Dave Lister
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- For the origami historian of the same name, see David Lister (Origami Historian).
David Lister is a fictional character from the British television series Red Dwarf who is portrayed by actor/comedian Craig Charles. Lister is the last human man in the known universe.
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[edit] Early life
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 14 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 had to go back for more chalk for his grandmother when she got run over. Lister lost his virginity at the age of twelve in one of the bunkers on the ninth hole of Bootle Municipal golf course.
Lister suffers from claustrophobia, which stems from an incident when a vengeful husband caught him 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 best song was called "Om". The young Lister had the tendency of calling everything "crypto-fascist" if he disliked it, or "shady" if he approved. After visiting his younger self via time travel, the older Lister was not impressed. He was accepted at art college, but dropped out on his first day when he learned his schedule would include lectures "first thing in the afternoon". Lister memorably went out with a girl named Lise Yates, but the relationship ended because he did not want to commit to a career, a fact that Lister has since secretly regretted.
According to the books by Grant Naylor, Lister went on a drunken Monopoly board pub crawl with his friends to celebrate his 25th birthday, where he got very, very drunk — when he awoke, he was on Mimas, one of Saturn's moons, wearing a lady's pink crimplene hat and a pair of yellow fishing waders, with no money and a passport in the name of "Emily Berkenstein", and a worrying rash. Lister, determined to make enough money to get back home, steals "hoppers" (the equivalent of taxis on Mimas) but he loses all his money after being attacked by a drug addict, hooked on the drug "Bliss". Penniless, Lister signs up for a job on the mining ship Red Dwarf, which was due to make a mining run to the outer solar system, and then back to Earth. He barely qualifies for a place on the ship, having only one GCSE — in Technical Drawing, which he failed.
[edit] Red Dwarf
As a third technician, Lister was the lowest ranking crewman on Red Dwarf, a ship with a crew of 169 , 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. Lister was imprisoned in a stasis booth because he smuggled a cat (which he named Frankenstein) aboard the ship. In the book, he deliberately let the cat be discovered so that he would be placed in stasis, thus getting back to Earth in (subjectively) zero time.
While Lister was in stasis, a release of lethal radiation occurred onboard and killed the entire crew. Holly, the ship's computer, kept Lister in stasis for three million years until the radiation levels decreased.
Lister was left as the last human being in the universe, accompanied on Red Dwarf by a hologram simulation of Rimmer and a humanoid creature that evolved from his cat — Lister is actually believed to be the god of this race of cat-people, who know him as "Cloister the Stupid". Lister has played pool with planets, been attacked by a killer kebab, and defeated cybernetic war-machines time and time again. However nothing has surprised Lister more than eating an edible pot noodle.
After a sexual liaison with his female alter-ego from a female-oriented alternate universe, Lister gave birth to twin sons named Jim and Bexley, named after the Zero-G football player, Jim-Bexley Speed. 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 to make sure they did not die within a fortnight, Lister sent them back to their mother's dimension.
Lister has a tattoo on his right buttock, dedicated to the love of his life: it is a heart with an arrow through it and underneath it has in dripping curry sauce, "I love Vindaloo". It was obtained while on planet leave on Ganymede with Petersen, who spiked his cocktail with four-star petrol. When he woke up the next day he had enrolled as a novice monk in a Ganymedian monastery. Although this is not canon it is mentioned in the deleted scenes on the Red Dwarf Season VI DVD.
Lister is dedicated to resurrecting and winning over the one true love of his three-million year life: Kristine Kochanski, the long dead navigation officer of Red Dwarf. It is his ambition to marry Kristine Kochanski and start a frugal life at a farm on the Earth islands of Fiji. When Lister meets an alternate universe incarnation of 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. This means that Lister is essentially his own father, and his girlfriend is his mother. Presumably he is also the father of the various alternate universes Lister has seen (as most of them would not have had this opportunity), lending some credence to his claim to be "the definitive version".
The future of Lister is uncertain as several glimpses of his future have been seen. He ended up as a brain in a jar, where his trademark dreadlocks are attached too (although this outcome was presumably undone when the present crew destroyed their timedrive, disallowing the path the future crew had taken up to that point), and as a 181-year-old man who dies while trying to take a bra off with his teeth. In one episode where Lister changed the past, he ended up as a billionaire who died at age ninety-eight when he lost control of the plane he was flying while making love to his fourteenth wife (although it appears this alternate future was reverted by Rimmer). One future that was given in the episode "Stasis Leak" (in which Lister travels back in time five years after the episode and marries Kochanski in the past) apparently did not play out. However, it is theoretically possible that this event happened early in the 200 years between Series V and VI, and was never referred to again; also, since Lister refers to himself "turning 28" at the start of Series VII (his age was given as twenty five at the start of the series), there is also a slight possibility that this potential future simply hasn't occurred yet. In the first episode of season 5, his physical age is given as 47.
In the book Better Than Life, which explores different adventures than the TV series, Lister eventually discovers Earth, but finds that it is ruled by eight-foot-long 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 dies of a heart attack in a confrontation with a polymorph, his body is taken to the alternative universe where time runs backwards (possibly the dimension in the first episode of season 3, "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 Kochanski, but backwards.
[edit] Personality
Lister is extremely slobby and very unmotivated. His best shirt has two curry stains on the front, and prior to going into stasis, he saved money by never buying soap or deodorant. He enjoys "bumming around", drinking large amounts of lager, and eating Indian food. Lister has dreadlocks on the back of his head, which he seems to have for most of his life (in "Future Echoes", Lister meets himself at age 171, and his dreadlocks are the length of his body). Lister's religious beliefs are unclear. He is referred to as being an atheist in the episode "Back To Reality", but in the episode "The Last Day" Kryten suggests he might be a pantheist, believing God to be in all things. Though, when pressed on his belief of "Silicon Heaven", he replies "Yeah, but I just don't think it applies to kitchen utensils. I'm not a frying pantheist". He understands the international language Esperanto — at least, he can understand it better than Rimmer. He considers himself good at pool, saying that he was nicknamed "Cinzano Bianco Lister" because once he was on a table you couldn't get him off.
Lister is warm-hearted and occasionally very introspective, and according to Rimmer, extremely optimistic and naive. He is in many ways complete opposite of Rimmer and the two are constantly at odds with each other. It is presumably this reason that Holly picked Rimmer to come back as a hologram in order to keep Lister sane. Rimmer is constantly pointing out Lister's stupidity (a somewhat hypocritical analysis), but in actual fact Lister is quite bright — if indisposed to use his intelligence to any great degree. He is capable of piloting a spaceship very well, of operating Red Dwarf and has a knack for mechanical repairs, particularly amateur cybernetics. He is literate, despite Rimmer's claims to the contrary, but he is not a regular reader, except for comic books.
Lister believes himself to be an excellent guitarist, but his belief is misplaced. In the episode "Psirens" his companions are able to distinguish a psiren disguised as Lister from the real Lister because the psiren plays guitar like "the ghost of Hendrix" — as Lister believes himself to play. Lister eventually acknowledges his inability to play the guitar to at least some degree; in "Nanarchy" he comments, after playing his guitar with assistance from Kryten due to the loss of an arm, "at least now I'm only half crap."
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 (the latter of which swims backwards and is prone to breaking down).
Lister has a strong appetite for Indian food, especially curries and vindaloo. Rimmer describes him as sweating madras sauce and having lost functional taste buds after eating nothing but curries. He has been attacked by his food twice: Once by a kebab (that was actually a polymorph) and then again by a mutton vindaloo transformed into a psychopathic humanoid monstrosity (the Mutton Vindaloo Beast — half man and half hot Indian curry) by Holly's fiddling with a DNA Modifier. 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."
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ This number has changed between series. In the first series, it was 169. In Series IV, Episode 3, Rimmer is accused of 1,167 counts of manslaughter, due to his own guilt over the accident that killed the crew of Red Dwarf. This would make the crew count 1,169 (as Lister is the only survivor and Rimmer cannot be charged with his own murder).
- ↑ In series V, Holoship, his physical age is stated as 47 after his chronological age, which is stated as mid-twenties. This is meant to be a joke about Lister's poor physical health. It has not been stated as fact.
- ↑ In the first Red Dwarf book Lister played a bass guitar. With only 2 strings, both of them G.
- ↑ Lister also admits his lack of skills playing the guitar to some extent much earlier than nanarchy. In the series 3 episode "Marooned" Lister says "I know I'm not exactly a whizz at it" when pleading with Rimmer to be allowed to play one last song on his guitar before it has to be burnt.
