Camille

Lister begins to try and break Kryten's programming in order to make him able to lie, cheat and be insulting. Kryten then takes Rimmer asteroid-spotting in Starbug, and when they receive a distress call from a doomed ship Lister's insubordination training allows Kryten to go and search for survivors despite Rimmer's order to keep a safe distance away. He finds Camille, who appears to him to be a female 4000 GTi mechanoid: "You’ve got all those little extras like realistic toes and a slide back sun-roof head!" The two fall instantly in love. When all four crew members see different people, and all fall in love, the truth outs: she is a Pleasure GELF, designed to be everyone's perfect mate. She reverts to her real appearance (a big green blob), but Kryten still takes her out on a date. The relationship is put in jeopardy when Camille's partner Hector arrives. In a pastiche of the end of Casablanca (one of the movies Lister made him watch to see how lying can be noble), Kryten convinces Camille to be with her partner, then laments that Lister taught him how to lie so effectively.


Cast notes

• The droid version of the GELF was played by Judy Pascoe, Robert Llewellyn's then girlfriend (they have since married). She was also the voice of the blob version. Robert has often joked how he use to complain to Judy about the amount of make-up he has to endure, and yet when Judy wore it she had no complaints.

Broadcast

• This episode was originally planned to be transmitted as the third episode of the fourth series, and indeed was transmitted as so in repeat runs in both 1992 and 1994, but on the series' original transmission it was felt more appropriate to run the episode on Valentine's Day and so it went out first. Further changes to the series' running order came about because of the outbreak of the Gulf War and the subject matter of some of the other episodes.

Continuity

• Kryten first lied in the previous episode "The Last Day" when he told the droid there was no Silicon Heaven, even though in this episode, Lister taught him how to lie.
• Lister's love of the movie Casablanca was first revealed in "Better Than Life". At the time, however, he considered the (fictional) remake starring Peter Beardsley and Myra Binglebat to be the definitive version.