I saw Norman’s face on a screen, on the wall of some sleeping quarters in a sitcom, set in space, with Craig Charles, who I’d seen in the bar of the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh. I’d rubber-necked as I was talking to someone else, I thought, ‘There’s that bloke, the one who’s married to that women who was in Mona Lisa with Bob Thingummy.’ Then I looked at the woman sitting next to him. It was that woman from Mona Lisa with Bob Thingummy.
There was another man with an H on his forehead, I recognised him too, it was Chris Barrie. I’d seen him at the Comedy Store, years before, doing amazing impressions. E-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-extraordinary David Coleman. Then another man came in, he had amazing clothes on, and big teeth, he was called Cat. I didn’t know him. I’d never seen him anywhere. That’s because I hadn’t been to see the three hundred West End musicals Danny John-Jules had already found Diva-dom in.
About three weeks after I went to meet Rob, Doug, Ed and Paul Jackson, I drove into the BBC special effects department in Acton. I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for. I was, like most of the world’s population, a prosthetic virgin. If only I’d been aware of the irony warning light flashing in the heavens when I’d spoken to Rob and Doug. I had explained to them that I was slightly concerned about playing a robot, or a mechanoid, because I was midway through developing a series for Channel 4 about a robot, and I didn’t want to get typecast. Rob and Doug assured me that it wouldn’t be a problem, they thought that very few people would recognise me. I think it’s important to remember that I was very reassured by this. When I say important, I mean to keep the concept of this importance in context. It wasn’t very important in the grand scheme of things, like, it wouldn’t be very important to someone in Northern Thailand, or in the horn of Africa. It was only important to me, for about a minute, which isn’t very high on a world rating of important things.
I entered the special effects room and was greeted by Peter Wragg, the master, the genius, the man behind Thunderbirds, the quiet, retiring master of special effects.
‘This shouldn’t take too long, Robert,’ he said. ‘We’re just going to cover your head with dental mould and about fifteen pounds of plaster bandage. D’you want a cup of tea?’
He lead me through rooms where men in white overalls were making exploding chairs for Noel Edmonds’ Big Big Breakfast Show, this was the room they made the Daleks in, the Cybermen’s wellington boots were sprayed silver in this very building. Everywhere I looked there were old rubber monsters, slavering beasts with eyes on stalks, there were severed heads and rubber arms, model space ships and boats, men sitting at benches sawing small bits of metal.
We entered a room white with plaster dust. There I met Bethan Jones, who was head of the Red Dwarf make-up department. She was Welsh and as soon as I walked into the room she said, ‘I knew you weren’t really Welsh, I thought you’d be fake Welsh.’
I took great umbrage at this. Fake Welsh, with a name like Llewellyn, how could she? Of course, the truth is that I’m about as Welsh as a croissant, but somewhere in my past there must have been a couple of Taffs. Peter and Bethan Jones discussed my head, Peter pointed at the bridge of my nose with a pen. ‘If we can carve in here quite steeply,’ he said, ‘we’ll get a better shape in the forehead.’
What were they going to do, put my head in a vice and get out a chisel? I wanted to look at the small print in my contract. I could see it clearly in my mind’s eye. Why didn’t I look at this more closely?
Section 4 (a) Subsection F9
Clause 18
The artist shall render his head, face and all areas above the throat to the company for modification, enhancement and radical change. All surgery costs and corrective therapy needed after the production to be paid for by the artist.
I didn’t remember reading that bit. As I sat in ‘the chair’ placed in the middle of the room, I was assured by Peter Wragg that I wasn’t about to have radical surgery.
‘Some people,’ said Bethan Jones, as she stuck a rubber bald cap over my hair, ‘go completely mad when their heads are covered in plaster of Paris. D’you think you’ll be alright?’
I didn’t know how to answer, it was like being told, ‘Some people completely die when they have a steamroller drive over them. D’you think you’ll survive?’
Having never had my head covered in plaster of Paris bandage before, it was difficult to judge. I didn’t think I was claustrophobic, I’m a pretty well-balanced sort of guy, most of the time.
As my body was wrapped in black bin bags, I began to get the distinct impression I wasn’t going to have a lot of choice in the matter. I was going to get covered whether I went mad or not.
‘Here’s a pad of paper and a pen,’ said Peter, handing me the same. ‘This is in case you need something scratching when you’re under. Just write down which bit is itching, we’ll try and scratch it, then put a tick if we’ve got it. You see you won’t be able to speak, hear, see or smell anything while you’re under.’ I gripped the pen and paper as if they were my last hope.
‘We start with the mouth and nose,’ said Peter, who was now mixing a large plastic bowl full of bright yellow stuff that looked a bit like putty. ‘This is alginate, the stuff they make dental moulds out of, it’s quite minty in taste, but it is a bit cold when we first put it on.’ I nodded in the special way I have developed when I don’t understand anything but want it to appear that I do.
‘We cover your nose and mouth first, then you blow through your nose and we make a little hole for you to breathe through. We need it to actually go in your mouth, so can you keep your mouth open very slightly. Okay?’
As I nodded yes, Peter slapped a great big handful of this minty gloop right in my face. It was very cold; it covered my nose, went into my mouth, forced my lips apart, ran over my teeth, settled around my tongue and went sort of rubbery hard. It was like eating minty custard that went solid as you ate it. It was like being covered in semi-solid toothpaste, it was like nothing else I had ever experienced. They covered my eyes next, then my neck, ears, top of my head. Their voices became muffled; all the sound was distorted as I felt something heavy and wet being slopped on top of the minty rubbery goo. I assumed this would be the plaster of Paris bandage. I felt a lot of rubbing and squibbling about, my head started to get heavier. All I could hear was my breathing, all of which was taking place through one nostril, which naturally after a few minutes, started to itch. And I mean itch, like the itch at the centre of the universe. What could I do? It must only have been seconds, but it seemed like ages, my whole consciousness was focused on this itchy nostril. I tried to wipe it from my brain, I tried to think about sex, car crashes, mountain streams in the dappled sunlight. Wide open seascapes, the mountains outside Vancouver. Anything except this damn nostril.
Then I remembered the pen and paper I was holding in my sweaty little hands. I wrote, as best I could seeing that the whole thing was done by touch, N O S T R I L I T C H. I heard muffled voices and movement around me; I couldn’t tell what was going on, until I suddenly felt something poke up my nostril. I found out later it was one of those blue make-up removal things with cotton wool spun on each end. It did the trick. The relief was monumental. In the normal course of events, an itchy nostril is hardly something you comment on. You don’t call a halt to a conversation and say, ‘Hold it! Wait! I’ve got an itchy nostril, everyone stay calm.’ You just rub it, pick it and flick it and be done with it. Not so when your head is encased in seven pounds of plaster of Paris.
My steady regular breathing continued, in, out, in, out. I became super aware that I was an animal, that I had lungs that were two big bags that had to fill with air, then blow it out again. Then I could hear my pulse, thrubub, thrubub. I could almost see my heart, this funny pumpy thing that keeps going, day and night, until I pop my clogs. How does it know? Why doesn’t it just forget to beat, why don’t I just snuff it? I felt my heart rate increase, Thrub thrub thrub, I felt a small rush of adrenaline. Maybe I would die with this bloody thing on my
head. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to get it off and I would starve to death slowly. I’d never see anyone again, my girlfriend, my mates, my mum and dad. It was all over. I could see the headlines, ‘Princess Di Has Ladder In Tights Shock’. Let’s face it, who would write about some sad actor who starved to death inside a plaster of Paris head mould in the BBC special effects department in Acton?
I tried to control these maddening daydreams; I tried to think about sex. Great big heaving … pulsating sweating … it didn’t work. It was a big shock. Never before in my life had I been unable to have a kinky sexual fantasy. I’d had them during exams at school, I’d had them when I was failing my driving test, I’d had them when I was having sex! But now, in this little, quiet, private world, where no one would know, because even if the Bishop raised his hat I was totally covered in loose-fitting black plastic, it didn’t matter, I just could not think about knobbing. I couldn’t even manage a soft-core shampoo advert. It was the ideal opportunity to have some deeply kinky and perverted sexual thoughts. Not a sausage. In fact, a sausage would have been about the kinkiest thing I could have thought about.
What a breakthrough though, for the treatment of sex offenders. They get sentenced to ten hours a day with their head encased in plaster of Paris. It just stops all that stuff. Well, it did for me, but maybe it wouldn’t work. I don’t believe there are edges to human sexuality.8 I bet there’s some bloke somewhere who is rock hard for plaster of Paris. I bet there’s a magazine you can buy in an Amsterdam bookshop called Kinky Plaster of Paris Monthly. Well, it’s not so daft, I’ve seen a magazine called Enema Digest. When I was doing legitimate research of course.
Actually, I don’t want to go on about plaster of Paris forever, but there were the Chicago Plaster Casters weren’t there. This was a team of young women artists in the late sixties who went around making plaster casts of famous rock stars’ … well, what can I call it and not be juvenile, let me think. Stiffies, yes, that’s mature. First they made them go … like they do, and then they covered them with plaster of Paris. Once it had set they filled them with wax and a bit of string and made candles out of them.
Oh, all right, I admit, I tried it; I saw this documentary about mad American sex therapists that had a section about these women. I was young, I was impressionable, I went home and tried it. I had a bit of plaster of Paris left over from building hills for my model railway set. I was halfway through the process, I don’t want to go into details but it seemed to be working, suddenly my mother called to me from downstairs that it was teatime. I quickly tried to remove two and a half pounds of semi-hard plaster from my semi-hard manhood. I had forgotten one vital element. The Chicago Plaster Casters used a plastic sheet with a hole in it to avoid the plaster of Paris getting caught on the model’s pubic hair. Okay, okay, it’s gross, I know, but anyway, I didn’t know that.
There is no real way of describing the pain that comes from hanging two and a half pounds of plaster of Paris from three or four pubic hairs, but let’s just agree that it is intense. I was panicking, I knew my mum was going to walk into my bedroom and I was going to suffer some fairly hefty adolescent humiliation. Luckily, I had a pair of nail-scissors on my bedside table and, with a bit of judicious snipping, I managed to remove the offending rock.
I did eventually make a wax mould of my downstairs department thingy. It looked like, well, you know when you clean out the vegetable rack and you find a six-month-old carrot that has dried up and shrivelled. It was sad and took many years to get over.
I was still under the plaster mould in the BBC special effects department in Acton. This state of affairs seemed to go on for hours, my ears were straining for any sound, I couldn’t hear anyone. I imagined Peter Wragg and Bethan Jones and the lads had all gone out into the sunshine, they were sitting on the step, smoking and drinking tea, reading the papers and chatting about football.
I imagined Peter Wragg saying, ‘We could go down the pub if you like, we’ve got to wait a couple of hours for it to go off, not much we can do really.’
Suddenly there was a cracking sound, a deafening creaking wrenching noise, as if the very bowels of the earth were being ripped asunder. I felt my head move, not much, just a judder, and then the pressure on my face was suddenly gone. After a little more creaking there was a huge relief on my neck, the enormous weight of the back half of the mould was lifted away, and I could hear.
‘Tip your head forward, Robert,’ said Peter Wragg. ‘We’ll ease the mask off slowly then, wriggle your face a bit.’
I did as I was told and slowly the mask moved. I could see light again, the minty lump was dragged from my mouth and I emerged back into the real world.
‘That wasn’t too bad, was it?’ said Bethan Jones with her jaunty Welsh accent. Not too bad in comparison to being Hilti-gunned9 to the underside of a battle tank on manoeuvres through a bramble patch at top speed, no. That’s what I thought, what I said of course was, ‘No, it was fine.’ I said that because I’m a well-brought-up person, or as Craig would say, ‘A softy middle-class bastard.’
They peeled the bald patch off and I had a wash, rubbing life back into my face. I returned to the casting room to see a plaster cast of my head emerging from the mould. It looked like the head of some sort of plug-ugly alien with bad posture. My neck had collapsed under the weight; my head was shunted forward so far I looked like a hungry giraffe. I couldn’t believe it was me. I had a sideways nose, a double chin and a bumpy head.
There was another warning light on the control panel in the sky, the small print beneath read, ‘It’s not over yet.’ Next I had to stand in between two supports, on which I rested my arms, and have a body cast. This is where the whole torso and upper arm area of the victim is wrapped in plastic cling film, then covered in plaster bandage up to a weight of seven tonnes. It is not an intellectually stressful task; you have to stand up, stay still and shut up. I could do the first two, but the last I have always found impossible. I wittered on like a drain for the whole time, I’ve been told by Australians that I could talk under wet cement. I was moaning and complaining as the plaster overcoat got heavier and heavier and my feet started hurting.
If you’ve never stood absolutely still for a long time, it’s difficult to imagine how something so simple could be so bloody uncomfortable. When you wait for a bus, or stand looking at a painting, as I’m sure you do very often, you are actually flitting about like a bird. Constantly shifting your weight from one foot to the other, scratching your bum and tapping your feet about. When you have to stand still, not move a muscle, it takes about forty seconds before you become uncomfortable, three minutes to be internally whinging and after twenty minutes you can bore anyone to death with your list of complaints.
I’d learned this many years before when a friend talked me into posing in her life-drawing class. I had to stand in funny positions without a stitch on so that a lot of quite normal-looking people could draw my bits. Well, okay, they usually drew the rest of me first, but I was convinced they were really interested in my bits.
After only a few moments what had started out as a very comfortable pose would become agony, and it was always made worse when the teacher said, ‘Only another thirty-five minutes.’ They liked drawing me because I was so thin in those days it was almost like drawing the human skeleton. Their other favourite model at the time was the opposite, Mr Lard Mountain they called him. I never met him, but I saw the drawings. He was big, I mean fat big, but also big big. He was big everywhere. All their drawing corroborated this. It made me very depressed. I was twenty-one and that sort of thing is of prime importance then.10 Normally it was quite warm in the life-drawing class, although sometimes, in the winter, it would get a bit chilly, and the old single Polaroid tended to turn into a passport photo. Except one time. Oh I shouldn’t tell you, but what the hell.
I was modelling (that’s what they called it) at the Royal Academy in London. Dead posh, proper art students, really old building, proper teachers. I even got to lie on a bed
. They had this amazing bed with things like car jacks under each corner that could lift and tilt the bed into any position. All I had to do was lie on it and they wiggled me around into the position they wanted. It was so warm and comfy, I was very happy. I was being paid to lie still on a comfy bed. I started to nod off. I felt sensual and warm, happy and fulfilled, the room around me disappeared and I entered a gentle, loving place.
After a while I started to sort of wake up because I sensed something had changed. There was a different emphasis going on in my lower groinal area. I opened one eye and glanced down in the downstairs direction. It was, of course, the worst possible thing that could happen. It was bound to happen, it was Sod’s Law. A double Polaroid, right in front of thirty art students. Some of them girls! I thought about dustbins, I knew that’s what you were supposed to do in such situations. The trouble was, dustbins made me think of having filthy kinky sex in a dustbin, which was no good. I tried car engines, oily sex under a car engine, football, muddy sex on a football field. It was hopeless. I was desperate to try and flick a bit of cloth over it, but it was no good.
The Man In the Rubber Mask Page 2