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.
