“It’s cold outside,” go the lyrics of the theme tune during the closing credits, “there’s no kind of atmosphere…” Hey, never mind outside. There’s no kind of atmosphere in here either.

You know those dreams where you’re on the bus, or at school, or in the office and then you realise you’ve got no trousers on? That’s how I felt halfway through this final part. During some of the most lazy writing I’ve ever encountered on a TV show, when the Blade Runner homage had wound up to full volume. When it had become less an homage and more of an out-and-out copy. Blade Runner, one of the most discussed and analysed movies among its fans, and certainly the one that’s been subjected to the greatest number of director’s cuts, is so familiar that watching a cheap rip-off of Zhora running, falling and dying through her plate glass windows looks exactly like that: a cheap rip-off.

Once again the whole thing was cleverly done, with great sfx, cool sets and mattes, but spread thickly with self-referential, self-indulgent pap which left a nasty taste in the mouth and pitifully few gags in the belly.

If you want to see how dimensional travel into the worlds of fiction should be done, read Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast, and even that ranks as possibly his worst, most self-congratulatory work. But hard sci-fi is not what we’re looking for in Red Dwarf, is it? Is it? First and foremost it’s a comedy. It just happens to be set in space. A few well-realised characters stuck in a limited space getting on each other’s nerves. It might as well be Porridge, but with the prison cell supplanted by the mining ship. So I’m sorry to state the obvious, but comedy should be funny and this just wasn’t, for the most part.

The biggest laugh of the whole mini-series for me was Kryten’s “I’ll stand at the bottom of our stairs and eat a barm cake,” when visiting The Kabin looking for Craig Charles. I didn’t go so far as to actually count the laughs, but they were so few that I easily could have. Not enough pay-off for an investment of 90 minutes in my view. Maybe Anna would have been kinder. Maybe her green shoots from episode 2 flowered and fruited in episode three. For me, they withered and died. There were glimpses of the old genius, both in the writing and the acting, but sorry to say, the magic has gone. On the basis of what I’ve seen the last three nights, another series would only be a waste of time and money for all involved, especially the audience.