Few British comedies have been loved as fiercely, or for as long, as Red Dwarf, and Rob Grant is half the reason it exists. Born in 1955, he met Doug Naylor writing for radio, and the two became Grant Naylor, a shared byline that produced award winning sketch comedy before delivering, in 1988, a sitcom about the last human being alive three million years into deep space.
Grant Naylor also wrote the novels, and those books did something unusual: they took a studio sitcom and gave it genuine science fiction weight. After the partnership ended he returned to television with The Strangerers and Dark Ages, and published solo novels including Colony, Incompetence and Fat, the last a furious satire on the diet industry. A second long collaboration, with Andrew Marshall, ran alongside.
He died suddenly in February 2026, aged seventy. The tributes all said much the same thing: he wrote jokes that survived repetition, and characters whose flaws were entirely the point.
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