Rob Grant, the man who taught British television that the future would be less Star Trek and more a curry-stained skip drifting through the void, has at last achieved the one status even Dave Lister couldn’t wriggle out of: permanently dead. He was seventy, and he died suddenly on 25 February 2026, proving that even cosmic irony has deadlines.
Born in Salford in September 1955, Grant sampled psychology at Liverpool University for three tedious years before concluding the human mind was better left to the experts—i.e., a hologram with an inferiority complex, a cat who thought he was God’s gift to lycra, and a mechanoid whose only vice was ironing. Teaming with Doug Naylor in the 1980s satire factory, he helped birth Spitting Image’s latex venom and then, from a Radio 4 sketch about a luckless space cadet, the glorious rustbucket epic Red Dwarf. Launched in 1988, the show demonstrated that you could conquer the galaxy on a budget smaller than a vending machine’s annual servicing fee, provided the jokes were sharp enough to cut through vacuum.
Grant co-wrote the first six series, then sensibly jumped ship, announcing he wanted “more on his tombstone than Red Dwarf.” The tombstone, of course, will now read exactly that, because fate has the driest wit of all. Solo he produced novels—Backwards, where time ran in reverse like a BBC commissioning meeting; Incompetence, a dystopia so plausible it felt like a leaked government report; Fat, because someone had to say the unsayable. Later, with Andrew Marshall, he gave us the gloriously daft Quanderhorn and, only days before departure, the announcement of the Red Dwarf prequel novel Titan. Talk about leaving them wanting more.
Tributes now flood in, calling him a 'visionary.' He would have greeted the word with the same arched eyebrow he once reserved for Rimmer’s promotion prospects. In truth he was simply a professional northerner who understood that the funniest thing in the universe is humanity trying to matter. The Dwarf sails on without him, but the laughter will forever carry a faint Mancunian echo and the unmistakable whiff of vindaloo.