technical inaccuracies and their favourite ‘Smeg-Ups’. And right in the middle was us – not really knowing if we were business or geek so we left. Then we went to see the show, etc, etc. He comes a good bit – when we left – we had to leave early to get the train so we stood up to go but the entrance was blocked so they ushered us toward the stage door and guess who we saw? Danny John-Jules who gave us a knowing hand as we left. We also got some stagy type guy telling us about the ‘sophisticated recording equipment’ and then we called the same Cab Company and got to the station with about 2 minutes to spare – but of course the train didn’t leave for another 20 minutes. When we got to Waterloo we were greeted by a load of pissed football supporters singing ‘Vindaloo’. We made in to the tube station and none of the machines would take Nick’s quid. So we ended up queuing. We finally made it to Paddington and 11.50 to catch our 00:20 train. So nipped over to Burger King for some over priced, under cooked food. Then we got the train back. It was a four ½ hour journey with loads of fourteen year old in the next carriage, pissed on alcopops and loads of people (2) from a Amsterdam smokers weekend – which is fine except they insisted on telling me stories about it for 1 1/2 hours and giving me business cards. Which was a bit crap. Nick slept half of the way back so I spent loads of time chatting to the Amsterdam guys about Red Dwarf and they liked it to and one of them quite like TMWRNJ which was nice. One the people on the table next to us said he had visited the Comedy NET and it was the experience of his lifetime to meet two such extraordinary, lively characters with such a great deal of time for their fans (OK, so I’m paraphrasing the last bit but that was the gist). We got back to Exeter at 4:30 ish and then went home and went to bed. I couldn’t sleep though because I’m a bit of an insomniac and so I watched two hours of TMWRNJ and as many Friends episodes that I could find – which is a lot. Anyway it was a rather fun day and we’re going on lots more trips this year and we’re even going on tour (of some kind). If you do see us on a train, or bus or at a studio come over and talk to us. We’re not complete bastards like some funny people (read Cannon & Ball. Plymouth 1990 – damn them to hell)