The Man In the Rubber Mask

by Robert Llewellyn

  Eventually, when the teacher called a break in the class, I rolled off the bed and pulled my trousers on pretty damn quick. No one uttered a word about it. I took a cursory glance at some of the students work. They hadn’t drawn it, there was a bit of rubbing out where they had moved it about a bit on the page, but they stayed well within the bounds of flaccidity. I found out later that it was a daily occurrence and no one had even noticed. Then I got depressed because no one had noticed. There’s no pleasing some people, is there?

  Years later, back in the BBC special effects department in Acton, Peter Wragg calmly kept applying bandage, smoothing it in and building up odd little ridges which would help when it had set and he’d remove it.

  The relief when this great lump of stuff came off was immense, I felt light as a feather, but was again depressed at the sight of this pot-bellied hunchback torso, that in my mind was a lightweight version of Arnold Schwarzenegger. After having my hands moulded, which was the least difficult, and being measured to bits, I was allowed to go. Surprisingly enough, looking back, I still really had no idea what I was letting myself in for.

  There have been some notable exceptions to this rule. A noisy drunken party which started at four-thirty in the morning made me a bit depressed once — depressed being a polite middle-class way of saying deeply angry. Henry. French. Red Dwarf Series III. An award funded by the Perrier water company. First prize is a thousand pounds and all nominees get to do their show in London at the Donmar Warehouse. Big, loud, gay stand-up comic, wit, raconteur and one-time presenter on That’s Life with Esther Rantzen. Now has a hand in the Brighton Comedy Festival. Featured in the film Prick up your Ears. The liberal term for pervy kinkiness. For those not familiar with a Hilti gun, this is a tool used in the building trade to drive nails into solid concrete or brick with the aid of a small explosive charge. I’m saying this as if it’s not of prime importance now, which of course it is. It’s massively important and I think of very little else.

  Chapter 2

  Just around the back from the BBC special effects department in Acton are the BBC rehearsal rooms. You can see them clearly if you drive down the A40, a big yellowish tower block which dominates the surrounding semi-industrial flatlands and cemeteries. As you go in the front door there’s one of those blackboards in the foyer with the white letters that you push in. This tells you what’s going on, who’s on what floor, and which room. Red Dwarf was on the fifth floor with the cast from Blackadder on one side of us and You Rang M’Lord? on the other. Alexei Sayle was down below us, and Jim Davidson was somewhere, I think, or was it Jimmy Tarbuck, and Paul Daniels and his wife. Oh it was marvellous. A thespian village transformed into a tower block. I took the lift to the fifth floor and found my way to our room. There was a little blackboard outside the door, and written in chalk it said Red Dwarf III, director, Ed Bye, producer, Paul Jackson.

  I pushed open the big double door and saw that I must have been very late, as there were about twenty people sitting around a big table in the middle of a vast room. I wasn’t intimidated. I’m an actor. I said hello in a high-pitched, nervous voice and tried to find somewhere to sit. I was introduced to so many people, it was hopeless, there was no way I would remember all these people I was going to be working with for the next ten weeks. Some of them I recognised: Bethan Jones from make-up, Peter Wragg from special effects, Rob and Doug, Ed Bye, and there was Hattie Hayridge. I knew her, I’d known her for ages, we did stand-up comedy gigs together.

  I shook hands with Chris Barrie. ‘How d’you do, sir?’ he said in a fairly formal manner. I shook hands with Danny John-Jules, ‘Yeah, how’s it hangin’, guy?’ he said with a big grin. I shook hands with Craig Charles, ‘What are you lookin’ at, you middle-class bastard?’ No, I lie, he didn’t say that then, that wasn’t until I’d been there a week. He said something like, ‘Nice to have you on board,’ and he bowed very low.

  Hattie looked very glamorous and settled, as if she’d been there for weeks. ‘Hello Hattie,’ I said nervously and tried to sit near her. In the middle of the table was a big pile of scripts, we were at the read-through, the first time each series when Rob and Doug get to hear the cast saying their words.

  That first read-through was pretty bad for me. Chris and Craig are such good sight-readers, and Hattie was very good, but I was very bad at that time. Danny on the other hand has a unique style when he first reads a script. He seems to be scanning through different pages to everyone else; sometimes he’s even looking through a different script. Sometimes he’s not even looking at the script, he’s reading about how much Pavarotti earns in a newspaper. It gets to his line and the room falls silent for a moment, Danny looks around with a big grin on his face. He’s happy.

  ‘Danny, it’s your line, man,’ says Craig.

  ‘What?’ says Danny.

  ‘It’s your line, man,’ says Craig.

  ‘Page thirty-two Dan,’ says Chris.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ says Danny, finding the page. He clears his throat and says his line, which is: ‘What’s happenin’!’

  Everybody laughs a great deal and the reading continues. The first time this happened Hattie and I were out of the picture. We didn’t understand the long history Danny already had with the company. It would appear to the casual observer that Danny had no idea what was going on, he would smile and look around when it was his cue and Craig would do his line for him. Then put him in front of an audience and he is always on cue, always getting the laugh, or, as Danny would say, ‘Kicking comedy booty, guy.’

  I read terribly that first day. I suddenly felt completely out of my depth. I was sitting around a table with a group of people who all knew each other well and who had been working in television for years. I had been working as a performer for years, but only with limited experience of TV.

  I wasn’t even playing a human; I was playing a mechanoid called Kryten. I didn’t know what he was supposed to be, what he looked like, where he’d come from, why he was there. I didn’t know anything. At that time I’d never seen the episode in the second series where Kryten first appeared. At that time Kryten was played by David Ross who later became Talkie Toaster and who also put in a magnificent performance as the headmaster in Alan Bleasdale’s GBH. I read Kryten in my own voice and what were very funny lines came out about as amusing as dog poo. At the end of a marathon read, six half-hour scripts, all of which took longer than that to read, it was hard for me not to be a little despondent. It seemed like such a mammoth task ahead. All these thousands of words to learn, and I hadn’t written them.

  This was the part that was so different for me. I had spent the previous ten years learning lines almost as I had written them. I had written everything I had ever performed except once. A play I was in at the Sheffield Crucible Theatre called The True Story of the Titanic. It was a sort of musical comedy satire thing, equating the sinking of the Titanic with Thatcher’s Britain.

  I played about six different characters, had loads of lines to learn which were written by someone else11 and I found it very hard. The director would happily verify that I had trouble learning my lines. His name is Stephen Daldry. He was a scruffy git in those days, now he’s gone all posh and directs films in Hollywood. I keep seeing him on telly, being nominated and winning awards for amazing films and plays he’s directed. He dresses very smartly and has nice haircuts. But when he was trying to get me to do a dance piece and say lines at the same time, his abilities in coaxing a performance out of an actor were stretched to the limit. Maybe I helped him though, you know? Maybe after he’d been through this difficult experience with me, he was a stronger, better director. After seeing me trip over and forget my lines eight hundred times in rehearsal, every other actor would be a breeze to work with. To give myself a small break, I never blew it in a performance though. In that respect I’m like Danny: give me an audience and I can remember things my day-to-day brain would find utterly incomprehensible.

  The play in Sheffield was performed by what I refer to as
‘proper actors’, these are people who’ve been to drama school and done proper acting training. People who have learned how to absorb lines, learned stagecraft, understand music and dance, can do proper singing. I was in a musical theatre group for five years, I just used to mouth along with the songs most of the time, then it looked like I was singing, but it sounded much better.

  The cast of Red Dwarf, however, are not ‘proper actors’ in those terms. As I said, I came out of the Alternative Comedy brigade of the late seventies and early eighties. Craig Charles started life as a performance poet. Chris Barrie I first saw doing impressions in a late-night comedy club. Hattie does devastatingly funny deadpan comedy routines. Danny was in Cats, Starlight Express and loads of other musicals as a dancer. Danny has those proper dancer’s legs; you know, the ones with the massive calves that can spring him eight feet into the air.

  That was my problem, before going to the read-through, I had reassured myself that I was working with a group of people who were more like me, not ‘proper actors’ but renegade comics who wouldn’t be able to read scripts well the first time. I was very wrong.

  As soon as the read-through was over, everyone got up and started talking to each other. I went to the special BBC tea table, which all those rehearsal rooms have. As I was making myself some tea, Bethan Jones asked me if it would be alright to try my head on, as the first mask was ready. I agreed.

  Rob and Doug came up to me and we talked about what Kryten should sound like. I said that I didn’t want him to be English because he was bound to sound like R2D2. Or was it C3PO? Anyway, the humanoid one who said, ‘Oh no, Master Luke!’ all the time. It would be so easy to say, ‘Oh no, Master Dave!’ and end up having a totally unoriginal robot on your hands. Rob smiled and smoked, Doug walked in little circles nodding and saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, no.’

  ‘What about a walk?’ said Rob. The walk. The moment I’d been dreading. When I first met Rob and Doug, weeks before, they’d been sitting down behind a table. I was showing them my full range of comedy walks, which they seemed to admire.

  By the time of the read-through, I knew Doug had a false leg, due to an accident when he was a kid. His walk is obviously affected by this, so my desire to do a comedy wobbly robo-walk was somewhat hampered. I had done a great many comedy walks in my time, in fact, one kind reviewer had once written, ‘…Llewellyn’s funny walks put John Cleese to shame…’ Well, I never like reviews which compare one performer with another, and they certainly didn’t put John Cleese to shame. I mean, let’s face it, had John Cleese been in the audience that night, I don’t think he’d have got up out of his seat after seeing my funny walk and said, ‘That’s it, I’ll never perform again, I feel put to shame!’

  My lack of desire to start comedy walking certainly wasn’t Doug’s fault, it’s painfully clear he didn’t give a toss about it. It was all my own inner middle-class guilt-ridden rubbish getting in the way.

  The big problem with comedy walks is that they invariably mimic someone who is disabled in some way. It’s a problem with a lot of character comedy; you are often imitating someone who isn’t ‘normal’ in the dull, grey sense of the word. You are being someone who is a bit bonkers, or a tosser, or a sad old git. But comedy walks have a specific danger all of their own.

  When on tour with The Joeys, during a ‘get-in’ at a theatre in Swansea, I did my Douglas Bader walk to pass the time and keep up the morale of my co-performers. Douglas Bader was a fighter pilot who lost both his legs in plane crashes but went on to learn to walk again. He had a very specific walk. It’s the only way you can walk if you keep both knees straight and don’t flex your ankles. You have to get all your movement from your lower back and pelvic girdle. A lot of men don’t think they’ve got a pelvic girdle, they think a girdle is a girly thing. But we do have them, which proves that all men are a bit girly anyway.

  So there I was, doing my Douglas Bader walk across the stage, my fellow performers and road manager were egging me on, thinking it was all terribly clever and funny, then a charming old man came in at the back of the theatre and stood still for a moment. He called out, ‘Would you like some tea?’ We waved and said we’d love some, then I watched in horror as this man turned with great difficulty and walked out. He did a Douglas Bader walk, he had no legs, well, he had two false legs. He’d been watching me do my ‘funny walk’ probably thinking I was taking the piss. I felt, well, let’s say I flew over the pit of utter shame in a hang-glider with no canvas.

  Pulling faces or gurning can be a dangerous occupation as well. Another kind reviewer once said, ‘Llewellyn’s facial gymnastics have to be seen to be believed’. I liked that one, facial gymnastics, nice one. Had that one put on the poster I can tell you. But there is a down side to facial gymnastics as well.

  In one Joeys show there was a sketch about the Law Lords. It implied Britain’s top judges were like mummified relics from a bygone age. I played the mummy, which involved funny walks and a great deal of highly energetic facial gymnastics. One night in a theatre in Canterbury I think, we had a brilliant audience, half of which came from a local special school. They were amazing, loving every minute of the show and screaming for more. However, there was one guy in the front row who didn’t have a lot of control of his face and when I walked forward being the judge, I noticed him looking at me. As a three-thousand-year-old mummified judge I was distorting my face in an unnervingly similar way to him. I felt terrible. Then he burst out laughing and pointed at me. I didn’t take much comfort from this at the time, but on reflection, there is no reason on earth why my face shouldn’t have been as funny to him as it was to anyone else.

  It’s a difficult area and one I’m useless at; I always seem to blow it by trying to be too careful. In fact, the year Mammon was running in Edinburgh I met a wonderful man called Jag Plah. Jag is an Indian stand-up comic who can only just stand up. He has been disabled from birth. He stumbles onto a stage, which takes some time, and advises the audience to ‘talk amongst themselves’ while he gets to the microphone. He then grabs the mike stand and drops his crutches, he looks at them lying on the floor and says, ‘Look at that, they’re useless without me.’

  I learned a great deal from being with Jag, one of the main things being that if you ignore someone’s disability, you’re not being honest with them; you’re pretending there is nothing wrong. He would always confront able-bodied people’s discomfort head on. We once went out to eat in a restaurant in Edinburgh that had a steep flight of steps to the entrance. As we were leaving a young Canadian couple in tartan shirts were waiting to go in. As soon as they realised Jag was on crutches they looked away, I suppose in the belief that they would embarrass him with their stares. I could suddenly see what it must be like, to be studiously ignored by everyone who sees you.

  Jag responded by saying, ‘Stand back, crip coming.’ The Canadian couple winced, to hear the term crip coming from someone like Jag obviously jangled their liberal nerves, but to ignore him was to be more offensive than calling him a ‘crip’. When Jag spoke, or walked, it was plainly clear that it was more effort for him than most other people. That was all. In every other respect Jag was a bog-standard, egotistical stand-up comic who leched after women. One difference was that he didn’t drink. He claimed in his comedy routine that if he drank alcohol he felt ‘completely legless’.

  I should have been super cool about Doug’s leg but I didn’t know him then, and felt very uncomfortable. I decided to go for broke though and suggested I could base Kryten’s walk on a kid I was at school with. He had muscular dystrophy, a wasting nerve disease, but at the age of fifteen he was still able to walk. He was the hero of our class mainly because he was so funny. Kids can be really horrible about that sort of thing, but for some reason our class had really taken this boy under their wing. If he answered a teacher’s question, he would put his hand up by swinging his shoulders and flicking his arm up, then holding his elbow with the other hand. This style of attracting the teacher’s attention quickly
caught on, and soon we were all doing it. I think it had a beneficial influence on the whole class, we were the bad lads of the school, in the problem class, but because putting your hand up to answer a question was such fun, we started to pay more attention. This boy’s walk was also very peculiar. He would flick his legs forward with a twist of his hips, sort of like Douglas Bader with rubber knees. When I perambulated across the floor like this for Rob and Doug, they clearly liked what they saw.Doug walked around in a circle nodding and saying, ‘No, no, yeah, no, yeah.’ Rob smoked another five cigarettes and said, ‘Very funny, Bobby.’

  Ed Bye wanted to know what sort of voice I was going to use. I searched my brains for all the daft comic characters I’d done over the years: Toby, the chinless wonder upper-class twit with buck teeth; Sir George Sprout, the gout-ridden old land owner; the boy Tom, ancient rustic know-all; Steve Crèche Ponytail, the massively righton non-sexist man. None of them fitted the bill.

  I tried my Dutch hippie accent, then I did my Scandinavian. It was a character I’d used in my stand-up comedy set, who talked about having sex on a bean bag in a stripped-pine living room with a Janis Joplin poster on the wall. Oh, it was very droll at the time, but it doesn’t work out of context. This accent tickled Ed; it has a daft sing-song quality to it, a charming innocence or stupidity, depending on your viewpoint. As I did the walk and the voice, the general consensus seemed to be settling on Kryten being a Swedish mechanoid. Very clean and tidy, very Swedish, a sort of Volvo robot with side impact bars.

  It felt good, I seemed to have cracked it, then Rob and Doug started walking around, standing in a huddle, smoking and talking. I didn’t really notice this, I was busy perfecting my walk, watching myself in the large mirror attached to one wall. Just as the character was starting to work for me Rob walked up and said, ‘The Scandinavian stuff.’