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The writer Rob Grant, who has died suddenly aged 70, created the TV space sitcom Red Dwarf with his old school friend Doug Naylor. The BBC series, starting in 1988, won a cult following with its story of a slobbish, low-ranking technician, Dave Lister, marooned on the rusting mining ship Red Dwarf three million years in the future, the universe’s last surviving human, following a radiation leak.
Craig Charles starred as Lister, whose only company is a hologram of his former bunkmate, the jobsworth Arnold Rimmer (played by Chris Barrie), the cool Cat (Danny John-Jules), a vain descendant of a pregnant pet Lister smuggled on board, and Holly (Norman Lovett, later Hattie Hayridge), the spaceship’s idiot computer, represented as a disembodied human head. David Ross, then Robert Llewellyn, later played the mechanoid science officer Kryten.
Space sitcoms were rare. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had successfully transitioned from radio to television – and novels – but Grant felt that “it was about time the working class had a shot at space”.
Red Dwarf had its roots in Grant and Naylor’s BBC Radio 4 sketch series Son of Cliché (1983-84), which included the adventures of Dave Hollins: Space Cadet, a parody of Alien, featuring a lone survivor voiced by Nick Wilton and a computer by Barrie.
They suggested it as a television sitcom, and – after being rejected three times – it was eventually launched as Red Dwarf on BBC Two.
From the third series, production switched to the writers’ own company, Grant Naylor, which gave them more control over their creation, but Grant left in 1993 after the sixth run, which was honoured with an International Emmy award the following year. The pair had by then written two spin-off novels, Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (1989) and Better Than Life (1990). Grant said of the split: “It became impossible for us to work together. Just one of those things. Musical differences.” He wrote Backwards (1996), another Red Dwarf novel, on his own, but also said he wanted to be remembered for more than just that programme.
While he went on to write the sitcom Dark Ages (1999), set in AD999, and the sci-fi comedy-drama The Strangerers (2000), then settle down as a novelist, Naylor continued, occasionally with other writers, to script Red Dwarf for two further BBC series (in 1997 and 1999) and revivals on the UKTV channel Dave (from 2009 to 2020). Although some of the surreal elements disappeared, the programme continued to hold on to a loyal fanbase and Grant eventually wrote, with Andrew Marshall, the prequel novel Red Dwarf: Titan, due for publication this summer.
Born in Salford, Lancashire, to Lilian (nee Fairclough) and Robert Grant, who served in the Royal Navy, he won a scholarship at the age of nine to Chetham’s hospital school, Manchester (later renamed Chetham’s School of Music), where he met Naylor. Alongside playing the trumpet, Grant had an ambition to write that was encouraged by two English teachers.
He bought science-fiction comics and paperbacks, and said that Arthur C Clarke’s short story The Star, highlighting the relationship between sci-fi, religion and science, “blew me away”.
Shelving ideas of becoming a journalist, Grant went to Liverpool University (1976-78), where he and Naylor both studied psychology. When Naylor read about a design engineer writing a sitcom that was taken up by ITV, they sent their own effort, The Big Time, about inept private detectives, to the BBC, which rejected it. Spending so much time on writing scripts, they failed their second-year university exams and were thrown out.
The pair continued coming up with television sitcom ideas, without success. Then, while working for the computer department of a mail-order warehouse in Manchester, they were advised to try radio. A BBC producer in the city liked their script for a sketch show titled Hot Potatoes and, while rejecting it, encouraged them to write. Their first success was a sketch titled The Big Melt, a Raymond Chandler detective parody featured in Comedy First (1979), a show for new writers.
Then, they were asked to create a BBC Radio 4 sitcom for the comedian Tom Mennard and came up with Wrinkles (1980-81), featuring him as a handyman in an old people’s home – with authority figures “acted” by musical instruments.
They followed it with the sketch shows Cliché (1981) and Son of Cliché (1983-84), a Sony award-winner, and Wally Who? (1982-83), a sitcom starring Tony Brandon on Radio 2. They also scripted The Harvey Brinkle Story for Bob Monkhouse (1982) and contributed to The News Huddlines (in 1981 and 1982) and The Grumbleweeds (from 1981 to 1983).
Switching to television, Grant and Naylor wrote for A Kick Up the Eighties (in 1981), Carrott’s Lib (1982-83), starring Jasper Carrott, Three of a Kind (in 1982 and 1983), Paul Squire Esq (1983), Pushing Up Daisies (1984) and, later, Alas Smith and Jones (1987).
Their big break came in 1985 when they were invited to take over as head writers on the ITV satirical puppet series Spitting Image, which had begun the previous year, lampooning politicians and royals. Audiences had plummeted, but Grant and Naylor turned it around by adding celebrities to the mix. With the composer Philip Pope, they also wrote the lyrics of a chart-topping novelty single, The Chicken Song (1986), featured in the programme. The pair finished on Spitting Image in 1990 to concentrate on Red Dwarf.
Grant later enjoyed solo success with the novels Colony (2000), Incompetence (2003) and Fat (2006). He returned to Radio 4 with a new writing partner, Marshall, for The Quanderhorn Xperimentations (2018) and Quanderhorn 2 (2020), parodying Quatermass, and the sketch show The Nether Regions (2019-22), in which Grant also performed.
He and Naylor settled a long-running legal dispute over Red Dwarf rights in 2023.
In 1989, Grant married Kath Andrews. She, and their son, Joe, and daughter, Lily, survive him.
