Thanks for the Memories

RIP Rob Grant, co-creator of a slice of my teenage inspiration.

Rob Grant was an immense influence on my young life as a writer. I started watching Red Dwarf in my teens then I read Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers. I was utterly hooked on the intergalactic jaunt that centered around a man’s desire to get back home - a recurring theme in works I love - from three million years away.

A Titan of British comedy and literary mirth - Rob Grant.

My obsession with anything Red Dwarf grew deeper and deeper. When I should have been doing homework, I was skipping through it so that I could write my own Red Dwarf book. I called each part a different colour, Red, Maroon and Blue, in homage to the ‘changing the bulb’ joke in the TV series. The book was titled ‘Alert’ and was mostly awful, but it accounts for my first-ever attempt at writing a novel.

I loved the original six Red Dwarf series Rob Grant and Doug Naylor created for TV more than I can possibly put into words. The day the final episode of series VI was aired, I was absolutely stunned. Other than the final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth, no final episode of anything affected me so much. It had a physical effect on me, inspiring me to create, to write, forever.

I went to a Red Dwarf convention to meet him and thank him in 1997. He wasn’t there, but I met a lifelong friend I still talk to most days, often about writing. The meeting propelled our creativity, and we naturally found comedy. It was irresistible. When Grant and Naylor ‘split up’ as a writing partnership after series VI of RD, it was never the same again. It missed Rob Grant’s cynicism, wit and… bite.

Together they were magic, but Grant could write brutal, crackling prose superbly. After reading ‘Infinity’ and Better Than Life, the split was self-evident in that Doug Naylor released Last Human, which I read and enjoyed and Rob Grant put out Backwards, which I adored and have read many times over the past 30 years.

Three decades on, Rob Grant has a new book coming out in July called Titan. It is a new Dwarf novel, written and released after years of legal wrangling over the rights which denied fans Grant’s work.

I feel sure Rob Grant would have written more novels in his dotage and I’m gutted he now cannot.

Titan will be published posthumously, and I will read it the day it is released. It’s on order, out there in the universe waiting to arrive in. Here’s what Grant said about the book in this week’s Radio Times:

“It’s Lister and Rimmer before the accident on shore leave on Titan. It’s set one universe to the side, so we can have familiar characters but we can do different things with them, because the difficulty was writing something that was going to be original and fresh and using the same characters without breaking the canon. So it was quite an intricate bit of work that actually took us about a year-and-a-half longer than we were hoping!”

“It’s common knowledge that there has been a legal dispute over the rights of Red Dwarf for bloody years. It went to court, and it made Bleak House look like an episode of Judge Judy! But we finally got it resolved in 2023, and suddenly all these rights became available to me, and one of them was for the prequel, and that’s where it started.”

“We originally wrote it as a treatment for a TV spin-off and took it around, but it’s horribly expensive, and we couldn’t really raise enough interest. We might down the line... we’ve been talking to streamers about it but, when you read it, it’s a whole world you’d have to create. It wouldn’t be cheap.”

RIP Rob Grant, and thanks for the memories... and inspiration.