The Man In the Rubber Mask

by Robert Llewellyn

  Dear Reader,

  The book you are holding came about from a rather different publisher than most. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound.

  Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.

  This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. Here, at the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.

  Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.

  If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type MITR15 in the promo code box when you check out.

  Thank you for your support,

  Dan, Justin and John

  Founders, Unbound

  Prologue

  When I first published this book back in 1994, I felt a little anxious that was just jumping on the Red Dwarf bandwagon. I mentioned this fear to Craig Charles, whose response was, ‘You’re so middle-class, Bobby, always feeling guilty about something’ which didn’t really help.

  Danny John-Jules, however, had a slightly different take: ‘You’ve been helpin’ push the bandwagon uphill, covered in rubber, for the last twenty-three years, guy, you may as well jump on.’

  Fair enough.

  ROBERT LLEWELLYN, 2012

  Robert Llewellyn is an actor, novelist, screenwriter, comedian and TV presenter. As well as starring in Red Dwarf he has presented Scrapheap Challenge and How Do They Do It? and his own online show Carpool. He is the author of five novels including News from Gardenia published by Unbound. He writes under a rack of solar panels in Gloucestershire.

  Chapter 1

  In the giant control room in the sky, there are banks and banks of lights on a huge, smooth black control board, each one connected to an emotion, or a significant experience of a human being on earth. If only we were aware of them, our lives would be transformed. If only I’d known that my irony warning light had been burning so regularly over the last five years that the bulb needed constant replacing.

  The irony light was full on when I was carrying the last bag of props down seven flights of stone steps in an Edinburgh apartment building. It was on because I thought carrying seven bags of props was hard work. I thought life was tough and the rest of the world was sitting around chatting and having tea, having sex or sleeping off the copious poisons of a night’s debauchery. How come, I thought, I was heaving great big boxes of heavy stuff about so early on a Sunday morning?

  It was the beginning of September in 1988, the end of the Edinburgh International Festival of theatre, music, dance, poetry, opera, jazz, film, television and shagging. I always had the feeling that there was a lot of the latter going on in Edinburgh, in between all the former.

  This was the time of year when Edinburgh turns into a ‘thespian village’. This was a concept that came from some old luvvie who made an opening speech at the festival club along the lines of, ‘Once a year the City of Edinburgh is turned into a giant thespian village.’ To which one embittered and no doubt hung-over member of the audience mumbled ‘wanker’ under his breath.

  Apart from shagging and thespians, there was an astonishing amount of drinking taking place, astonishing for me because I don’t drink very much. Half a pint of watered-down lager and I’m performing a sad, comedy stripagram on a bar-room table before you can say ‘keep your dignity’. If I drink a double whisky I’m transformed into a smiling human vomit cannon in about thirty seconds, so I stick to orange juice and very expensive mineral water.

  However, unlike most non-drinkers, I quite enjoy the company of drunk people.1 There are two bars during the Edinburgh Festival where people I know lean against the wall and talk a lot. The Assembly Rooms and the Gilded Balloon. In the Assembly Rooms, we all stand around under huge, posh chandeliers, shouting and laughing in a loud show-off sort of way. All the time we are talking to someone, we are looking around the room hoping to meet someone really famous. It’s a complaint called Edinburgh neck, an involuntary spinal twitch that ruins any conversation and reduces all communication to gag try-out and witty put-down. The room is packed full of insecure, loud-mouthed performers, agents and TV executives. I love it.

  The Gilded Balloon bar is slightly different. It is where the exact same crowd go when they are pretending they hate the Assembly Rooms bar. I love doing that. I love going to the Gilded Balloon after I have been in the Assembly Rooms, twitching my head like a demented automaton, and then slagging everyone off for being so posey.

  ‘I can’t stand the Assembly Rooms. It’s just utterly full of people looking around to see who’s in. I mean, Lenny2 and Dawn3 walked in, and everyone looked at them. It’s pathetic.’ I said this to Arthur Smith, the man who played the Barman in Backwards,4 and he said to me, ‘I met Lenny Henry once. Well, I didn’t actually meet him, I saw him at a party.’

  The Gilded Balloon bar isn’t quite as glamorous as the Assembly Rooms. It is in fact a narrow corridor leading to the toilet, but it will accommodate up to one hundred and seventy very drunk comedians. Drunk comedians stand very close to you when they are in full flow. They tell you what you should do with your show, your life and your lover. By three in the morning, it can begin to look rather sad, and if you are not ‘deeply relaxed’ after seven pints of designer lager (total cost £304.76p) then the best bet is to head for home.

  The final bag was stuffed into my small, rusty hatchback car and we set off. I breathed in the crisp Scottish air and brewery fumes for the last time, little knowing that by the time I got twelve miles down the road, one of the new, super-cheap remould tyres I had bought to get the car through its MOT would tear apart like a wet paper bag in a wind tunnel.

  My two companions, Martin Pople (who could have gone out with Greta Scacchi, but didn’t) and Deborah John Wilson (whose brother is Yaphet Kotto, the black guy in the original Alien movie), sat on the side of the road laughing as I struggled to get the spare wheel out from under the monstrous amount of stuff we were carrying.

  By some fluke the spare wheel was pumped up, I found a jack and a spanner, so after a few more comedy wheel-changing moments we were on our way.

  The reason I had super-cheap, fell-off-the-back-of-a-lorry, good-as-new tyres on the car was because I was skint. This was my normal state of affairs: nothing to worry about, I got by, somehow. It was only odd because I had just completed a sell-out run of a play I had written called (and you should read this bit as if you were announcing an upcoming science fiction movie, the classic deep American rumble voice) Mammon, Robot Born of Woman.

  It had been nominated for the Perrier Award.5 Plays don’t normally get nominated, stand-up comics normally get nominated, so that meant it must have been good, even though it didn’t actually win. Not that I cared of course, I’m not competitive, I’m a thespian, I didn’t care when Simon Fanshawe6 gave me a big hug in the bar of the Assembly Rooms and t
old me with barely concealed delight that I hadn’t won.

  ‘Robbie, darling!’ he shouted. ‘You haven’t won, isn’t it absolutely dreadful!’

  Okay, if I’m really, really honest it would have been quite nice to win, but as soon as the play was nominated it was packed to the roof. Even the bloke who runs the Assembly Rooms, Bill Coutts, couldn’t get in. He had to bring his own chair and sit behind the stage to watch.

  The play was about a robot, as you can probably tell from the title; not at all like Kryten. Mammon was supposed to be a robot who resembled a human to such a degree that no one other than his maker could tell. It was sort of the Frankenstein story, mixed with a bit of Robocop, a bit of Terminator and a few silly walks. The twist was that instead of the maker being a mad male scientist, she was a mad female scientist. Dawn Raid (played by Deborah John Wilson) was a black woman who had made ‘the perfect white man’ in order to enter ‘the market place’ or the Stock Exchange and start making money. Remember, this was 1988, before Black Wednesday, Black Friday and that rather dull grey Tuesday morning in early April. At this time there were still wide boys in the City of London pulling down 800k a year gross and thinking they were terribly clever. I was brought up to believe it was very bad manners to laugh at other people’s misfortune, but the day after Black Wednesday I cycled through the City of London laughing my head off and pointing at sad dejected-looking businessmen in their crumpled pinstripes. It was an amazing sight to see so many deeply unhappy seriously rich people.

  In the story Mammon made money on the stock market very successfully, but as he progressed, Dawn noticed he started to develop certain human characteristics. He was designed to blend in with his environment, which is what he did. He started to become like the men he worked with. Dawn, being a slightly mad scientist, takes the next step: she introduces ‘Lust mode 691, the ultimate in sexuality software’ into Mammon’s computer brain. At this point Mammon copulated with everything on the stage, including some members of the audience unlucky enough to be seated in the front row. It was a disgusting spectacle and should have been banned.

  I remember thinking, during those rare moments of speculative thought actors have during performing, that it was an odd thing for a grown man to be doing. Pretend to copulate with a desk in front of two hundred people in a small room in Edinburgh. Little did I know the irony warning light was flicking on the big control panel in the sky. I had seen nothing yet.

  With a new super-cheap remould tyre fitted to the super-cheap car, we continued our journey south. I dropped Deborah off in Manchester, where she was staying with some friends for a while to recover from the Edinburgh trauma. Next stop, Leicester, where I dropped off Martin (the man who directed Mammon) at his parents’. We had a cup of tea and I asked him if the playwright Joe Orton,7 who came from Leicester, used to live near them. He didn’t.

  I drove the last leg of the journey alone, arriving in London in the early hours of the morning, dumped all the props and bags in the hall, listened to the three messages on my answer machine from my mum and collapsed into bed.

  One of the first things I did the following day was go through the press list to see who had come to see the play. During the hectic schedule of doing the show every day, and getting in and out of the theatre in such a short time, meant that I only took the barest note of what people said to me. All sorts of heavyweight (as in influential, not overweight as in tubby) media people came to see the show, and as I scanned the list I saw a name that I knew. Paul Jackson, I knew he did The Young Ones, and loads of other things — he was one of those people who did a lot of stuff on telly. Other than that I thought nothing of his attendance, the play had been commissioned as a six-part sitcom by Channel 4, Mammon was going to be on the small screen, that’s what was really exciting.

  I had discovered this over lunch one day in Edinburgh, Seamus Cassidy, the head honcho for mirth makers at Channel 4 had seen the show and liked it. I’d worked with Seamus on a not-so-glowingly-successful sitcom I co-wrote for Channel 4 in 1986 called The Cornerhouse. This particular sitcom was made up of a great deal of sit, and not very much com. Ah well, we all have to fail, sometime, but why so publicly? If an accountant fails, only he and one or two other people know about it. If an actor fails, everyone you know will have seen what you do.

  They will smile and say, ‘You know your sitcom, The Cornerhouse, it was on the telly last night Bob.’ And I nod proudly, waiting for the praise.

  ‘You failed Bob,’ they say sadly, ‘you really, really failed.’ Therefore Mammon’s success was of great importance to me.

  I don’t want to go too far back, but when my mum used to change my nappy… No, no, that’s too far, just a couple of years back. Before, before all this I was in a four-man comedy, satire, slapstick and music group called The Joeys. I did that from 1980 until 1985, it was very successful, especially considering we hardly appeared on telly. Anyway, that’s another story, all I’m saying is that between 1985 and 1988, I’d been busy, but busy in a sort of cold miserable failure type of way rather than a warm glowing success type of way.

  Seamus Cassidy had commissioned me to convert Mammon into a six-episode situation comedy. It was great; I worked day and night on the scripts and storylines, developing the characters, introducing new ones, throwing the whole thing away and staring again. It was two years later that I discovered Channel 4 couldn’t afford to make the series, but by then everything had changed anyway.

  Mammon never made it to the screen, not in the original way I had intended anyway, but on 10 July, about nine months later (the gestation period for babies and weird events) I locked my pushbike to a lamp post on the Charing Cross Road. I was going to have a meeting with Paul Jackson, and some other blokes, about some sort of part in some sort of sitcom. That’s all I knew. I entered the little door at the old Noel Gay office and was met by Paul Jackson’s braces and tie. As the glowing sensation settled in my eyeballs, I shook hands with the figure behind. Paul immediately showed me downstairs; I entered a basement office to see three men sat around a table. A tall gangly skinny one called Ed, and two slightly shorter stockier ones called Rob and Doug. As soon as I was told their names I forgot because, as Rob, Doug and Ed would no doubt confirm, I have a memory like a sieve.

  We talked about robots and funny walks and accents and trying to avoid all the old comedy robots like R2D2 and Marvin the Paranoid Android. Looking back, it was the first time I experienced the Grant Naylor gaze. There has sometimes been confusion about this name, I’ve met people who thought Red Dwarf was written by one man called Grant, second name Naylor. We always knew them as Rob and Doug, but their combined surnames make the name of the production company Grant Naylor Productions. However, if you made a particularly unsuitable ‘comedy’ suggestion, you would often be the recipient of the Grant Naylor gaze: four often very tired eyes staring at you blankly. It wasn’t a pleasant experience and we avoided it at all costs.

  After this meeting I realised what they were talking about. I had seen about three episodes of the first two series of Red Dwarf, but as I worked at night as a stand-up comic and actor I missed a lot of telly. I knew Norman Lovett from the comedy circuit. We had worked together on various things over the years, in fact my first ever experience of working in television was with Norman. It was on a Channel 4 show called, wait for it, this is what it was called, I promise you, Book ’em and Risk it! It had the exclamation mark at the end of it like that. Book ’em and Risk it! Brilliant. This programme presented the talents of people like Steve Frost and Mark Arden (I bet he drinks Carling Black Label), Ben Elton (yes indeed ladies and gentlemen) and The Joeys (oh wow, mime!).

  The idea was that because we were aspiring young performers we would ‘do anything’ to get on a telly show. We were supposed to be storming the entrance lobby of a TV company and ‘doing the show right here’. The director, Mr Brian Izzard, would not contradict me I think, if I said he was ‘not Britain’s leading Non-Sexist man’. A charming and hard-working ind
ividual who had been in the business many years, he dealt with me very kindly when I tried to point out to him that The Joeys were trying to create a new form of non-sexist, non-racist humour, and we didn’t really like his references to ‘secretaries with big tits’ etcetera. He put his arm around me and stared into the middle distance. With a tight smile he said, ‘I still love you Robert, but you do your job, and I’ll do mine. Okay love? I still love you.’ With that he gently pushed me away as he got on with his job.

  As the rehearsals continued, Norman, whom I’d only just met, seemed to get even more depressed. He really wasn’t happy about something, probably being called a ‘child’ by the director. Mr Izzard had a habit of saying ‘Come along now children’ to the cast, whose ages ranged from nineteen to fifty. As we were doing some sort of blocking and confusing rehearsal, Norman said something like, ‘Sod this for a lark’ and walked out, never to be seen again. He didn’t miss much, the show went out early in Channel 4’s history and thankfully sank without trace.

  I saw Norman regularly over the next eight years or so. One very memorable time was when I was compère at a comedy club in Woolwich, south London, called the Tramshed. Just before I went on stage to announce him, Norman asked me to time him from when he went on stage to when he first spoke. I nodded, not really understanding what he was asking. I went onto the stage and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together in a warm and supportive manner for the very wonderful Mister Norman Lovett.’ The crowd went bananas and Norman sloped onto the stage looking slightly moth-eaten and miserable. He stood behind the microphone, the clapping died down, and the room became quieter as the audience waited for the first gag. Norman stood there in silence, someone laughed, Norman looked at them, the whole audience laughed. He looked at the whole audience. They laughed again. Norman hadn’t uttered a sound. I was looking at my watch at the side of the stage, two minutes. The other comics on that night crowded around. They knew Norman was going for his record. He stood motionless, picked out by the single spotlight. The audience went silent again, not a sound. Norman stared at them. It was a comic’s nightmare, standing there in utter silence. Then someone snickered, Norman gave the person the most cursory of glances and immediately the whole audience started laughing again. Four minutes. He’d been standing on the stage in front of three hundred people for four minutes, entertaining them, somehow, by doing absolutely nothing. It was very funny, it was utterly infectious, even the hardened old pros at the side of the stage were roaring with laughter. There must have been ten periods of nerve-racking silence, each one broken by someone bursting out laughing, looking at this gaunt, miserable bloke, standing on a stage wearing a cardigan. At seven minutes twenty seconds, after a huge prolonged wave of laughter, Norman said ‘What?’ He got an ovation.