Rob Grant, scriptwriter and author who was co-creator of the sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf

Rob Grant, the writer, who has died aged 70, was the co-creator of one of Britain’s most popular and enduring television comedies, the sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf.

He devised Red Dwarf in partnership with Doug Naylor, his best friend from the age of nine, with the aim of shaking up the British sitcom in the era of Terry and June. “What we wanted to do,” Grant recalled, “was a comedy with no cardigans and no formica. Something that was a bit different. Steptoe and Son in space.”

First broadcast on BBC Two in February 1988, the series starred Craig Charles as the uncouth Lister, a technician on the 21st-century mining spacecraft Red Dwarf, who is put into suspended animation as a disciplinary measure and wakes up after three million years to discover that he is the last human left in the universe. However, he still has to endure the company of his pompous, fastidious supervisor Rimmer (Chris Barrie), who survives in the form of a hologram. Grant and Naylor took the name Rimmer from a patronising prefect at their school.

Other regular characters were The Cat (Danny John-Jules), a humanoid evolved from a pet cat Lister had smuggled aboard the ship, the deadpan computer Holly (portrayed by Norman Lovett and later Hattie Hayridge), and the Jeeves-like android Kryten (Robert Llewellyn). Although viewing figures were unspectacular for its first two series, Red Dwarf began to take off when Grant and Naylor took over production, under the aegis of their company Grant Naylor.

“The programme has improved since the early days,” declared The Sunday Telegraph’s Noel Malcolm in 1989. “The combination of wacky humour and groan-inducing old gags is just right now, and in addition this whole episode was based on a massive conceptual joke (they had landed on a version of the Earth where time ran backwards) which has never been worked so cleverly before… The producers of this show are geniuses.” That episode, entitled “Backwards”, saw a rare cameo in front of the camera from Grant, who played a man “un-smoking” a cigarette.

Red Dwarf became one of the BBC’s most successful exports, and in the US it won an Emmy Award in 1994. Grant and Naylor also collaborated on a number of best-selling spin-off novels.

Having spent his whole career writing with Naylor, Grant yearned to pursue solo projects and left Red Dwarf after its sixth series. He observed that watching subsequent series, written by Naylor in collaboration with others, was “like watching a video tape of your ex-wife’s next honeymoon”.

Grant did not want to relinquish his stake in the characters, however, and a long-running legal dispute between Grant and Naylor was only resolved in 2023. Grant recently completed Red Dwarf: Titan, a prequel novel co-authored with his new regular writing partner Andrew Marshall, to be published in July.

Robert Grant was born in Salford on September 25 1955, the son of Robert Grant, who was in the Royal Navy, and his wife Lilian. He “grew up around the corner from the street originally used for the Coronation Street exteriors”.

Rob won a scholarship to Chetham’s Hospital School, where he befriended Doug Naylor. They both went on to study psychology at Liverpool University; during this period, they recalled, Grant was “the one with the distinctly non-regulation flared trousers and Peter Wyngarde sideburns”, Naylor “the one with the plastic Chelsea boots and the Man from U.N.C.L.E. polo neck”.

Grant spent so much of his time fruitlessly sending comedy scripts on spec to the BBC that he was kicked off his course. He and Naylor went on to live together in a flat above a supermarket in Manchester (“it became an utter pit… I’m convinced that flat was the birthplace of the SARS virus”) and both worked in the computer department of a mail order warehouse “picking up boxes of paper and putting them down somewhere else” while continuing to bombard the BBC with sketches.

Their first broadcast sketch was a Raymond Chandler parody, which earned them £49 – “my entire earnings for the year”, Grant recalled. They “managed to wangle” an office at BBC Manchester, and they were soon writing radio shows for veteran comics such as Ken Dodd, Bob Monkhouse, Roy Hudd and The Grumbleweeds.

In 1980 the pair wrote an offbeat comedy for Radio 4 called Wrinkles, set in a retirement home and starring Tom Mennard and Ballard Berkeley. In the Telegraph Gillian Reynolds reported that Wrinkles had sparked a “great national debate on whether or not [it] is the comic find of the year or a total disaster… Someone told me the other day he’d had to stop driving while listening to Wrinkles because the surreal quality made him lose concentration.”

Grant and Naylor went on to write the sketch show Cliché (1981) and its sequel Son of Cliché (1983-84). On the latter they were struggling to complete one script at 2am with the show due to be recorded at the Paris Theatre the next day: “Then suddenly, out of this emotional cocktail of panic, hysteria, exhaustion and terror, we write a sketch called ‘Dave Hollins - Space Cadet’. It concerns the plight of a lone space traveller and his computer, the rest of the crew having been wiped out by a strange, chameleonic alien.”

Despite both writers being so tired at the recording that they both fell off the stage into the orchestra pit, the audience laughed harder at the Dave Hollins sketch than anything else, and he became the show’s most popular regular character. They suggested to the BBC that the idea be expanded into a TV sitcom, but despite initial enthusiasm Red Dwarf took five years to come to fruition.

In the meantime Grant and Naylor moved from Manchester to London to write for Jasper Carrott’s television series Carrott’s Lib (1982-83) and went on to be leading writers on Spitting Image. They provided the lyrics for The Chicken Song, a merciless send-up of nonsensical hit novelty songs such as Agadoo, which proved so popular after debuting on Spitting Image that it went on to top the singles chart for three weeks.

After leaving Red Dwarf Grant wrote Dark Ages (ITV, 1999), a sitcom starring Phill Jupitus and Alistair McGowan set in 999 BC, and The Strangerers (Sky, 2000), another amalgam of comedy and sci-fi. He also published a number of successful comic novels, including Incompetence (2003) and Fat (2006).

Latterly he teamed up with another veteran writer, Andrew Marshall (the creator of 2 Point 4 Children) to write two popular series for Radio 4: the sci-fi comedy Quanderhorn, a pastiche of Quatermass; and the sketch show The Nether Regions, in which Grant also performed. The latter offered gems such as what The Shipping Forecast sounds like to non-sailors (“Dover, Sole, Haddock, Vikings, Dolphins, Plusnet, East Acton”).

With the fruits of his success Grant brought himself a “country pile” in Dorset, but missed city life so much that within two years he had sold up and returned to London.

Rob Grant is survived by his wife Kath, whom he married in 1989, and their son and daughter.

Rob Grant, born September 25 1955, died February 25 2026

[Source: Daily Telegraph]