Does anyone remember the BBC series Red Dwarf being funny?
I thought it was. But I found Red Dwarf fans even funnier. Back in the 1990s they proved an endless source of hilarity for me and my fellow students at Manchester University. We considered ourselves to be the epitome of cool, living reckless lager-fuelled lives, missing lectures, going to all the trendy clubs, living on Marlboro Lights, amphetamines and doner kebabs, and reading a bit of Derrida and Foucault in the meantime. How we used to scorn the students at the rival college, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), what with their pasty faces, greasy hair, rolled-up cigarettes and predilection for real ale and scrumpy. How we used to find their science and engineering courses philistine in comparison to our more noble pursuit of more abstract and meaningful truth via English, History or the Classics. And you could always spot a geeky UMIST student because he was wearing a Red Dwarf t-shirt, or emerging bleary-eyed from an all-night Star Trek showing at
