Writer Doug Naylor reveals more about the cancelled comedy special

Doug Naylor has revealed more details of the Red Dwarf special cancelled by UKTV – and says he’s still shopping the idea around other broadcasters.

In September, the writer revealed that the planned 90-minute special was pulled after he’d written most of it, when the broadcaster unexpectedly decided it did not want to commission any more scripted comedy.

At the time, Naylor revealed that the script involved Lister going back in time to help his 23-year-old self escape from stasis, with the pair going on the run – pursued by two Rimmers from the same timeframes.

It would be a callback to the very beginnings of the sitcom – which Naylor originally created with Rob Grant  –  as Lister actor Craig Charles was 23 when the first series aired in 1988.

Speaking on the Comedians’ Comedian podcast today, Naylor, above, revealed that he was 'absolutely loving’ the storyline, and had got as far as developing a computer-generated version of the young Lister – and at a cost that would be affordable within TV budgets.

‘I wanted to have a fully CG young Lister who looked identical to Craig Charles,’ he told host Stuart Goldsmith. ‘I had an effects guy working on it, and he created one, and it was like, "oh my God, is that CG? Jesus that’s amazing"

‘He said we could do it on the budget that we'd been told. There were probably going to be techniques – at some point he was probably going to have some form of plastic surgery or disguise –  but at least you could have that moment of "Oh my God, that's him right out of the first ever episode".’

Naylor – who said that ideas had always been ‘quite easy to come up with’ for the show – said he was ‘two-thirds of the way through’ the script when late last year UKTV ‘changed their minds without reading a word of it’.

‘They said, "we're no longer commissioning comedy because they're not successful… apart from Red Dwarf which is very successful", so that was a bit Catch-22.’

He said he hadn’t finished the script as he was instead working on his recently-released children’s book Sin Bin Island.

But he told Goldsmith: ‘I’ll definitely finish the screenplay and I'll desperately try and get it made as a TV movie, and if not, I'll turn it into a novel’.

He also revealed that the first comeback episodes he made for UKTV – the three-part Back To Earth miniseries in 2009 – ‘wasn’t what I wanted to do’.

Naylor complained that ‘their budget was minute and I had to write a show that basically [used] anything that was free… hence the Coronation Street set. But it wasn't what I wanted to do, I was trying to get back to Red Dwarf so we started again with [series 10]

The miniseries saw the characters Rimmer, Cat, Kryten and Lister arriving back on Earth in the present day only to find that they are characters in a television series called Red Dwarf – and featured them meeting Charles on the set of the ITV soap in which he was starring.

Naylor also spoke about Red Dwarf being under-appreciated by the industry, despite selling more VHS and DVDs than any other comedy apart from Only Fools And Horses, and being the  highest rated scripted show ever on BBC Two.

However he pointed out ‘we've never been nominated for a Bafta – although we've won an Emmy’. He added: ‘It's a weird thing, we have always been the rebels.

‘For example, we were commissioned by BBC Manchester, not BBC London. BBC London never had any photographs of the cast up for the light entertainment parties. It was almost like we didn't exist, although we were top of the charts.

‘And that fed something, and I think it's why we're still going now, because it was just like "we're gonna keep going and going…"’

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Published: 13 Nov 2025