The Man In the Rubber Mask

by Robert Llewellyn

  I said, ‘Yeah, it really feels good.’

  ‘No,’ said Rob, ‘it’s going to drive people insane. That voice really gets to you after a while. What about American?’

  ‘Yeah, American, no, yeah, yeah,’ said Doug. That was okay, I had spent time in America, it made more sense in some ways, a robot was far more likely to come from America than Sweden. You can see how strongly I held on to my opinions, I don’t swim with the tide, I stick to my beliefs, sometimes, for a bit, as long as everyone likes me.

  I did my Californian, my bland Midwest, they were all a bit dull. Then I explained I’d spent time in Vancouver a few years before, having sex with a blonde Canadian woman in funny positions in various natural woodland settings. Not that the sex was important to the accent, although her accent was great. It was a sort of American Swedish. Canadians have a Scandinavian sing-song quality, and West-coast Canadians have a very particular vowel sound. The closest comparison to this accent I can think of is Loyd Grossman, who is actually from Boston, Massachusetts, but who can twist vowels the rest of us didn’t know existed.

  I tried the walk again, now with the distorted Canadian/Bostonian accent: ‘Eouo, helleo thar Mustur Dayvid Suur, Iy hayve youuour breakfust, just as yououo orduered it.’

  That was it, in some ways, Kryten, as I portray him, was born at that moment. Obviously when I finally had the whole costume on, the walk changed, the arm movements were defined by what I could and couldn’t do in the costume, but the voice is more or less the same.

  However, there is no rest for the egotistical, and no sooner was I riding the crest of a comedy wave in the rehearsal room, than Bethan Jones led me into the little side room, sat me on a chair and slicked back my hair. This is the first stage in the make-up procedure; I was having the first test of Kryten’s head.

  Next came the bald cap, like a thin bathing cap that is stuck to the skin with spirit gum all around the hairline to hold it in place. Then, the worst bit, the mask, a one-piece moulded balaclava of latex foam, was pulled over my head like a giant split condom. First they glued the rear section on to the back of my head. Then, starting with the forehead, they glued the mask to my face. Glue all over my nose, cheeks, lips, chin, neck and ears. In fact more or less everywhere except my eyelids.

  I looked in a mirror and saw a very odd spectacle. The mask was unpainted and looked the same colour as a plaster you find floating in a swimming pool. A sort of dirty grey beige colour. The skin around my eyes looked very dark, so I could still, as it were, see myself under the rubber. Rob, Ed and Doug came in and stood around looking at it. Bethan Jones explained everything about the mask’s difficulties to them.

  Rob smiled and smoked, Doug said, ‘Yeah, great, yeah, yeah.’

  Ed Bye said, ‘Well chap, what’s it like?’

  I don’t know what I said. I think we discussed the theory of irony. I said that it was ironic how when I’d first met them I was worried about being recognised for being a robot, worried about getting typecast. Here I was, so well covered in prosthetic foam even my own mother wouldn’t recognise me.

  After about twenty minutes Bethan Jones removed the mask and I was back to normal. Even that early on there was a huge relief that washed over me when the thing finally came off. I washed my face and felt it carefully with my hands. It felt new and different, even after such a short time. I made a mental note of the amount of days I had before the next mask was being applied ready for the first day’s filming, which was to take place in Liverpool.

  Peter Biddle.

  Chapter 3

  The beginning of recording the third series of Red Dwarf was a difficult time for me because I was already committed to performing in a new play I had written, to be premiered at the Edinburgh Festival, 1989. The play was called Onan. It was an idea that I had been knocking around for a long time, and it finally came to fruition when I co-wrote it with John McKay.12 Onan was the story of two men who set up the first non-sexist, non-racist, righton pornographic magazine. The magazine was called Onan, named after the biblical figure who spilled his seed on the ground. I discovered you can say ‘spilled his seed’ on radio and television, however, if you say ‘wanker’ people seem to get upset. Funny old world. Anyway, the play dealt with all the thorny issues surrounding the production and consumption of pornography, but it dealt with them in a humorous and witty way. We hoped.

  When I wasn’t doing read-throughs and costume fittings for Red Dwarf, I was busy rehearsing Onan in an old school building in Hackney.

  John and I both appeared in the play and our first night try-out took place in the Soho Poly Theatre in London. Considering it was a comedy the laughs were few and far between. It felt very leaden and worthy, the big audience were crammed into their seats in this tiny basement theatre. Afterwards John and I were both pretty depressed, we had both had successful shows the previous year in Edinburgh, now we were going up with what felt like a bit of a dog.

  Everyone who saw the show in London was very nice about it, ‘It’s fantastic guys, it really says a lot,’ said someone who looked faintly bored.

  ‘I really laughed,’ said someone else, without cracking a smile. We were also in a bit of trouble because in the normal course of events we’d have had time to jiggle the play around a bit, between the first performance and our arrival in Edinburgh. Now, due to my filming schedule, this wasn’t possible. The day after this glamour-free première, I drove to Liverpool and checked in at the hotel.

  I was greeted in the bar by the full complement of Red Dwarf: the sound engineers, the cameramen, the vision mixers, lighting technicians, boom operators, the rest of the cast, Rob and Doug. The whole lot of us took over the corner bar of the hotel. Craig walked in and was greeted at every table he passed. Everyone in Liverpool knew Craig. He implied to me that half the people who knew him wanted to kill him, so I moved myself slightly further away.

  We all went out for a meal, which considering there were about eighty people in all, took hours of careful organisation. Craig and Danny went off clubbing. I had to go to bed. This is the story of my life, everyone else goes off clubbing, I go to bed.

  The reason I went to bed was made apparent in the dark hours of early morning. My bedside phone went, I answered it, a Liverpudlian woman’s voice said, ‘This is your early morning call, Mr Llewellyn.’ It had started; this was my first day proper on Red Dwarf.

  Half an hour later I was sitting in a make-up chair in the temporary BBC Liverpool studios, which were on the site of the Liverpool Garden Festival, which was on the site of the old docks, which were on the site of the older docks, which were on the site of a forest probably. Nothing is permanent on earth, nothing can be conserved, change is the only constant. There we go, that’s the sort of paper-thin philosophy I filled my head with as I sat watching Bethan and Gill put my make-up on.

  This first day I was sitting in the make-up chair for something like six hours. They were trying it out, testing different colours and powders, painting the mask once it was stuck on me. I’ll say it just once because it’s boring, but the masks are extremely uncomfortable to wear. It’s hard to describe, and I’ve tried to do it many times. I’ve said things like, it’s like wearing someone else’s old socks over your face all day, with a local anaesthetic, like a dentist gives you, and then sitting in a sauna. It’s also like having mud slapped on your face and then dried so it goes all tight. What it’s really like is having your whole head covered with prosthetic foam rubber; there is no way of knowing without doing it. It is hot, it is uncomfortable, it does make me a bit irritable, and in fact I’m a bit irritable now writing about it. Just leave me alone will you, don’t stand so close. Get off my case. Jesus!

  Okay, there, that’s it; I’ll really try not to go on about the mask. It may pop up occasionally, but I’ll try and keep it to a minimum.

  It’s that first day; I’ll never forget it as long as I live. The irony warning light was on red alert. Six hours in make-up, I finally stand up and stretch the stretch o
f the un-dead. I had a hyper-stretch; my buttocks were as numb as a monk’s cassock snake, as they say in Australia.

  I went into the costume department and was met by the lanky form of Howard Burden, the genius behind all the Red Dwarf cossies. I have to admit there have been times, maybe as a shard of fibre glass has wormed its way into my anatomy, or my shoulders have ached because of the armour I’m wearing, or when my core body temperature has gone so high I’ve seen Russian helicopters hovering above me ready to pour sand on my head, I have been known to call Howard things other than a genius. But it’s all done with great love and understanding because what you see works very well, and as we troopers in showbiz always say, ‘That’s what’s important’. Actually, that’s bull, what we really say is, ‘I really can’t work in this cossie love, it’s sheer agony!’ On the first day I got zipped, buckled, pop-riveted, velcroed and strapped into my costume. For three or four minutes it’s very comfortable, then I try and sit down and my Plastazote buttocks come flying off. I walked around in it for a while, visited the set where Craig was filming. It was incredible; the remains of a crashed space ship could be seen stranded on top of an iceberg. It was all made of polystyrene and bits of old hardboard, but it looked great. They were filming the inserts for the episode titled Marooned. Craig was stumbling about in the snow being buffeted by a howling blizzard. This blizzard was created by an old Volkswagen car engine on a stand, attached to a gigantic propeller. It can create enough wind to blow you off your feet. It worked. Craig went flying very effectively. He was only too willing to do his own stunts.

  ‘Hey, Ed, how about I come out of the door and dive out,’ said Craig, wiping the fake snow from his hair, ‘and you know, like, land on me head, that’d look good.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ed brightly, ‘and you’d also be dead, which would leave me looking like a right wally.’

  ‘Hey, Eddy, man,’ said Craig, ‘I can land on me head and no harm done. I’m a Scouser man, you know what I’m saying.’

  ‘Yes, I know exactly what you’re saying, and you’re completely mad.’

  Just as the wind machine was getting ready to blow Craig through the supporting wall of the studio, lunch was called. Another bit of standard Red Dwarf irony. I had spent six and a half hours getting ready, and then I had to sit still for an hour and do nothing while everyone had lunch. I don’t blame people for having lunch. I think it is their most fundamental human right to have lunch. It’s just ironic, or Sod’s Law, that it always seems to happen that I am ready just before lunch. I went into the Portakabin that was my dressing room and sat down and looked in the mirror. The mask was extraordinary, it was impossible to see where the mask stopped and my face began. I looked at myself for a long time.

  That moment was the one and only time I was terrified of Kryten. It was the shock of being alone, looking in a mirror and not seeing you looking back. Someone else, some square-headed dork with chiselled features was looking back at me. I looked closer, it was someone else, it wasn’t me there. My heart rate went off the scale, I felt dizzy and nauseous, I felt as if someone had spiked my tea with a harsh hallucinogenic drug. I was, as they say in Australia, ‘off my face’. I looked away from the mirror and tried to compose my thoughts, I really felt like I was going mad. I was very scared. I stood up, I had to get away from the mirror, but the movement of my standing caught my eye in the mirror and I looked back. There he was again, that bloke with no hair and a cuboid head. It was horrible.

  I walked out of the Portakabin, through the makeshift dining area and into the car park outside. I walked past people who were working on the show, technicians and office staff, and they all ignored me. They had no idea I’d just had the fright of my life. They couldn’t tell if I was happy or sad, or angry or upset, or scared even. To them, I was the poor sod in the rubber mask. It made me super-aware of how much we can give away with our faces when we think people won’t notice.

  We are all, unconsciously most of the time, very good at ‘reading’ people’s faces, we can usually tell at a glance what sort of mood someone we know is in. If you remove that element, people start to cut you off, start to remove you from their mind’s eye, take less notice of you. Is this what it is like being disabled or having a terrible facial disfigurement? You wander through a world where you are very aware that you are being cut out of the picture.

  When I was about sixteen, I was going around the Museum of Mankind in London, and I saw a man who had a hole in the side of his face the size of an orange. You could see the side of his jaw, his teeth, his tongue. The poor man must have suffered some terrible accident, or had commando surgery for cancer. Whatever it was, the result was very shocking. I was torn, as I’m sure most people are, and I tried not to look at him. I wanted to stare, but I had been taught that staring was rude, so I looked away. I don’t know what to do in a situation like that, whatever your reaction, it’s wrong.

  ‘Cretin,’ said a voice with a French accent. ‘Do you want a cup of tea, Cretin?’

  It was Sylvie the company runner, she was a very small Frenchwoman who could not pronounce the name Kryten, and settled on Cretin, which means the same in French. She looked me in the eye when she asked me if I wanted tea, then she gently reached up and touched my rubber face.

  ‘It must be very ’ot,’ she said.

  I nodded. It was very ’ot. I’d only been in it seven hours and I was parched. It was interesting, however, that some people were not at all intimidated by the mask, and some were so horrified that they looked away. Sylvie’s radio crackled into life, asking her to go into the studio.

  She replied, ‘I am making tea for Cretin,’ which meant the whole crew heard her call me Cretin. It was naturally only a matter of time before the rest of the cast were calling me Cretin, especially Danny, who found it peculiarly amusing. Danny’s laugh could easily win the International Full-Bodied Laugh Grand Prix.

  I got a cup of tea from Sylvie, and then found I couldn’t drink it. It was like trying to drink after you’ve been to the dentist and your lips are completely numb. I couldn’t feel my own lips, but immediately the tea touched my prosthetic lips, they absorbed the fluid and tasted like I was sucking someone else’s flannel in the bath. Did you ever do that as a kid? Suck your flannel? I did. My mum was always telling me not to, but at least it was my own flannel; I have no idea why I did it. But imagine doing that, thinking it was your flannel and feeling quite happy about it, and then realising it was someone else’s flannel.

  Lunch was supplied by location caterers - my favourite form of eating. I will often agree to doing a job if I hear the production is being made on location. It means one of those big trucks will be there with the two men in white who serve amazing food in the middle of nowhere.

  Here’s a tip: if you see a film crew near your street try and beg, borrow or steal a windproof jacket, get a peak cap with the name of a TV show or film on the front, and join the queue. The food is free and very nice. If anyone asks who you are, which is very doubtful, tell them you’re from a company with a TV-type name, Telly Techno, Telly Graphic, and you’re on set to talk to Nick. There is always a technician called Nick on every crew. I’ve done this many times around north London. Of course it does help if you know one of the lighting or sound people, but I have managed to get a free lunch from location productions where I didn’t know a soul.

  There was a long queue leading up to the step of the location catering truck. I was salivating, I’d missed breakfast, I’d been sitting still for hours, my body was pleading with me for some form of low-level pleasure. Food, anything, an old carrot, just something different to the stifling tightness.

  I chose the roast beef with the cauliflower, peas and roast potatoes. I made my way from the truck to the double-decker bus which doubles as a dining room. I sat down and looked at this plate of food. How on earth was I going to get it into my mouth?

  I chopped everything up small and tried to get it past my lips without touching them. My prosthetic lips tasted so horri
ble by now I didn’t want them to spoil my lunch. I soon found that by tipping my head backwards, I could more or less drop food into my open mouth from above. After I had done this a few times, I looked up and saw Craig looking at me sympathetically.

  ‘You poor sod,’ he said. I did feel pretty miserable, I stopped eating before I finished my plate and stared at what remained sadly.

  ‘Cretin, they want you in wardrobe,’ said Sylvie. So that was it. I couldn’t really eat. After slipping into my costume (I use the term ‘slipping’ in a comedy way) I had to go to make-up again to be touched up before going on the set.

  ‘You’ve ruined your lips!’ said Bethan Jones, viewing the damage all that tea and roast beef sauce had done. I was there another thirty minutes being re-glued, repaired and powdered, then finally, I entered the studio to do my first shot for Red Dwarf.

  In the story, the Cat (Danny John-Jules) was out searching for Lister and Rimmer on Starbug, which had crash-landed and was marooned on an ice planet. The Cat had harnessed Kryten to a sledge and the scene demanded that I pull this sledge, with Danny and a load of provisions, across a snowy landscape in a blizzard. He had to shout ‘Mush! Mush!’ as if I were a pack of dogs, and lash me with a bull-whip. Danny loved this scene. I was not so keen. For a start, when I was tied up to the sledge, I couldn’t get a grip in all the fake snow. So Peter Wragg tied another rope to the sledge, and somehow managed to lie down on the floor and pull the sledge for me. That would have been cool, but then they brought around the wind machine, the one they’d been blowing Craig around with in the morning. To get a good blizzard effect, they would start up the wind machine and then pour Dreft washing soap flakes into the wind.

  Ed arranged the camera and they started the wind machine. As soon as it was up to full blast, which was deafening, they started the blizzard effect. Within seconds, due to intense eye pain, I realised that my eye blink ability was severely restricted. The make-up was so heavy around my eyes that I really couldn’t close them. Super painful shards of Dreft mild and gentle soap powder stung my forced open eyeballs, I grimaced and tried to cover my face, I couldn’t see or hear anything, I finally turned away from the shot and someone killed the wind machine. I looked at Danny through soap vision; he was sitting on the sledge, in a big fur coat. He was smiling from cheek to cheek and saying ‘Mush! Mush!’