Although the group has been retrospectively identified with the New Romantic movement of this period, according to Dave Rimmer, author of New Romantics: The Look, " at the time were no such thing.

In turn, this has pushed Rimmer to several psychotic episodes and breakdowns during exams, and on one occasion caused him to write " I am a fish " repeatedly on the exam paper.

Rimmer has been known to be called " bonehead " and " smeghead ".

As a " soft-light " hologram, Rimmer retains his memories and physical appearance, but is composed of light and has no tangible form ( other than a small " light bee " projection unit when away from Red Dwarf ).

Because he is resurrected as he was at the time of the accident, he lacks any of the growth that the ' other ' Rimmer has gone through since the series began, reverting him back to his original persona.

As the highest ranking survivor aboard the ship ( despite being a hologram ), Rimmer often deludes himself into believing that he is in charge and that he has somehow been moulding " his " crew into an effective spacegoing unit, despite the fact that the others tend to take suggestions from Lister or Kryten in a crisis.

Although Rimmer ultimately succeeds in destroying the opposing army, his forces are completely wiped out when he uses most of them as a diversion and then has Kryten turn up the heating to melt all the droids.

Rimmer has also been attempting to learn Esperanto for eight years, but has failed miserably.

He has attempted to coerce Lister to shoot a dangerous Simulant in the back ( bemoaning the fact that said Simulant was currently awake ), suggested shooting Kryten and Lister into space when they appeared on the ship in a timeline where they had been erased from history, suggested that he and Kryten eject Lister and Cat from Starbug when it was revealed that the ship lacked fuel to reach the nearest planet-although this was also prompted by the discovery that the ship only had air for seven minutes and was ended when Rimmer learned that his projection unit only had enough power for four minutes -, and casually pushed a fellow hologram into traffic after she repeatedly threatened to have him " erased ".

When Lister and The Cat respond to a drill too slowly, Rimmer argues for increased discipline and sensible haircuts, believing that " every major battle in history has been won by the side with the shortest haircuts " ( resulting in the Cat insulting his hair-do by saying ' that he had hair like his, just not on his head ').

Rimmer is constantly accusing Lister of stupidity but Lister has actually been shown to be quite intelligent on several occasions and his lack of motivation is really what holds him back.

While he continues to be a sanitation droid, and to enjoy cleaning and serving others, he has also become the science expert amongst the Dwarfers, often leading missions such as their search for Rimmer on the psi-moon in " Terrorform ".

The dichotomy between these two aspects of his personality has led to Rimmer naming him things such as " Captain Bog-bot " and " Commander U-Bend ".

His greatest ambition is to be human, and to this end he has attempted to learn to lie and insult people ( mostly Rimmer ), although he has trouble with the words " smeg head " ( the best he can manage is " smeeeeeeee heeeeeeeee ").

In the episode " Confidence and Paranoia ", Lister ( along with a physical manifestation of his confidence ) hits upon an idea of how to generate two holograms at once and also deduces where Rimmer has hidden the personality discs – only to discover too late that Kochanski's personality disc has been switched for a duplicate of Rimmer's.

His comedy has a quiet, dead-pan surrealism, and in 2000 he made a successful stand up tour, co-headlining with Chris Barrie, who played Rimmer in Red Dwarf.

Rimmer has appeared mainly in supporting roles – especially in films and television series produced in the United Kingdom, having emigrated to England in the late 1950s, initially performing as a cabaret singer before auditioning for Thunderbirds.

Rimmer has a long-running association with TV producer Gerry Anderson.

Rimmer's habit of quoting Space Corps directives eventually becomes a key part of his personality, so much so that when Lister begins to miss Rimmer in in Series VII, Episode " Blue ", he has a homoerotic dream in which Kochanski's inability to cite Space Corps directives is seen as a defect:

' ( PBS ident, also included on the DVD for series VIII ; Kryten complains that Rimmer has just made it up )

With the Apocalypse boys vapourised, Lister and The Cat return to reality to find the virus has killed both Kryten and Rimmer, destroying their mechanical components beyond repair.

Robert Rimmer stated, " Little did I know as a growing fetus in Blanche's womb that twenty-nine years later Relief Printing Corporation would own me, and FH, as I began to call him (" Dad " seemed inappropriate when I was finally in business with him ), would be subtly controlling my life.

Rimmer stated, " I transformed portions of my realities into fiction.

The original Red Dwarf came equipped with at least four Starbug vessels, as Starbugs are abandoned in " Backwards " and " Terrorform " as a result of crashes by Rimmer and Kryten, with Lister and Cat retrieving the two in another Starbug both times, and in " Bodyswap " after Rimmer ( using Lister's body ) crashes it and is retrieved by the others in Blue Midget.

Painting by William Rimmer: scene from Macbeth, depicting the witches ' conjuring of an apparition in Act IV, Scene I

When challenged, Rimmer claims he can quote from it and embarks upon the soliloquy: " Now !... That's all I can remember.

In the series Red Dwarf, Earth is seen mainly as the goal of the crew's trip ; Dave Lister is personally obsessed with revisiting it as his home world, especially since he is the only character to be from there as Arnold Rimmer was born on Io.

In series eight, a self-fulfilling prophecy started by the words " Rimmer will die in forty seconds of a heart attack from the shock of being told he's going to have a heart attack ".

His father had been rejected from the Space Corps in his youth for being an inch below regulation height, and was thus fixated on all his sons succeeding where he had failed ; to which end, he refused to allow them to eat unless they could answer complicated astronavigation questions, and stretched them on a rack to make them taller causing Rimmer to reach a great height at an early age.

Rimmer attended a boarding school from age 8 to 18 where he used to sleep wearing boxing gloves and was visited by his future self ( this being the Hologram Rimmer telling him to plagiarize a future invention, when he was 18 he joined a Polytechnic and studied maintenance.

Rimmer claims that he lost his virginity in the back of his brother's Bentley with a girl named Sandra though this was said in order to hide from Lister the fact that he actually lost it to Yvonne McGruder.

Three million years later, when Lister was brought out of stasis, Rimmer was chosen by Holly to be reactivated as a hologram in order to keep Lister company and prevent him from being driven insane with loneliness.

After an encounter with a female despair squid, Rimmer and the rest of the crew hallucinate an alternate reality in which they are fictional characters and their lives are just a TV show that they have somehow escaped from.

Despite his cowardice, and tendency to run from any kind of danger or fight, Rimmer is the member of the crew most willing to kill, preferably in the safest and most cowardly way possible, although, due to a mixture of cowardice, and the fact that for much of the series he cannot physically harm anyone, he seldom manages to.

* Rimmer Dall, a fictional character from the Heritage of Shannara series by Terry Brooks

*" The Birthday " was recorded by The Fall with vocals by then-bandmember Lucy Rimmer and no apparent contributions from bandleader Mark E. Smith ; it was released as " Birthday " on their 1996 compilation album Sinister Waltz.

Lister was left as presumably the last human being in the universe, accompanied on Red Dwarf by a hologram simulation of Rimmer and a humanoid creature that evolved from his cat.

For example, he managed to learn the international language Esperanto from Rimmer's tapes, while Rimmer himself was unable to.

Later on, Rimmer attempts to fight back by quoting from the same regulations, but his imperfect recall of the Directives means that he normally quotes the wrong paragraph number and instead references obscure and bizarre Directives that have little or no relevance to the situation at hand.

In order to buy Kryten time, the crew ( Rimmer, Lister and The Cat ), adopt personas from a VR Western game, Streets of Larado, and enter the game to assist him.

He continued to play in goal for Manchester United in a period of significant underachievement for the club, which culminated in their relegation to the Second Division in 1974, a season which saw Stepney, unusually for a goalkeeper, score two goals from penalties thus making him the ( joint ) leading scorer at Christmas For half a season he was replaced by Jimmy Rimmer.

Following on from Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, Lister, Rimmer and The Cat have discovered a cache of ' Better Than Life ' headbands in one of the sleeping quarters.

* Eudora J. Struble and Virginia Rimmer Herrmann, An Eternal Feast at Sam? al: The New Iron Age Mortuary Stele from Zincirli in Context, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, vol.