Dave Lister (Red Dwarf) - Early Life

Early Life

An orphan, he was discovered at six weeks old on 26 November 2155, under a pool table in a Liverpool pub (the Aigburth Arms), nestled in a cardboard box with the mysterious word "ouroboros" scribbled on its side. Lister celebrates his birthday "most of the time", and uses 14 October as his official birth date. Lister is in fact his own father, shown in the episode "Ouroboros" when he fills up a test tube for Kochanski, and then realises after seeing a battery box with an "Ouroboros" logo, that he in fact is the baby in the test tube. While this means that Lister has no lineage on his father's side, on his mother's side, Dave Lister is a member of the Kochanski family.

He was adopted by the Wilmot family, but after his adoptive father died when he was six he went to live with Grandma Lister, whose last name he took. She was a tough, pipe-smoking woman who once famously headbutted the headmaster of Lister's school when Lister came bottom in French, leading to Lister's expulsion, and whose cooking led to his being nicknamed "Fat Boy" from ages eleven to thirteen. Lister decided to lose weight after his grandmother died when she was hit by a truck, and he was ashamed to find that the coroner had to go back for a second piece of chalk to complete the chalk outline. After his grandmother's death, Lister apparently lived and attended school in an orphanage, sleeping in a pitch-dark dormitory alongside many other boys including "Squeaky" Gibson, whose life he saved on one occasion when he discovered Gibson having an epileptic fit. Around the same time he got his first job as a supermarket trolley attendant, which he would eventually quit after ten years "because he didn't want to get tied down to a career".

Lister lost his virginity at the age of twelve in one of the bunkers on the ninth hole of Bootle Municipal golf course; his partner is variously named as either Susan Warrington or Michelle Fisher. He also spent a good part of his puberty lusting after the older sister of one Pete Tranter. Lister suffers from claustrophobia, which stems from an incident at age 17 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 throw him into a canal. 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. Around the same time, he formed a band called Smeg and the Heads in which he was the singer and guitarist, along with his friends Dobbin (drums) and Gazza (bassist). One of their songs was called "Om", the only lyrics to which appeared to be repetitions of the vocalisation "om". Lister 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 went out with a girl named Lise Yates, but the relationship ended because he did not want a commitment, a fact that Lister has since secretly regretted.

Within the continuity of the books by Grant Naylor, Lister went on a drunken Monopoly board pub crawl in London with his friends to celebrate his 23rd 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". Lister, determined to make enough money to get back home, spent six months stealing "hoppers" (the equivalent of taxis on Mimas) and collecting the fares, but he lost all his money several times from blowing it all on alcohol (hoping that if he got drunk enough again, he would awaken back in London) and on one occasion being mugged by a drug addict who was high on the narcotic "Bliss". Eventually, Lister signed up for a job on the mining ship Red Dwarf, which unknown to him was due to make a four-and-a-half-year mining run to Triton before heading back to Earth.