Red Dwarf co-creator reveals hopeful reaction to new special being scrapped

Red Dwarf fans were gutted when it emerged that a new special from one of the show's original writers had been scrapped - but now co-creator Rob Grant has offered a hopeful outlook on the show's future.

Doug Naylor, who created and wrote the sci-fi comedy with Grant from its inception in 1988, revealed last year that his new special, which was set to see Craig Charles's character Lister going back in time to help his 23-year-old self escape from stasis, had been scrapped by UKTV.

Grant, who recently announced he is co-writing the first Red Dwarf novel in 30 years with Andrew Marshall, has responded to the news, exclusively telling Radio Times: "It's been going for so long, and I'm sure it'll have another life down the line somewhere. These things happen."

A spokesperson for UKTV previously told Radio Times in a statement: "UKTV has no current plans to commission further episodes of Red Dwarf.

"It's been a privilege to work with Doug Naylor and the cast in a relationship that began with the Back to Earth specials, which premiered to 4 million viewers, and has subsequently produced three full series, a retrospective and Red Dwarf's first ever feature length, The Promised Land."

However, as Grant says, that might not be the last we see of Red Dwarf on screen.

The two co-creators, who dissolved their partnership in the 1990s, have been working on their own individual Red Dwarf projects since a legal dispute was resolved in 2023.

Speaking about how that has impacted his work, Grant explained to Radio Times: "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."

Grant and Marshall's prequel novel Red Dwarf: Titan will be published in July - and they revealed they've taken it to streamers in the hopes of getting it made into a TV spin-off.

"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," Grant told us.

He added: "We might down the line… we've been talking to streamers about it but, when you read it, [you'll realise] it’s a whole world you'd have to create. It wouldn't be cheap."

For now, however, they're focused on the new novel, with Grant explaining: "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 added that the story will see Lister and Rimmer "get a message from the far future warning them that all realities are going to collapse unless they do something about it."

Grant and Marshall are also keen to continue their new story, with a sequel novel.

"We'd love to," Grant said. "We so fell in love with the characters. There are some new ones, and its explores existing characters more deeply."

Watch this space!

Red Dwarf: Titan will publish in hardback, ebook and audio on 16 July 2026. Red Dwarf is available to stream on BBC iPlayer.

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