The Quanderhorn Xperimentations
The full adaptation of the Radio 4 show, with additional material and story!
England, 1952.
Churchill is Prime Minister for the last time. Rationing is still in force. All music sounds like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. People like living in 1952: it's familiar and reassuring, and Britain knows its place in the world.
Few have noticed it's been 1952 for the past 65 years.
Meet Professor Quanderhorn; a brilliant, maverick scientific genius who has absolutely no moral compass. With his Dangerous Giant Space Laser, High Rise Farm, Invisible Robot and Fleet of Monkey-driven Lorries, he's not afraid to push the boundaries of science to their very limit.
Even when it's clearly insane to keep pushing.
Despite the fact he's saved the world from several Martian invasions, the attacks of the Mole People, the Troglodyte Shape-shifters and the Beatniks from Under the Sea, plus countless other sinister phenomena which threatened to rend the very fabric of reality, the Government would like to close him down. Why? Because they're terrified of him. Of his reality-warping experiments, of the mysterious button on his desk which he's constantly threatening to press. Of the unearthly secret locked in his cellar. And yet they're even more terrified it might stop being 1952 and they'll be out of power.
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Rob Grant
Robert Grant, 1955 – 2026, was born in Salford. Despite being hopelessly and incurably tone deaf, he spent ten years at Chetham's School of Music.
After being unceremoniously ejected from Liverpool University, he started writing for BBC radio. Together with Doug Naylor, he created several radio series, including the multi-award-winning Son Of Cliché, and the surreal sitcom Wrinkles, which earned the distinction of achieving the second worst audience evaluation rating ever, just being edged out of the top spot by a Radio One quiz show that provided the wrong answers to the questions. They also contributed material to just about every living comedian in the eighties, including Bob Monkhouse, Ken Dodd, Roy Hudd, and, yes, the Grumbleweeds.
They moved onto television, supplying sketches for Three Of A Kind, and Carrott’s Lib among other shows, before heading up the writing team on Spitting Image, and penning the inexcusable No. 1 hit ‘The Chicken Song’.
Again with Doug, he co-created the international smash Red Dwarf for BBC television in 1983, and in 1988, BBC television actually got around to making it. In 1994, the show was awarded an international Emmy.
His solo TV work includes the pre-medieval comedy series Dark Ages for ITV, starring Phil Jupitas and Alistair McGowan, and the alien invasion comedy The Strangerers for SKY.
He has written four novels: Colony, Backwards, Incompetence and Fat, which were all international bestsellers.
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