First off, Happy Easter you lovely telly fans, hope you’re getting animated over last night’s Doctor Who with foil wrapping strewn all around. And so to Red Dwarf – presumably you watched the first episode and were terribly disappointed? Some of you may have even given up, and watched Britain’s Got Talent instead of last night’s episode – but that would have been a shame. Because there were green shoots, ladies and gentlemen, the green shoots of improvement…

Related: All our Dwarfian delights…

To put this review into context, I should really give you my thoughts on Part One, but to be honest you could just go and re-read John’s review – it was thin, slow, short on gags, and strangely lacking in atmosphere (yes, they’re in space, there’s no atmosphere to begin with, but you know what I mean). It looked spectacular, of course, it really did, but – and it’s not often I say this – it missed the live studio audience.

In interviews, Chris Barrie has said that the single camera set-up has allowed them to give a more ‘natural’ performance rather than playing up to the audience, but since when has Red Dwarf been about natural performances? It’s about silly plotlines, daft puns and Lister being ‘disgusting, but sometimes quite brave’ as that girl said on the bus in last night’s episode.

Thankfully, there was a lot more of that in Part 2. I’m not going to hail it as a masterpiece, but this had much more of the Red Dwarf I grew up with – in particular, the silliness that makes you giggle despite yourself. And the story actually began in earnest, with our heroes pulled through into a dimension (presumably ours) in which they really are just characters in the TV show Red Dwarf. Taking the blurb on a preview DVD of their final adventure as their guide, they embark on a ‘metaphysical odyssey’ to find their creator and beg for more episodes.

At this point, I was regretting having volunteered to review this part – I never wanted to be in the position of having to declare to you all that a Red Dwarf storyline was beyond me. Luckily, it got no more complicated than that, though, and the guys simply went off to find someone who could help, and who better than the owner of a sci-fi memorabilia shop? The ‘sorry to interrupt your WarHammer’ joke did smack a little of biting the hand that feeds, but the Blade Runner “enhance photograph, turn 170 degrees, flip, find a raindrop, zoom in on the reflection, invert” parody made all members of my household laugh out loud.

This sort of storyline is always going to feel self-indulgent, and the episode itself felt very quick (one feature-length episode may have been a better idea) but there were some nice touches – having Rimmer flick through carpet samples in a home furnishing store was particularly inspired. If tonight’s finale boasts an improvement as great as the one between parts one and two, it’ll be well worth sticking with.