A popular event celebrating iconic shows on the small screen is returning for its fourth edition this November. Taking place at three Birmingham venues - Midlands Arts Centre (MAC), Mockingbird Cinema and The Heath Bookshop, Square Eyes TV Festival features a carefully curated programme of screenings and talks based around much-loved shows like The Sopranos, Trigger Happy TV, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Prisoner Cell Block H. Chris Barrie, of Red Dwarf and The Brittas Empire fame, will launch this year’s festival by chatting about his career in a special Audience With... event on Friday 1 November. What’s On recently caught up with him to talk Rimmer, Brittas, and everything in between...

Not many actors can claim even to have one classic character on their CV, but Chris Barrie has two: uptight spaceship technician Arnold Rimmer from Red Dwarf and oblivious leisure-centre manager Gordon Brittas from classic 1990s sitcom The Brittas Empire. 

This November, TV icon Chris will be talking about his televisual career at Midlands Arts Centre’s Square Eyes TV Festival, a big celebration of the small screen that offers audiences the chance to hear from the cast and crew of their favourite shows, which this year includes Prisoner Cell Block H, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Brass Eye.

The notion of what television actually is has changed considerably over the last decade. What started out as a box in your living room has now morphed into streaming on demand and searching through YouTube on the bus. Chris - who was born in 1960 - came to television in its nascent days. 

“I started watching TV when I went to boarding school,” he remembers. “I watched shows like Doctor Who - which was just at the tail end of the Patrick Troughton years - but there wasn’t actually a lot of comedy on TV at that time. It was only in the 70s that I remember seeing comedy shows like Morecambe & Wise and people like Mike Yarwood doing impressions, who was a big influence on me.”

Impressions were what made Chris. His talent for mimicking famous politicians saw him appear in popular TV series like Carrott’s Lib and Spitting Image, with a Carrott’s Lib Election Special in 1983 specifically helping to put him on the map. “That was my launching pad. That election special was really one of the first times you were allowed to do political jokes on TV. We had 12 million people watching, and the live audience were laughing like drains because they finally had a conduit to laugh at politicians.”

Chris’ rise in comedy also coincided with the rise of alternative comedy, which started to seep from the live stage into television. Look at his CV and you see an incredible line-up of TV shows that came to define a major change in comedy, including The Young Ones, Blackadder and The New Statesman. Chris worked with the likes of Jennifer Saunders, Rik Mayall, Rowan Atkinson and Adrian Edmondson, cementing himself as a key player in a time period that saw British society start to become increasingly sceptical of authority. 

“There were two producers blazing a trail at the time in comedy. One of them was Paul Jackson, with shows like The Young Ones, and the other was John Lloyd, with Not The Nine O’Clock News and Blackadder. I was one of the people lucky enough to be starting out at the time. 1983 was such a huge year for comedy, and that’s also the year I did a radio show called Son Of Cliché with Rob Grant and Doug Naylor.”

Ah yes, Grant and Naylor - the duo who would give Chris the role that has come to define him, not least because he’s been playing it for over 30 years: Arnold Rimmer. Launched in 1988 on BBC Two, Red Dwarf should never have worked. A low-budget sci-fi sitcom that marries complex plots with silly gags, the show somehow became a worldwide phenomenon that’s still being made today. How does Chris explain the show’s longevity?

“The bedrock for Red Dwarf has always been the writing,” he says, with obvious enthusiasm. “The writing has been consistently good throughout the run, and so has the chemistry between the cast, which is something we’ve built up over three decades. I think the show’s continued popularity is a marriage of those two things. Craig [Charles], Danny [John-Jules], Robert [Llewellyn] and me are all very different people, but put us together on screen and we’ve created this thing that just… works!”

Whilst Rimmer has always been what people know Chris best for, there’s another long-running role he inhabited: Gordon Brittas, the irritating leisure-centre manager from BBC sitcom The Brittas Empire. Across seven series, Brittas contended with a furious goose, a squash-court massacre and Roman soldiers laying siege to his office. It was a gloriously mad series - and filming it was just as chaotic. 

“It was a weird show even for BBC One, but the actual making of Brittas was quite frustrating. With Red Dwarf, you have this amazing attention to detail and lots of agonising over whether or not something should be in the show. It was very different on Brittas. One director said, ‘We’ll just do three takes and use whichever has the best feel to it.’ I’d think, ‘Hang on, didn’t somebody fluff their line in that scene? Surely we’re not moving on already?!’ So you had to get it right in the first three takes. But I loved Brittas, and I loved the cast and crew, and it was on at a time when there were so many great comedies on TV, like Only Fools & Horses and Keeping Up Appearances.”

But what of Chris’ own viewing habits? Does he watch much TV himself, or is it a bit of a busman’s holiday for him? 

“Not lots, and I don’t watch much comedy. My sons say, ‘Dad, you never laugh at anything,’ and I tell them, ‘Well, I’ve kind of seen that joke before!’ I really like The Big Bang Theory, though - some of the performances in that show are great. Sheldon is a very funny character. And as for drama, Breaking Bad is probably as good as TV can ever be, to be honest. It was one of the only shows I’ve ever watched where I actually said to the family, ‘I want to watch another one to see what happens next.’ So you end up sitting there for four or five hours straight, which is very unlike me!”

Feature by David Baldwin

Square Eyes TV Festival takes place at Birmingham’s Midlands Arts Centre (MAC), The Mockingbird Cinema and The Heath Bookshop from Friday 1 to Sunday 10 November. For full listings, visit macbirmingham.co.uk