Following Red Dwarf co-creator Rob Grant’s death earlier this year, his friend and co-author Andrew Marshall has revealed the pair of them were planning to create new animated episodes of the beloved sci-fi comedy.
Grant, who created Red Dwarf with Doug Naylor, died in February this year, with tributes pouring in from friends and fans. Before his death, he not only co-wrote the spin-off novel Red Dwarf: Titan with Marshall, but also had plans for further Red Dwarf projects.
Speaking exclusively to Radio Times ahead of Red Dwarf: Titan’s publication on 15 July, Marshall explained: “We did start work with some great animators in Wales to try and begin work on an animated version.
“We put this aside briefly because we were going to write the book, and we thought the book would take about six months, and in fact the book took about two years to write, because it was so immensely fiddly, fitting it into the canon, and so forth, and so that was all put aside unfortunately.
“That would have been quite interesting – we were planning to do 15-minute animated Red Dwarf episodes, but I’m afraid that got postponed, and that was probably one of the things we would have gone back to.”
As for whether the animated episodes could ever be returned to following Grant’s passing, Marshall said: “Perhaps [they] could. I don’t know. Who knows what the future will hold.”
Red Dwarf fans are eager for more of the series, though its most recent planned return from Grant’s co-creator Naylor was ultimately scrapped.
But, Grant’s final project was the spin-off novel Titan, which he’d previously said he hoped to one day see on TV.
Speaking to Radio Times in the weeks before his passing, he explained of the novel: “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.”
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.”
Marshall now says: “I think it was really good to have a much bigger canvas to work on than the usual confined sitcom version of it. It enabled us to interweave the plot strands more effectively into a more filmic piece of work, and also we were able to make interesting character arcs.”
He continues: “Both Rob and I had an immense desire to make you laugh, so we were sort of pooling our combined comedy experience over 50 years to try and make the work as funny as possible.”
It’s Marshall’s first time stepping in to write Red Dwarf – although he’s been a fan of the series for years.
“I had no trouble with [writing] Lister and Rimmer – they’re very well delineated. You know what they’re like!” he recalled. “Cat, I thought would be harder to get into but actually I found I could get into that quite easily.”
Meanwhile, Marshall previously told us of his work on the novel: “I was slightly reluctant to start with because obviously I can’t replace Doug. Eventually [Grant] persuaded me that when we worked together, it would be a different perspective on Red Dwarf. The characters are still as they always are, but we would be able to see them from a slightly different perspective.
“I was interested in making a wider and deeper version of the characters, so we could just see a little bit more inside… in a book, you can arrange things differently [compared to a sitcom] so that characters can have a bit of a development, and they can each go on a bit of a journey, and that was a very interesting way of looking at it.”
Red Dwarf: Titan will publish in hardback, ebook and audio on 16 July 2026 and is available to preorder now. Red Dwarf is available to stream on BBC iPlayer.
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