Grant Naylor

Grant Naylor Productions

Type	Television production company
Founded	1983
Founder	Rob Grant Doug Naylor
Headquarters	London, United Kingdom
Key people	Doug Naylor (Owner)
Products	Red Dwarf, Spitting Image, The 10%ers, Carrott's Lib, Stressed Eric
Website	www.reddwarf.co.uk

Grant Naylor was the collective name used by writers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor for their collaborative work, including the television series Red Dwarf. Grant and Naylor themselves called this pseudonym a "gestalt entity" (i.e. something which is greater than the sum of its parts).

The collaboration began in the mid-1980s when the duo co-wrote BBC Radio 4 programmes such as Cliché and its sequel Son of Cliché, and television programmes such as Spitting Image, The 10 Percenters, and various Jasper Carrott projects. The pair are also credited with writing the lyrics to "The Chicken Song" and a number of other musical parodies for the British satirical television show, Spitting Image.

The "Grant Naylor" collaboration, as it had become known, created the cult science-fiction comedy series, Red Dwarf. Later episodes of Red Dwarf were made by a company named after this pseudonym, Grant Naylor Productions.

In the mid-1990s, after the success of Series VI of Red Dwarf, the "Grant Naylor" collaboration ended, leaving Naylor with all the writing duties for the show. When Doug Naylor was apparently left with control of Red Dwarf, Rob Grant cited creative differences as the reason for his departure. His main reason however, he said, was that he "wished to have more on his 'tombstone' than Red Dwarf."

Doug Naylor went on to write series seven, eight, nine and ten of Red Dwarf by himself, sometimes in collaboration with other writers, particularly on series seven.

In 1999 and 2000, Rob Grant independently wrote two television series, Dark Ages and The Strangerers, and script edited the series Stressed Eric. In the past few years he has written four solo books and is rumoured to be working on an animated series entitled Cruel Aliens.

Since the end of the eighth series of Red Dwarf in 1999, Grant Naylor Productions under Doug Naylor attempted to make a feature-length movie version of the show.^[1] However, it proved impossible to find sufficient funding. Instead, a new three-part TV miniseries, Red Dwarf: Back to Earth, was created and shown on channel Dave over the Easter weekend in April 2009. Since then Grant Naylor Productions have created a tenth series Red Dwarf X, broadcast in 2012. Red Dwarf XI was broadcast on UKTV's Dave channel September - October 2016. Red Dwarf XII, which was shot back-to-back with XI, will air around the same time in 2017.

References

1. "Red Dwarf The movie". www.thereddwarfzone.co.uk. Archived from the original on 2008-02-04. Retrieved 2008-02-07.