Dave Lister

David Lister is a fictional character from the British television series Red Dwarf who is portrayed by actor/commedian Craig Charles.

The most important thing to know about Dave Lister is that he's the last human man in the known universe. The second most important thing to know is that his best clothes have only two curry stains down the front.

An orphan, he was discovered as an infant under a pool table in a Liverpool pub (the Aigburth Arms), nestled in a cardboard box with the word ouroboros scribbled on the side. He was roughly six weeks old at this time, his birthday is officially 14th October 2155. Because of the confusion Lister celebrates his birthday "most of the time". He was adopted, but his adoptive father died when he was six. His adoptive mother apparently followed soon after, and he was raised by his "gran", presumably the mother of one of his adoptive parents. She was a tough, pipe-smoking woman, who nutted the headmaster when Lister came bottom in French and whose cooking led to his being nicknamed "Fat Boy" until he was thirteen. He decided to lose weight after he was shocked to find that the coroner used so much chalk around his grandmother when she got run over. He suffers from claustrophobia after a vengeful husband caught Lister making love to his wife in the supermarket where he was employed. The man kidnapped the naked Lister, locked him in a box and threatened to chuck him into a river. Lister begged for mercy and was finally released onto the stage of a local theatre in the nude, in the middle of the Bootle Amateur Players' production of The Importance of Being Earnest. When he was 17, he formed a band called "Smeg and the Heads." Their only hit song was called "Ommm." The young Lister had the tendency of calling everything "crypto fascist". After visiting his younger self via time travel, the older Lister wasn't impressed.

Lister was the lowest ranking officer on a ship with a crew of 169, a "third technician," and spent his time performing tasks too menial for the skutters, under the hated supervision of Arnold Rimmer, or getting drunk with his friends Olaf Petersen, Selby and Chen. But since then he has lived an astounding life. After awaking from three million years in stasis, Lister has played pool with planets, been attacked by a killer kebab, and defeated cybernetic war-machines time and time again. The most amazing thing that has happened to Lister is eating an edible pot noodle. He is also the god of a race of cat-people who know him as Cloister the Stupid.

Lister lost his virginity at the tender age of 12 in one of the bunkers of a golf course in Bootle but he's now dedicated to resurrecting and winning over the one true love of his three-million year life: Miss Kristine Kochanski, the long dead navigation officer of Red Dwarf.

Lister was an atheist at first, but is now a pantheist and believes God to be in all things. He can understand the international language Esperanto - at least, he can understand it better than Rimmer.

It is his ambition to marry Kochanski and start a frugal life at a farm on the Earth islands of Fiji. In the book Better Than Life, which is not consistent with the TV series, Lister eventually discovers Earth, but finds that it is ruled by eight feet cockroaches. He becomes their king and plans to rebuild the planet. The others find him thirty-six years later (after believing Lister was missing for a fortnight due to a time dilation). Later, after Lister is killed by a polymorph, his body is taken to a different universe where time runs backwards and is told that he will be rescued in thirty-six years time. Two accounts of what followed (again, inconsistent with each other) are Backwards and The Last Human. The latter also features yet another alternate Lister, this one adopted by a disturbed upper-middle class couple, rather than "our" Lister's adopted parents, and suffering extreme sociopathy as a result. The former tells how he unspent eight years in prison for murder and had a relationship with Konchanski but backwards.

In the series, he has twin sons named Jim and Bexley after the Zero-G football player, Jim-Bexley Speed. Lister gave birth to the twins himself after a sexual liaison with his female alter-ego from a female-orientated alternate universe. Due to them being born in a different reality to their conception both of them grew to be eighteen years old within three days, so in order to make sure they didn't die within a fortnight Lister sent them back to their mother's dimension.

Dave Lister is also known as 'the king of crap' for purchasing (among other things) a talking toilet, a talking toaster with artificial intelligence and two robot goldfish, which he named Lennon and McCartney (one which swims backwards and is prone to breaking down). He hates pot noodle. While trapped on an ice planet, and given a choice of either dog food or pot noodle, he exclaimed "Well it's pretty obvious what will get eaten last...I can't stand pot noodle". After eating the dog food, he says "Now I know why dogs lick their testicles...it's to get rid of the taste of their food."

The future of Lister is uncertain as several glimpses of this future have been enjoyed by viewers of the show. He may end up as a brain in a jar, or maybe as a 181-year-old man who dies while trying to take a bra off with his teeth, and in one episode where Lister changed the past he ended up as a billionaire who died in a plane crash making love to his supermodel wife. One future that was given in the episode Stasis Leak (in which Lister travels back in time 5 years after the episode and marries Kochanski in the past) apparently did not play out (although it's theoretically possible it happened early in the 200 years between series 5 and 6, and was never referred to again for some reason), so we'll just have to wait for what will really happen.

When Lister meets an alternate universe incarnation of his long-lost love, Kochanski, he is given the chance to create an IV child. When the child is born, he takes it back in time and space to the pool table when he was first discovered. Lister is essentially his own father and thus the human race can never die out. Presumably he is also the father of the various alternate universe Listers we've seen (as most of them would not have had this opportunity), lending some credence to his claim to be "the definitive version".