Rob Grant co-wrote the sitcom that put two men who could not stand each other in a spaceship and let them get on with it. Red Dwarf's strongest stretches are his and Doug Naylor's, and they are the reason to know his name.
Fi1m perspective
Two men in a bunk room who cannot bear each other, with nowhere else to go. That is the engine Rob Grant and Doug Naylor built for Red Dwarf (1988), and every science-fiction idea on the ship is there to give Dave Lister and Arnold Rimmer something new to fall out over. Grant said they wanted "a comedy with no cardigans and no formica": a sitcom that kept the petty grievances and lost the front room. The point was never the spaceship. The point was that a change of surroundings does not change a man.
The pair had been writing together since school, first on sketches for BBC Radio 4 (Cliché, Son of Cliché, Wrinkles), then for Spitting Image, where Grant wrote the lyrics for "The Chicken Song". Red Dwarf grew out of one of their radio sketches, "Dave Hollins: Space Cadet". Once it reached BBC Two they took over producing from series 3 in 1989 and directing from series 5 in 1991, under their own Grant Naylor Productions, and most critics agree the programme sharpened once the writers were also in charge. We agree, with the caution in our review that the standard wobbles considerably across the run.
What holds it together is that the concept is the excuse and the quarrel is the joke. We laughed harder at Lister and Rimmer failing to agree on anything than at any of the ideas, and that is a compliment to the writing, because the ideas are good: the "Backwards" episode is the one people reach for when they want to show what a conceptual gag looks like with a sitcom running underneath it. Craig Charles and Chris Barrie make the partnership worth returning to, but they are returning to lines that trust a grievance to survive any circumstance. That is Grant and Naylor's trick, and nobody has done it better in the genre.
The partnership ended after series 6 over creative differences, and Grant went his own way. He created Dark Ages for ITV in 1999 and The Strangerers for Sky One in 2000, neither of which we have reviewed, and wrote four solo novels, from the Red Dwarf tie-in Backwards (1996) to Fat (2006). Later he worked with Andrew Marshall on Radio 4 projects and on a Red Dwarf prequel novel, Titan, announced shortly before his death in February 2026.
Grant said he did not want Red Dwarf to be the only thing he was remembered for. It will be the main thing, and it is a better thing to be remembered for than most writers manage. Start with series 3 and keep going.
Biography
Rob Grant (1955–2026) was an English comedy writer, television producer and co-creator of the science-fiction sitcom Red Dwarf. He formed a long-running writing partnership with Doug Naylor, known as Grant Naylor, and the pair created the series, which first aired on BBC Two in 1988. Grant contributed as writer, and later as producer from the third series and director on some episodes.
Before Red Dwarf, Grant and Naylor worked as head writers on the satirical puppet show Spitting Image. After leaving the partnership in the mid-1990s, Grant created the series Dark Ages (1999) and The Strangerers (2000), and wrote several novels including Backwards (1996), Colony (2000), Incompetence (2003) and Fat (2006).
