It feels like this sitcom has been around since the dawn of time itself. The show first appeared on our screens on BBC2 back in the space year 1988.

Since then it's been on again off again more times than Prince Harry and Chelsy Davy to the point that the show, nearly a quarter of a decade since it first aired, returned with a tenth series earlier this year.

All the original cast – Chris Barrie as Rimmer, Craig Charles as Lister, Robert Llewellyn as Kryten and Danny John-Jules as Cat – returned to the deck of the mining ship known as Red Dwarf for these six new episodes.

Although the series and episodes are all self-contained, it's not really recommended for anyone who has never really seen the show before. Not because they won't get the in-jokes, purely on the basis that it isn't very funny.

Writer and director Doug Naylor may have access to some impressive tech, as it's highly possible that he travelled through time – back to the eighties – to write this series. Either that or this new series is just insufferably dated.

Or maybe Naylor has been cryogenically frozen for the last thirty odd years and hasn't realised that comedy tastes have generally become more sophisticated – Mrs Brown's Boys and Citizen Khan notwithstanding.

The cast of Red Dwarf contemplate the news that their careers are officially over and this is all they'll be doing for the rest of their lives.

Ironically enough Naylor and his team went to great pains to get this series filmed in front of a studio audience (and from the achingly long behind the scenes feature on the DVD, the show definitely attracts a very particular crowd, who look like they carry multi-sided die in their pockets in case an impromptu session of a role playing game breaks out), only for the results to sound as authentic as canned laughter.

This then is for the hardcore (multi-sided, die carrying) fans; it is, after all, their fault that the show has come back from the dead like the most unwelcome of zombies, time and time again. And it really is only this small band of loyal fans who will truly appreciate the tired, retro-comedic adventures of the crew of Red Dwarf.

And we'll only have them to blame if Red Dwarf XIV premieres in 2038 on the Red Dwarf channel, with the same old cast – now appearing as just their heads in a large jar as in Futurama - dishing out exactly the same dirge for their balding, bearded fan base.