Opening titles narration:
- "My name is Alex Drake, and quite frankly, your guess is as good as mine."
When Ray (Dean Andrews) is brandishing a banana like a gun at Luigi's, Gene (Philip Glenister) says, "Oi, Billy the Flid", referring to the punchline of the sick joke "What do you call a cowboy with no arms?" This refers to the victims of the drug thalidomide, which was used in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a morning sickness cure for expectant mothers, which resulted in severe birth defects such as missing limbs.
Chris (Marshall Lancaster) says, "Can I have a crack at Missile Command?", referring to the arcade video game released by Atari in 1980.
Marjorie (Tanya Franks) says she met David Blonde (Simon Merrells) in Tandy's. Tandy was a chain of electronic stores in the UK from the early 1970s onward. In 1999, the UK stores were taken over by Carphone Warehouse and were either closed or turned into Carphone Warehouse outlets. The parent company Tandy, was an American company founded in 1919 by Norton Hinckley and Dave L. Tandy. Originally a leather goods shop, they changed direction when they bought out the electronics chain Radio Shack in the US in 1963. Along with Commodore International, Atari, and Apple, Tandy were one of the first companies to start the personal computer revolution in the US with their TRS-80 (1977) and TRS-80 colour (1980) line of computers.
The metafiction sequence set in the present day showed several homages to Back to Earth (Part One) (2009). Not only were the show's characters shown on every television screen in the store, but the cast were depicted on DVD covers (similar to the DVD cases Kryten picks up in Back to Earth: Part 2). Red Dwarf: Back to Earth 1-3 were first broadcast on satellite channel "Dave" from 10-12 April 2009.