RIP Rob Grant

In tragically surprising news, as he was in the news just last week, Red Dwarf co-creator Rob Grant has passed away at the age of 70.

Born in Salford in 1955, Grant grew up in the north of England, studying at Liverpool University. He met Doug Naylor in the mid-1970s at university and they collaborated on a series of sketch shows for BBC Radio 4, including Cliche and Son of Cliche. For the latter they created a character called "Dave Hollins, Space Cadet," the last human being alive after being marooned in the distant future. Filing that for future reference, they started working on TV projects for comedian Jasper Carrott and then the satirical puppet show Spitting Image. In 1986, Grant and Naylor wrote "The Chicken Song," a satirical song for Spitting Image which unexpectedly hit #1 on the British music charts.

Both Grant and Naylor were science fiction fans and wanted to do something in that genre. In 1987 they developed the TV science fiction sitcom Red Dwarf for the BBC. After running into numerous problems with casting - original choice for Rimmer, Alan Rickman, bailed out to appear in some obscure American movie set in a skyscraper - and scheduling - the entire first season had to remounted after a studio strike - the show debuted in February 1988 and was immediately successful. Its stars, Craig Charles, Chris Barrie, Danny John-Jules and Norman Lovett (later joined by Hattie Hayridge and Robert Llewellyn), became well-known figures on British television almost overnight.

The show aired six seasons from 1988 to 1993, selling hundreds of thousands of copies on VHS and hundreds of thousands of copies of two novels penned by Grant and Naylor, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers and Better Than Life. The TV show also spawned a high-selling magazine and a fervent fan community. Despite being one of the the biggest comedy shows in Britain during its early lifetime, the show attracted relatively little attention from the critical community and was mostly ignored for TV awards. Ironically, the show achieved its highest critical success in the United States by winning an International Emmy Award for the Season 6 episode Gunmen of the Apocalypse. There were two attempts to film a pilot for the US market, both failing to go to series.

Grant and Naylor co-created a more conventional sitcom for ITV about theatrical agents called The 10%ers in 1993, but their creative relationship was cooling. They stopped working together after 1993 and dissolved their writing partnership in 1995, though both retained ownership stakes in the Grant Naylor production company. This dissolution, along with legal troubles for castmembers of the show, prevented a new series of Red Dwarf being made until 1997, with Naylor leading a new writing team. Naylor later wrote the eighth season in 1999 by himself. Rob Grant's last contribution to the Red Dwarf mythos was a novel, Backwards, published in 1996.

Grant created and wrote the period sitcom Dark Ages for ITV in1999 and the SF sitcom The Strangerers for Sky One in 2000. He pivoted to writing novels for Gollancz, namely Colony (2000), Incompetence (2003) and Fat (2006), along with a radio series for BBC Radio 4 called Quanderhorn, a pastiche of Quatermass, written by Andrew Marshall. He also penned a radio series called The Nether Regions, again with Marshall.

In 2022 Grant announced an intention to return to Red Dwarf to produce a spin-off prequel TV show called Red Dwarf: Titan. This created a legal tangle with Naylor that took a year or so to resolve. Since 2023, Grant had been working on this project with Marshall, with multiple streaming companies taking meetings but nobody willing to commit a budget. Just last week, they confirmed they had written a novel version of the project, which Gollancz had picked up for publication this summer. This will now be a posthumous release, and Grant's final project.

Rob Grant suddenly passed away on 25 February. Red Dwarf castmembers, friends and fans have posted tributes online.

On a personal note, I met Rob Grant on several occasions in the late 2000s at various publishing events in London with Gollancz. He was very personable, funny and a seemingly infinite reservoir of anecdotes. He will very much be missed.