New Dwarf

According to the BBC Red Dwarf: Back to Earth pulled in record figures for Dave.

But let's look at it closely. A figure of "over 2m" is quoted as the audience for the first episode. This figure falls to 1.7m for the second episode, and falls further to 1.3m for the third. That's a fall-off of about 35%, which is NotGood, and indicates that the viewers thought it was crap.

The report also quotes a figure of 8m viewers for Red Dwarf at the height of its' popularity, back when it was on BBC2. Now, not all the fans of the originals will have digital TV, and not everyone who watched it last century was a hard-core fan. The specials had quite a bit of advance and pre-broadcast publicity - they weren't hard to find, in other words. So, from the numbers, we can deduce that the revival of Red Dwarf wasn't all-that hotly-anticipated, nor was it warmly received.

And that does not surprise me one bit.