By Caroline Dowse

Spin my nipple nuts and send me to Alaska...Red Dwarf is back! It's been almost two years since series X - too long for us Dwarfers - but last night's opening episode was worth the wait.

Titled Twentica, it saw the geriatric crew heading back in time to 1950s America to stop a group of simulants called the Exponoids enslaving the human race. In a neat twist on the Prohibition era, it wasn't booze that was banned but technology, so there was a nice scene set in a lab where scientists worked on their illegal experiments. When it was raided by the police, they turned the place into a bar, complete with jazz band and flapper girls.

As always, its the one liners that make Red Dwarf. In one scene an electo-magnetic pulse hit Starbug, knocking out Kryten and Rimmer. "Kryten's been fried like a Mars bar in Scotland!" Lister cried.

And there were jokes aimed purely at the science nerds among us too.

"How dense do you think I am?" a police officer asked one of the flapper girl scientists.

"I don't know. Divide your mass by your volume," she spat back.

This feels like a return to form for Red Dwarf after the misfires of series VII, VIII and the feature length episode that debuted on Dave. The cast have slipped easily back into their roles and the writing is as good as ever, but it did prompt a couple of questions for me: A) Why isn't Chris Barrie on telly more? and B) Why did the BBC axe it in the first place?

Still, the boys seem to have found their natural home on Dave and there's another series planned for next year so there's a lot more RD to come.

Anyway, back to this series. Having seen some previews of future episodes, I can't wait to watch rest of it. Roll on next week's episode.

Engaging countdown mode...