Regular Characters

• Dave Lister played by Craig Charles. A genial Liverpudlian (and self-described bum) and the lowest-ranking crew member on the ship before the accident. He has a long-standing desire to return to Earth and start a farm on Fiji, but is left impossibly far away by the accident that renders him the last surviving member of the human race.

• Arnold Judas Rimmer played by Chris Barrie. Born on the moon Io, Rimmer is a fussy, bureaucratic, neurotic coward, who is nevertheless judged to have the highest chance of keeping Lister sane when chosen to be the ship's one available hologram.

• The Cat played by Danny John-Jules. A humanoid creature who evolved from Lister's smuggled pet cat. In the early series the Cat is concerned with little other than sleeping, eating and fawning over his appearance, and tends not to socialise with other members of the crew. As the series go by, however, he becomes more influenced by his human company, and so begins to resemble a stylish yet dimwitted human.

• Holly in series I, II, VII and VIII played by Norman Lovett. Hattie Hayridge takes over the role for series III to V. The character makes no appearance in series VI. The ship's on-board computer has an IQ of 6,000, although this is severely depleted by the three million years he/she is left alone after the accident, having developed "computer senility". The change in actor for series III is explained by Holly changing his face to resemble that of a computer from a parallel universe with whom he'd fallen in love.

• Kryten played by Robert Llewellyn from series III onwards. Full name Kryten 2X4B-523P. In his original one-off appearance in series II, Kryten was played by David Ross. Salvaged by the crew from a crashed spaceship (upon which he had continued to serve the ship's crew despite their having been dead for thousands or even millions of years), and rebuilt by Lister, Kryten is a sanitation mechanoid with an overactive guilt chip. When first encountered by the crew, he is bound by his "behavioural protocols", but Lister gradually encourages him to break his programming and think for himself.

• Kristine Kochanski in series VII and VIII played by Chloë Annett. Kochanski was originally, in series I, II and VI, a supporting character played by Altered Images vocalist Clare Grogan (credited as CP Grogan). In the first two series, Kochanski was introduced as a longtime crush of Lister's whom he had never managed to pluck up the courage to ask out on a date. In the first novel, however, she was described as having actually dated him for a month, and this development was retroactively introduced into the later series.