Lister is characterised as a third-class technician (the lowest ranking crewman) on the mining ship Red Dwarf spending his time performing tasks under the hated supervision of Arnold Rimmer.

In the series, he becomes marooned three million years into the future, but maintains a long-standing desire to return to Earth and start a farm on Fiji and open a hot dog and doughnut diner, preferably with the one true love of his life, Kristine Kochanski, a navigation officer of Red Dwarf.

Lister first appeared in Red Dwarf's first episode "The End" (1988), where he is characterised as third technician on board the mining ship Red Dwarf, ranking below his immediate superior Arnold Rimmer (Chris Barrie), with whom he shares quarters, and all four of the service robots as the lowest ranked crew member on board the ship.

As a technician, Lister helps Rimmer with maintenance work on chicken soup vending machines that not even the robots are assigned to.

After trying to change another future echo involving the Cat and ending up causing it instead, Lister accepts his fate when Holly asks for help to stop the navi-comp from overheating.

In this episode, the crew of Red Dwarf rescue a service mechanoid called Kryten (David Ross) from the crash landed spaceship the Nova 5.

Lister was eventually sent to a child psychologist after he was found with his head in the toilet bowl reading his father the football results.

[12] In a possible future seen in the episode "Stasis Leak" (1988), Lister finds out that his future self from five years hence has gone back in time and married Kochanski three weeks before the accident which causes Red Dwarf to leave the Solar System; their wedding and honeymoon taking place while Kochanski is on planet leave at the Ganymede Holiday Inn.

[14] At the start of "Backwards" (1989), some quickly scrolling text describes Lister's pregnancy leading to successful delivery of twin boys, Jim and Bexley.

[15] According to backstory in "Marooned" (1989), Lister lost his virginity to Michelle Fisher at the age of twelve in one of the bunkers on the ninth hole of Bootle Municipal Golf Course.

[16] In "Timeslides" (1989), Lister is seen travelling back in time by entering a photographic slide with mutated developing fluid, and tells his seventeen-year-old self (played by Emile Charles), who at this point is a singer-songwriter in a band called Smeg and the Heads, how to gain a successful multi-billion-pound[note 2] business empire with fifty-eight houses by inventing the "tension sheet" so that he won't join the Space Corps and get trapped on Red Dwarf in deep space.

By becoming the inventor of the tension sheet and never joining the Space Corps, Lister's entire timeline is altered, causing Kryten to never be rescued and the Cat race to no longer exist.

Rimmer unwittingly changes the timelines to set things exactly how they were, and Lister, the Cat and Kryten return to Red Dwarf.

In the episode, a Starbug from fifteen years hence arrives, with Lister, Rimmer, Cat and Kryten's future selves intending to copy some components from the present Starbug's time drive so they can fix the fault in their own drive and continue their lives of opulence, socialising with notorious figures of history such as the Habsburgs, the Borgias, Louis XVI, Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring.

Returning to the part of space where they were last seen, the crew discovers Red Dwarf has been converted by the nanobots into a planetoid made of sand and Holly restored to his old settings (again played by Norman Lovett) and abandoned there, with the Red Dwarf Starbug spent years chasing after being a subatomic version shrunken down and eventually exploring Lister's laundry basket, and the remaining bits they didn't want being left on the planetoid.

Lister, Rimmer, Cat, Kryten and Kochanski are sentenced to two years in the ship's brig for misuse of confidential information.

During a mission with the Canaries, the mainframe computer of the SS Silverberg, Cassandra (Geraldine McEwan), who can predict the future with an accuracy rating of one hundred per cent, tells Lister that he chokes to death aged 181, while trying to remove a bra with his teeth.

[34] In Red Dwarf: Back to Earth (2009), set nine years later, Red Dwarf is intact; the human race is apparently "virtually extinct" in the universe apart from Lister again; Lister, Rimmer, the Cat and Kryten are the only people on board the ship; and Rimmer is shown to be a hard light hologram and the most senior officer on board again; how these have come about and what happened to the micro-organism is not explained.

Kryten and Rimmer speculate that they were able to choose whether or not they wanted to wake up because of the strengthened antibodies of the four from the previous encounter with the despair squid.

Lister initially believes that Kochanski is dead as well, but two children in the hallucination (played by Charlie Kenyon and Nina Southworth) inform that Kryten lied to him, and she actually left him after taking a Blue Midget shuttle.

[40] In "Officer Rimmer" (2016), Lister reveals that as a kid he sold the rights to his genome to his friend Dodgy for 100 dollarpounds and half a packet of cigarettes.

Kryten explains that this means thousands of companies, including a call centre, were licensed to produce biological copies of Lister.

Lister is described as going on a drunken Monopoly board pub crawl in London with his friends to celebrate his 23rd birthday, where he gets very drunk; when he awakens, he is on Mimas with no money.

As a result, this Lister grew up to be a sociopath, often manipulating others with his efforts, claiming not to believe in even the concept of love, and perfectly willing to murder his shipmates in order to achieve his goals.

Lister is normally dressed in a leather jacket and deerstalker hat, his boiler suits and his lengthy dreadlocks that he grows only from the back of his head.

[24][failed verification] He also has another tattoo claiming that he loves Petersen placed on his inner thigh, which stems from an unidentified incident where the two got so heavily drunk together that Lister had no idea what was happening to him.

[10] He enjoys "bumming around", drinking large amounts of lager, and eating Indian food and listening to a band called Rastabilly Skank.

[10] In the episode "Thanks for the Memory" (1988), Arnold Rimmer described that, even though all its ingredients were wrong, a fried-egg chilli chutney sandwich somehow made a right and likened this fact to Lister's personality.

When the Inquisitor from the 1992 episode of the same name appeared on Red Dwarf to judge the crew, he declared that Lister's failure to put his brain to good use was evidence that he had not lived a worthwhile life.

[48] In Series I, Lister's guitar is firstly a silver acoustic Clarissa Roundback (Polverini, Italian Ovation copy, S1E5, 19:41).