'A a great loss to his family, friends and comedy fans'

Rob Grant, the co-creator of Red Dwarf, has died unexpectedly at the age of 70.

A message from his family has been posted on fan site Ganymede & Titan. It states: ‘With much sadness, we have to announce that Rob Grant, co-creator of Red Dwarf, passed away suddenly yesterday afternoon, a great loss to his family, friends and comedy fans across the world.’

Red Dwarf, which Grant created with Doug Naylor, launched on BBC Two in 1988. Its star Craig Charles  today called Grant, 'one of the funniest people I've ever met. A visionary. My heart goes out to his family and friends. The impact he and Doug had on the course of my life is immeasurable.'

Grant grew up in Salford, in the shadow of the very streets that served as the original exterior locations for Coronation Street. Despite being, by his own cheerful admission, hopelessly tone deaf, he spent a decade at Chetham's School of Music in Manchester, where on his very first day he met a fellow pupil named Doug Naylor — a friendship and creative partnership that would come to define both their lives.

Grant later studied psychology at the University of Liverpool, before being, as he liked to put it, 'unceremoniously ejected' and turning his attention to writing for BBC radio.

The Grant-Naylor collaboration quickly flourished. Together they wrote for radio programmes including the multi-award-winning Son of Cliché and the surreal sitcom Wrinkles, and contributed material to a generation of comedians including Bob Monkhouse, Ken Dodd, and Roy Hudd. They moved into television, writing for Three of a Kind, Carrott's Lib, and Spitting Image, where Grant served as script editor and co-wrote the novelty hit The Chicken Song.

The pinnacle of the partnership arrived in 1988 when Red Dwarf launched on BBC Two. Evolving from a recurring sketch in Son of Cliché called Dave Hollins: Space Cadet, the show placed a gloriously working-class crew aboard a dilapidated mining spaceship three million years into deep space. It became a cult phenomenon, launching the careers of Craig Charles, Chris Barrie, Robert Llewellyn, and Danny John-Jules. Grant and Naylor also novelised the series under the joint pseudonym Grant Naylor, describing themselves on the dustcover as a 'gestalt entity'.

Grant departed Red Dwarf after its sixth series in 1993 following a dispute with Naylor and subsequently worked on olo television projects including The Strangerers for Sky and the pre-medieval comedy Dark Ages for ITV. He also found success as a novelist, publishing Colony, Backwards, Incompetence, and Fat In later years he collaborated with writer Andrew Marshall on the BBC Radio 4 comedy The Quanderhorn Xperimentations.

 Grant had recently resolved his long-running dispute with Naylor  over Red Dwarf rights and was completing a prequel novel, Red Dwarf: Titan, co-written with Marshall.  

Published: 26 Feb 2026