RIP Red Dwarf Co-Creator Rob Grant

Farewell To One Of Space Bug’s Original Captains

The sad news reached us today that Red Dwarf co-creator Rob Grant has passed away at the age of 70…

Red Dwarf fan site Ganymede & Titan put something up on his passing:

With much sadness, we have to announce that Rob Grant, co-creator of Red Dwarf, passed away suddenly yesterday afternoon (Wednesday 25th February 2026), a great loss to his family, friends and comedy fans across the world.

The original cast ©BBC

Here’s a few tributes to him from his friends and colleagues:

“Earlier today I was informed of the passing of @realrobgrant,” wrote Craig Charles.

“I am in total shock.He was 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. RIP ROB”

Producer Alan Nixon, who worked on Son Of Cliche with him, had this to say:“I first met them both in 1983 when they came from Manchester to work on one of the funniest sketch shows I’ve ever had the good fortune to produce – Son of Cliche.

He was working on a new Red Dwarf novel as he explained to Radio Times recently:

“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!”

He went on to explain: “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.”