In many ways, things were a lot better in 1988. I was 11, dressed from head to toe in Tammy Girl, recording Tiffany off the radio, falling off my pogoball. Life was simpler then. Well, strictly speaking it wasn’t, as we were allowed outdoors, which automatically made things more interesting and complicated. Maggie was delighting Eurosceptics with her Bruges speech, the NHS lurching from crisis to crisis, IRA rampaging, Phillip Schofield in the closet - sorry, broom cupboard - and no one had an iPhone. It was probably pretty shit then, tbh, but I wasn’t old enough to notice. One thing I do remember though, is that I was watching Red Dwarf, and it was definitely not shit.

I’m planting my flag in this scarlet spaceship – the Neil Armstrong of Dwarfers. Loved it. Loved the wild innovation of the plots; the withering one-liners; the gleeful silliness; the pin-sharp characterisation that held it all together. But that was three million years ago, and a lot’s evolved since then. Do I still love it? I wanted to find out, so I watched The Promised Land, a brand-new feature-length special.

Initially, I didn’t love it. I’d forgotten about the laughter track, which seems so much more intrusive nowadays, the audience chortling, craven and OTT. Lister and co looked pitifully aged, some of their accents dubious, occasionally Craig Charles seemed on the point of a self-indulgent corpse. All in all, it was shonky, the flimsy set a Cat hair’s breadth from falling in on itself. But then I started to see the light…

With a rebooted Holly bent on destroying them, the crew escape on Starbug, stumbling on a ship called the Iron Star. It’s packed with new tech, including a form of hologrammatic projection called 'Diamond Light', which gives holograms superhero abilities. Naturally, Rimmer is immediately on board. Brazenly refusing safety checks, he has his own program updated, giving him amazing powers, but after a few minutes he shuts down, destroying his Light Bee's battery with just a few minutes’ juice remaining. Now he can only exist if he’s connected to a mains power supply, following everyone around carrying his own extension cable. For sheer visual comedy, watching Rimmer hustle along space ship corridors unravelling his power cord behind him is hard to beat. I began to snigger, and from then on was hooked – or, at least, plugged in.

It’s a jolly jape that brings Lister’s godlike-status among felis sapiens to fruition, and sees the crew buried alive in a sandstorm on a desert moon, implausibly saved by a re-rebooted Holly blowing it up. Rimmer’s superhero powers are briefly restored by a magical stone secreted in beetle dung, but he ultimately sacrifices his abilities to kickstart a comatose Kryten, thus taking himself back to his original – mediocre – form. Rodon, the ruthless - and godless - feline tyrant is eventually undone by the simple mechanism of a laser pointer, which drives his henchcats to distraction.

The gemstone in the beetle dung of Red Dwarf is its unbridled absurdity, and the stagnant state of the crewmates - their complete inability to be anything other than they are, to end up anywhere other than the confines of a crap, out-of-date mining craft. For filming purposes this was always handy, but it’s the essence of great sitcomery – the essential trap that keeps pulling them back where they started. Like Rimmer always returning to his power source, a limited radius is what pulls us back, to what we know will happen, again and again. And in times of trouble, you go back to what you know, even if it’s not quite as good as you remember.

So, in the end, I liked – not loved - it, and it did take me back to the 80s, when I watched it reclining in my bean bag, while mum and dad got stuck into the Asti Spumante. It had the same ingredients, just rebooted, and if some of them were a bit loosely wired, well, I can live with that. And if you can’t, you’re a smeghead.

• Red Dwarf: The Promised Land – 90-minute special, Dave, April 2020