Conditioning through comedy.
In this episode of Red Dwarf series 5 called Back to Reality, which originally aired in March 1992, the crew is attacked by a giant "despair squid". This results in a group hallucination which convinces the crew that what they had thought was reality was actually a computer game they had been playing for the last four years - à la The Matrix.
There was an episode of Red Dwarf series 2 called Better Than Life - • Video - which originally aired in September 1988, which also featured an artificial reality game - www.imdb.com/title/tt0094535/e...
There was also an episode of Red Dwarf series 6 called Gunmen of the Apocalypse, originally aired in October 1993, which involved an artificial reality computer simulation game - • Video
In the 9th and probably final series, Back to Earth, the crew of Red Dwarf finds out that they are fictional characters, which also happens in the movie spin-off of the dark British sitcom The League of Gentleman.
The crew go back to earth and meet Craig Charles (the actor who plays Dave Lister) on the set of the longest running soap opera in the world - Tavistock Institute creation and behaviour modification tool, Coronation Street, in which Craig Charles plays a taxi driver. They also meet their "creator", who makes references to Blade Runner, and also points out that "nothing lasts forever, NOT EVEN BANKS."
But it turns out that it was all another collective hallucination caused by another despair squid - • Back To Earth - Anothe...
This seems to be a deliberate confusion of reality, artificial reality and fiction.