Dave Lister

David Lister is a fictional character portrayed by Craig Charles in the hit British sitcom, Red Dwarf and also stars in the books of the series.

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.

A baby orphan, he was discovered under a pool table in a Liverpool pub (the Aigburth Arms), nestled in a cardboard box with the word ouroboros scribbled on the side.

Lister was the lowest ranking officer on a ship of 169, the third technician. But since then he has lived an astounding life and after awaking from a three-million-year slumber, Lister has played pool with planets, been attacked by a killer kebab, eaten an edible pot noodle and defeated cybernetic war-machines time and time again. He is also the god of a race of cat-people.

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 the Dwarf.

Spiritually, Lister is a pantheist and believes God to be in all things.

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, 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 four years later (after believing Lister was missing for a fortnight due to a wormhole they discover). Later, after Lister is killed by a polymorth, his body is taken to a different universe where time runs backwards and is told that he will be rescued in thirty four years time.

His twin sons are 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 toaster with artificial intelligence and two robot goldfish, which he named Lennon and McCartney.

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) did not play out, so we'll just have to wait for what will really happen.

When Lister meets an alternative-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.