being gay before the smartphone era mustve been awful because they couldnt send dick pics and just had to hope the hookup was packin heavy
maybe there could be some kind of speed dating with an intervening glory hole and you could pass little slips of paper through the hole with contact info if u were into it
This feels like a fun opportunity to reflect on the confluence of reasons that the first five or so seasons of Red Dwarf have an extremely low-profile, analog approach to technology in spite of being science fiction. On top of now being an old show in its own right, the early seasons had vanishingly small budgets for costumes, props, and set dressings. Even later on, as the show's production values grow, there's no reasonable way to indulge in a Star Trek vision of slick tablets and neon touchscreens, since most of the props are barely disguised contemporary tech. The result is that same "working class spacer tech" that Alien gets so much press for; lots of clacky, beige keyboards and magnetic tape storage drives. In this context, Lister can get stunlocked by a Double Polaroid and the audience hardly has a reason to wonder about where they scored undeveloped Polaroid film long after the end of human civilization.
I recall one of the actors mentioning in an interview that the rack of "tapes" in the Teaching Room were one of the "only splashes of color" the budget allowed, and that the DoP ended up trying to frame shots in such a way that the tapes would be visible just to keep things from being entirely gray and beige. 