Arnold Judas Rimmer started life as a tragic smeghead and ended up dead: as a tragic smeghead hologram. He left home at sixteen to become an officer and a gentleman and ended up as a chicken soup machine operative. Even in this lowly position he was responsible for inadvertently killing the entire crew of Red Dwarf: his punishment was to spend eternity as a hologram denied the power of touch.  The problem for the surviving members is Rimmer's personality has stayed exactly the same - he was, and is, a petty-minded, jumped-up, anal-retentive megalomaniac with delusions of competence. While the others enjoy all-night card sessions, he takes his pleasure in solo games of Risk, playing with his collection of model soldiers and jogging around the ship. Not the universe's most fun individual.  But there's a pathetic side to his character. He knows he's at the bottom of the metaphorical slime-bucket, and even when he has the opportunity to remedy his sexual inexperience and have sex twice a day with a beautiful female hologram, events conspire against him.  After seven series of Red Dwarf, Rimmer continues to excel as the ship's token tosspot. We've learnt all there is to know about him and he is less lovable than ever.

Having friends in high places is not always a guarantee of career advancement. Chris Barrie was well-known to Rob Grant and Doug Naylor through his work with them on radio and then Carrott's Lib. By the time Red Dwarf was in the pipeline, Barrie was working with Grant and Naylor on Spitting Image. Yet, when the writers were casting the series the voice-over king was barely in the running.   Barrie takes up the story: "I think Rob, Doug and Paul Jackson were in two minds whether to do it with legitimate actors or people they had worked with in the past, and I fell into the latter camp. Eventually I got a letter saying, 'Thanks, but we're going with legitimate actors'. Then three weeks later they decided to go with us lot."  Despite his lack of acting experience, Barrie was clearly ready to play a man as dead as a can of Spam. He'd got his Equity card doing impressions on the stand-up circuit, having been sacked from every previous job he'd ever had, and since then the work has just snowballed.

Over the years, Barrie has intimately observed the evolution of Rimmer. It hasn't been a pretty sight: "In early days he was looked upon as a sheer bastard for no apparent reason. But he's dead and can't touch things, which is a good enough reason for being bad-tempered, fed-up and grumpy. But we couldn't always have him saying: 'By the way, I'm dead, which is why I'm being such a git', so the other thing was to have horrible things, like the sacrificial virgin thing in 'Terrorform', happen to him.  Chris Barrie believes that sometimes you can forget what a gimboid Rimmer really is: "You only realise what a complete dingbat Arnie is when you meet Ace Rimmer and see what he would have been like if he had been successful. What we are ultimately trying to say is that Rimmer is pathetic really, and it is probably better to feel sorry for him than to hate him. Rimmer gives you a reason to hate the others, because they are so horrible to him. But, at the end, if he wins something, there's always a glint in his eye that says: 'I'm a bastard after all, and I hate these three smegheads.'"

Barrie also has to cope with the familiar TV ailment, where fans write to the actor confusing him with the character: "Strangely, I don't get many proposals of marriage, but a lot of people want to know about me. Some want me to draw around my palm and send it back. Some want to know how old I was when I ate my first Topic bar. And some want to know how I felt when I went into stasis for the third time. I think they feel sorry for me."  Fortunately for him, the similarities between Barrie and Rimmer, despite a remarkable physical resemblance, are minimal: "Rimmer is a dreamer, but he is brought down to earth in every episode and realises that he is a complete smeghead. It always ends with his ego shrinking down to the size of a small radish."  Barrie is hard-pressed to come up with one favourite episode. In Red Dwarf V things hotted up for him in 'Holoship' when Rimmer actually had sex and fell in love, but every series had equally high points: "I loved 'Better Than Life' and 'Dimension Jump', doing Ace Rimmer was a good acting challenge, being a James Bond character with a silly wig."

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