Dave Lister
David Lister, commonly referred to simply as Lister, is a fictional character from the British science fiction situation comedy Red Dwarf, portrayed by Craig Charles.
Lister is characterised as a third-class technician on the mining ship Red Dwarf spending his time performing tasks under the hated supervision of Arnold Rimmer. In the series, he becomes marooned three million years into the future, but maintains a long-standing desire to return to Earth and start a farm on Fiji and open a hot dog and doughnut diner, preferably with the one true love of his life, Kristine Kochanski, a navigation officer of Red Dwarf. As a character, Lister is lazy, slobbish, and unmotivated, but he frequently shows moral courage. He also likes Indian food, especially chicken vindaloo, which is a recurring theme in the series.
Fictional history
Television
1980s
Lister first appeared in Red Dwarfs first episode "The End", where he is characterised as third technician on board the mining ship Red Dwarf, ranking below his immediate superior Arnold Rimmer, with whom he shares quarters, and all four of the service robots as the lowest ranked crew member on board the ship. As a technician, Lister helps Rimmer with maintenance work on chicken soup vending machines that not even the robots are assigned to. Lister is shown having smuggled an unquarantined pregnant cat from the moon Titan on board Red Dwarf as part of his five-year plan to buy a farm on Fiji to bring along the cat, the cat's unborn kittens, and to get a sheep and a cow and breed horses. As punishment for bringing the cat on board, he is put into stasis for 18 months without pay.Lister mentions that crewmember Kristine Kochanski was going to come with him to Fiji, but never told her before her death. The ship's computer Holly tells Lister that while Lister was in stasis, a release of lethal radiation occurred on board as a result of a faulty repair carried out by Rimmer, killing the entire crew. As a result, Holly keeps Lister in stasis for three million years until the radiation levels return to normal. Lister is left as presumably the last human being in the universe, accompanied on Red Dwarf by a hologram simulation of Rimmer and a humanoid creature called "the Cat" that evolved from his cat, who was safely sealed in the hold along with her unborn kittens when the crew died. Lister tells Holly to set co-ordinates for Fiji, which has become the "promised land" in the religion of the Cat's people.
Lister's backstory in "Future Echoes" reveals that Lister's "grandmother" raised Lister, and headbutted the headmaster of Lister's school when Lister came bottom in French, leading to Lister's expulsion. Also in this episode, Red Dwarf is shown travelling faster-than-light, and this causes glimpses of the future, "future echoes", to appear to the crew. Rimmer sees what he believes to be Lister being killed in the drive room. After trying to change another future echo involving the Cat and ending up causing it instead, Lister accepts his fate when Holly asks for help to stop the navi-comp from overheating. Lister survives, and a future echo of Lister aged 171—who cannot see the younger Lister and Rimmer but remembers the conversation he had when he was Lister's age—explains that it wasn't Lister that Rimmer saw die, but Lister's second son, Bexley, who appeared in a photograph with his twin brother Jim as a child in another future echo. Lister realises that this means he is going to have two sons in the future. The elderly Lister from the future tells the present Lister to quickly take his camera to the medical unit. As Red Dwarf begins to slow down, Lister sees a future echo of himself from nearer to the present who is holding baby Jim and Bexley, and the present Lister takes the photograph of the Lister holding the babies, which had previously been seen on the bunkroom wall in a future echo.
In "Balance of Power", Lister is revealed to have pined after Kochanski; Lister mentioning that he had always been crazy about Kochanski but never acted on his feelings to ask her out or make love to her. Lister asks Holly why Rimmer was brought back as a hologram instead of Kochanski. Holly explains that this is because Rimmer was the best person to keep Lister sane, and that the two had shared fourteen million words between each other, compared to the 173 words Lister shared with Kochanski. Lister asks Rimmer where the disc which contains Kochanski's hologram has been hidden so that Lister could go on a date with Kochanski, but Rimmer refuses to switch his own disc off to bring back Kochanski for an evening due to the risk that Rimmer's hologram wouldn't be turned on again.
In "Waiting for God", Holly reads out the captain's confidential files on Lister, explaining that Lister's previous job before joining Red Dwarf was a supermarket trolley attendant, which he left because "he didn't want to get tied down to a career". After translating a holy book written by the Cat's people, Holly confirms that Lister is considered a god in the Cat's people's religion called Cloister, and that his plan of buying a farm on Fiji and opening up a hot dog and doughnut diner has become their idea of Heaven.
In "Confidence and Paranoia", Lister, with the help of a solid manifestation of Lister's confidence, deduces where Kochanski's personality disc is hidden as well as a means of how the ship can power two holograms at once. Lister is still unable to go on a date with Kochanski, however, as the disc inside Kochanski's box has been swapped with one containing a duplicate of Rimmer.
In "Me²", Rimmer moves in with his double as better company in the next bunkroom over from Lister. After the two Rimmers' constant arguing, Lister decides to have one of them wiped to stop this. Knowing that Rimmer would never tell Lister otherwise, Lister tricks Rimmer into revealing Rimmer's "gazpacho soup" story while Rimmer's double is wiped instead; Rimmer believing that he was the one that was doomed.
According to Lister's backstory in "Kryten", Lister applied to art college after having failed his exams. He dropped out after 97 minutes however, after learning that there were lectures every day, "first thing in the afternoon". In this episode, the crew of Red Dwarf rescue a service mechanoid called Kryten from the crash landed spaceship the Nova 5. After Kryten begins serving Rimmer, Lister persuades Kryten to rebel against Rimmer and to become independent. Kryten changes the portrait of Rimmer he is painting to make it appear as though he was sitting on the toilet, and then pours soup onto Rimmer's bed sheets. Kryten takes Lister's space-bike and goes out to find a planet with an atmosphere where he can grow a garden, which had always been a dream of his.
Backstory in "Better Than Life" reveals that Lister's "dad" died when he was six. Lister's grandmother, while trying to explain to Lister that his dad wouldn't be coming back, said that Lister's dad had gone to the same place as Lister's goldfish. Lister thought she meant he was flushed down the toilet. Lister was eventually sent to a child psychologist after he was found with his head in the toilet bowl reading his father the football results.
In "Thanks for the Memory", when Rimmer had eight months of Lister's memory pasted over his own as a present to celebrate the anniversary of Rimmer's death, Lister recounts to Rimmer that Lister had gone out with a girl named Lise Yates, but the relationship ended because he did not want to be tied down, a fact that Lister later regretted. Rimmer also realises the memories he was given couldn't have actually happened because Rimmer remembers being an orphan even though both his parents were alive, meaning that at some point Lister himself had become an orphan.
In a possible future seen in the episode "Stasis Leak", Lister finds out that his future self from five years hence has gone back in time and married Kochanski three weeks before the accident which causes Red Dwarf to leave the Solar System; their wedding and honeymoon taking place while Kochanski is on planet leave at the Ganymede Holiday Inn. This version of Lister's future has still yet to be portrayed outside of "Stasis Leak" as of Series X.
"Parallel Universe" shows Holly's "Holly Hop Drive" trying to get to Earth within a few seconds. Instead, however, it lands the crew in a female-oriented parallel universe with another version of Red Dwarf; its crew including a female version of Lister called Deb Lister. Because of the laws of the female Lister's universe being different, Lister falls pregnant with his alternate self's child after a drunken sexual liaison with her.
At the start of "Backwards", some quickly scrolling text describes Lister's pregnancy leading to successful delivery of twin boys, Jim and Bexley. Because the twins were conceived in another universe where different laws apply, they reach eighteen years of age in three days. To save their lives, Lister returns them to their universe for their father to raise them. Kryten is described as being found in pieces after his space-bike crashed on an asteroid shortly after these events. Lister rebuilds Kryten, although he is unable to recapture his former personality.
According to backstory in "Marooned", Lister lost his virginity to Michelle Fisher at the age of twelve in one of the bunkers on the ninth hole of Bootle Municipal Golf Course.
In "Timeslides", Lister is seen travelling back in time by entering a photographic slide with mutated developing fluid, and tells his seventeen-year-old self, who at this point is a singer-songwriter in a band called Smeg and the Heads, how to gain a successful multi-billion-pound business empire with fifty-eight houses by inventing the "tension sheet" so that he won't join the Space Corps and get trapped on Red Dwarf in deep space. By becoming the inventor of the tension sheet and never joining the Space Corps, Lister's entire timeline is altered, causing Kryten to never be rescued and the Cat race to no longer exist. Lister is also seen living with the model and novelist Sabrina Mulholland-Jjones, and according to Holly, in this new timeline, Lister dies aged 98 after he crashes a plane he had lost control of while making love to his fourteenth wife. Rimmer unwittingly changes the timelines to set things exactly how they were, and Lister, the Cat and Kryten return to Red Dwarf.
Despite having previously mentioned his father and grandmother, backstory in "The Last Day" reveals that Lister never knew who his parents were because he was abandoned at the age of six weeks in a cardboard box underneath a pool table in a pub, with Lister never finding out why.