User:John Stephenson/sandbox

Gordon Brown (born 20th February 1951) is the current prime minister of the United Kingdom and leader of the government of the United Kingdom Labour Party. He is also a Member of Parliament for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath in his native Scotland, and holds a PhD in politics from the University of Edinburgh.

Brown succeeded his political rival Tony Blair as prime minister in June 2007; much has been made of the differences between the two men, though Brown remains a supporter of the centre-left 'New' Labour ideology in which socialism plays no part. He is said to be slightly more left-wing than Blair, and slightly cooler towards the 'special relationship' between the UK and the USA. However, the two share a similar outlook over the Iraq War, a conflict Brown supported, and on a more practical level, he has pledged to continue his predecessor's commitment to addressing climate change and international terrorism.

Prior to taking office as premier, Brown served for ten years as the UK's finance minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Those ten years since 'New' Labour was first elected in 1997 were often marked by behind-the-scenes feuding between the so-called 'Brownite' and 'Blairite' camps; in one memorable instance, an anonymous briefing declared Brown "psychologically flawed." More recently, documents appeared in the mass media suggesting that Blair intended to remove Brown from the Treasury and offer him the post of foreign minister.

References

• Brown JG (1982) The Labour Party and political change in Scotland, 1918-1929: the politics of five elections. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh.

External links

• 10 Downing Street - official website for the UK prime minister's office
• Timeline: Blair vs Brown - details on the ups and downs of the Blair-Brown partnership, from the BBC

See also

• Chancellor of the Exchequer
• Tony Blair

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Red Dwarf is a science fiction situation comedy originally aired on British television by the BBC in 1988. By the final series in 1999, it gone from a cult television favourite to mainstream success, spawning several original novelisations and accompanying merchandise. Interest in Red Dawarf remains high, with a loyal fan base and continuing attempts to launch a movie version of the series.

Red Dwarf was created by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, Manchester-based scriptwriting partners who worked under the pseudonym Grant Naylor. Their partnership lasted from the late 1970s, when they worked on several series together and wrote material for various comedians such as Jasper Carrott. During this time, they were attempting to get a sci-fi sitcom into production, with the central character the last human in the universe. In 1983, this saw the light of day on radio as Dave Hollins: Space Cadet, though Grant and Naylor continued to approach the BBC with a script made for television which took this basic idea and expanded it. This script, which was rejected by the BBC for three years, was called Red Dwarf, after the mining ship on which the central character would find himself almost alone.

The BBC rejected the script several times because it was felt that a sitcom with science-fiction elements would not work. Grant and Naylor kept submitting basically the same script through the producer Paul Jackson, who eventually convinced the corporation to commission six episodes. Red Dwarf aired five years after Dave Hollins was first broadcast.

The new programme had been considerably changed and expanded upon. Hollins became Dave Lister, a lazy and rather unkempt employee of the Jupiter Mining Corporation, who has the dubious honour of being the lowest-ranked crew member of the JMC's gigantic ship Red Dwarf, a vessel sent through the solar system on a mining expedition. His room-mate is Arnold Rimmer, a deeply competitive, throughly nasty incompentent who has reached the dizzying heights of second-lowest rank aboard the ship. Lister is punished for bringing aboard an unquarantined cat by being placed in suspended animation for eighteen months; however, while he and his cat are respectively sealed in stasis and the ship's hold, a radiation leak kills everyone else on board.

Having set up the idea of a ship the size of a city, Grant and Naylor now had Lister almost alone in the universe; three million years have passed before Red Dwarf's computer, the artificially-(un)intelligent Holly, was able to release him unharmed. Whereas Dave Hollins had only the ship's computer for company, Dave Lister was given two new companions: a hologram simulation of the long-dead Rimmer, and Cat, apparently the last of a race of feline humanoids that evolved from Lister's pet. With the crew reduced to dust (as Lister discovered, but not before accidentally eating some of their remains), these four characters would find themselves travelling through an empty universe; initially confined to the ship, the series moved towards comedy drama as more money flowed into the production team's coffers and more special effects and location filming was made possible.