The Birth of Red Dwarf
Liverpool tends to be credited for its music and its football long before anything else and the roll-call of famous things to come out of the city is long enough that a science-fiction sitcom rarely makes it onto the list. Yet Red Dwarf, set three million years into deep space aboard a filthy mining ship, began a good deal closer to home than the Cat’s quarters. Two writers, a few pints and a beermat in a back-street Aigburth pub were more or less the whole of it.
The show has since run to a dozen series across four decades and made a Liverpool lad, Craig Charles, into the slobbish last human, Dave Lister. So how did a Radio 4 sketch and a night in the Aigburth Arms turn into one of British television’s longest-running comedies?
From Radio Sketch to BBC2
Rob Grant and Doug Naylor met as pupils at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester, going on to write together for BBC radio, with Grant studying Psychology at the University of Liverpool along the way. Red Dwarf grew out of Dave Hollins: Space Cadet, a recurring sketch about a lonely astronaut and a deranged computer in their Radio 4 series Son of Cliché.
Whilst the script did the rounds of producers in the early 1980s, it eventually found a home at BBC North in Manchester, under Paul Jackson and Peter Ridsdale-Scott. What many might not know is that an electricians’ strike nearly did for it before a frame was even shot. The first series was recorded late in 1987 and the opening episode, ‘The End’, first aired on BBC2 on the 15th of February 1988.
The Pub Where It Started
Before any of that, though, there was the pub. Grant and Naylor drank in the Aigburth Arms in the early 1980s and it was there, by the pub’s own account and CAMRA’s, that the pair scribbled out the idea for a science-fiction sitcom on a beermat.
The pub returns the favour inside the show. Lister, the last man alive, is found as a baby in a cardboard box beneath the pool table of the Aigburth Arms, left there in the year 2155. The box is marked ‘Ouroboros’, which a barmaid misunderstands as ‘Our Rob or Ross’.
The Aigburth Arms on screen is a likeness rather than the real place. The version in the episode ‘Ouroboros’, broadcast in the early months of 1997, was a set dressed up from a Laser Quest in Kingston, well over two hundred miles from Victoria Road.
What Remains on Victoria Road
The city has not let the connection go unmarked. In the April of 2009, cast and writers gathered at the pub, by then trading as the Victoria, to unveil a plaque naming it the birthplace of Red Dwarf and of Lister. The wording still notes that the ‘show creators Grant Naylor drank here as students’.
Celebrating the return of Red Dwarf by kicking off, yet again, that they renamed The Aigburth Arms
— John Gibbons (@johngibbonsblog) September 22, 2016
Rob Grant died suddenly in the February of 2026, at the age of 70, which has given that plaque a meaning that it did not carry before. Anyone wanting to stand where the whole thing was dreamt up can still call in at 6 Victoria Road, though it is worth a quick check of the pub’s own hours before setting off, bearing in mind that it has since gone back to being known as the Aigburth Arms.
