The Man In the Rubber Mask

by Robert Llewellyn

  ‘Ahh, perfect weather for Kryten,’ I said as I joined them.

  ‘Shut up you smug bastard,’ said Craig, then laughed through his teeth and hussled someone for a cigarette.

  Craig and cigarettes. Okay, it’s a little-known fact that Craig Charles is on a mission, that is to borrow a cigarette off every living smoker on the planet. He has so far clocked up forty-seven thousand, eight hundred and fifteen people. This isn’t to say Craig never buys them, he buys them and loses them; in fact, during the read-through of the fourth series, he came in with hundreds of packs of cigarettes and distributed them around the room.

  Even here, in this obscure corner of irony control, there was a little light flashing. In January 1990 I gave up smoking. I’d been a smoker for nearly twenty years, ever since I had a pull on a Number Six filter tip behind the chemistry lab,20 I was hooked. This time, however, I’d really kicked the habit. I have a very strange photograph someone took during the making of the third series where you can see Kryten smoking. It looks all wrong somehow. Kryten wouldn’t understand smoking, and it would make the laundry smell which is such a shame.

  There was Craig during series 3, ‘Hey, Robert you middle-class bastard, give us a smoke man.’ Then, at the start of series 4, Madame Bountiful wanders around doling out ciggies like they’re going out of style. ‘Oh, you gave up, man, you can’t have any.’ said Craig, ‘You’ve become a safety Nazi.’

  We were standing around in the cold because we were once again filming inserts for the next series. Once I was fully kitted up in Kryten’s Krippling Kostume I climbed the wide stairs, carefully not tripping over the thick twists of cable which ran from the generator trucks to the array of lights John Pomphrey had installed.

  Inside this huge building was a breathtaking sight: two gigantic steam-driven pumps, one at either end of the building. A giant Meccano set of a machine which once upon a time pumped water up to thirty miles away, supplying millions of homes and businesses. It has long since been shut down, but I had the strange feeling I’d seen it before. As I wandered around in this vast echoing chamber I asked John Pomphrey why it might be I recognised it.

  ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was filmed in here,’ said John as though everyone had been asking him all day. They had.

  ‘Toot Sweets,’ I said. ‘The Toot Sweet song, of course.’

  I wandered about the building singing ‘Toot sweets, toot sweets, the pom poms you blow on, the whistles you eat’ dressed as a mechanoid with a rubber head. Irony warning light number seven blew a fuse. I was beginning to understand how to get through this time. It helped me if I went slightly mad. I seemed to end up in the oddest places with a rubber head on. It was best, I felt, if I sang a song from a popular children’s film of the sixties. Preferably featuring the many talents of Mister Dick Van Dyke.

  We spent the rest of the day wearing ridiculous foam rubber and plastic flashing shoes called escort boots. These were made at great expense and with great difficulty by the Peter Wragg Diva Posse as they’d come to be known. We broke them within about ten minutes, the combination of our clumsiness and the fact that as a cast, we are very good at breaking props. We can break virtually anything. However, we had great fun stomping about in these things that were almost impossible to walk in. They escorted us into the justice zone, another of Rob and Doug’s brilliant concepts. A zone where whatever crime you commit, the resultant misfortune happens to you. I mean, how do they come up with it? What goes through their minds? When we’re actually in situ, working out how to film something, it rarely occurs to me where all these ideas come from. I suppose they must sit around and say things like:

  ‘What would happen if you were in a world where crime was impossible.’

  ‘How could it be impossible?’

  ‘If every time you committed a crime it was against yourself.’

  ‘Yeah, no, yeah. Good. So there’d be no point to crime so you’d stop.’

  ‘You’d never start.’

  ‘Yeah, no, yeah, you’d never start, and if you gave someone a present, you’d get it back.’

  ‘Yeah. Great. And if you whacked them over the head with a hammer, you’d feel the pain yourself.’

  That’s how those two men earn their living, by coming up with absurd notions and developing them into storylines.

  Of course, the other thing I think they do when I’m trying to learn some difficult lines late at night, wearing a mini Grand Canyon into my kitchen floor, when I’m feeling paranoid as I’ve failed to remember some excruciating logical twist, I’m sure, I’m convinced that months before they have sat around and said something like:

  ‘Okay, we’ve got our storylines worked out, the structure’s there right. Okay, what we really need to do now is—’

  ‘—give Robert some really hard speeches to learn!’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, ha ha ha.’

  ‘Ha ha ha.’

  ‘I compared your mother to a bloated blubbery fish.’

  ‘A simple-minded scaly old piscine.’

  ‘Ah ha ha. That really screwed him in the last series didn’t it? Soft middle-class bastard.’

  ‘Did you see his face as he was trying to learn that? Hopeless. He spent hours trying to do that one.’

  ‘Hey, hey. Hold on, steady. Hold on. Here we go, what about, in Justice, when Rimmer is on trial for killing the crew of Red Dwarf, Kryten has to defend him.’

  ‘And do a very long speech.’

  ‘A very, very long speech. Yeah. With lots of facts and twisted logic in it.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. A long speech. Ten, twelve pages.’

  ‘Yeah, that’ll do his head in. Know-all bastard.’

  ‘Smug git.’

  ‘Hey, hey, I know what will really do him in!’

  ‘What, what, what?’

  ‘Right at the very end, right, at the very, very end, when he’s done this long, killer speech, we give Danny a one-word punch line and a massive woof.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, no, yeah. Great.’

  I’m sure nothing of the sort really happens, but one thing is for sure, none of us in the cast will ever know what they say about us. Sometimes we can guess, just by what happens to us in the series. Craig gets blown up, strangled, shot to bits and covered in curry. He says, ‘Hey, guys, how come I’m always the one that gets done in, la? What have I done?’

  ‘You got up this morning,’ says Rob as he walks past.

  ‘They’re hard bastards,’ says Craig.

  ‘Very bitter men,’ I say.

  ‘Very bitter hard bastards,’ says Chris. ‘Who happen to be very deeply talented.’

  ‘I ain’t saying nothin’, geezer,’ says Danny.

  Teasing Rob and Doug is one of the mainstays of our weekly routine when we are recording a series. They are referred to as The Boys, The Comedy Gestapo, The Comedy Boot Boys, The Comedy Police and Keep your heads down, they’re in.

  They take this ribbing very well, in the spirit in which it is intended.

  ‘Shut your face you bastard,’ says Rob as he headbutts you. No, no, I jest. It’s all good, clean boysy fun. They are very involved in the day-to-day process of creating the series, and by series 4, the production company had changed from Paul Jackson Productions to Grant Naylor Productions.

  ‘Hey, Rob and Doug, la,’ says Craig during a read-through session, ‘got your own production company now I see. Grant Naylor, you’ll have a helicopter next, la.’

  ‘It’s on order,’ says Doug.

  ‘But when we get it,’ says Rob, ‘you can’t have a ride in it.’ Rob Grant’s nickname is Doctor Love. He’s the man everyone turns to with their problems. I’ve had dreams where Rob is on a radio problem programme, people ring him up to get advice.

  ‘Doctor Love, what do I do? My wife’s left me!’ asks a distraught caller.

  ‘It’s your own fault you miserable bastard,’ answers Doctor Love.

  Series 4 was a very different experience for everyone, though. The first three series had been r
ehearsed in London and recorded in Manchester. This time we were under a completely new regime. We rehearsed and recorded in the same studio, G stage at Shepperton. This was decided officially because the shooting was so technical it was much easier for all concerned if we had access to the set all week. I think the reason was to give everyone a hard time because we all had to get to Shepperton every day.

  If you don’t know where Shepperton is, it’s the flat bit with the reservoirs you fly over as you come into land at Heathrow Airport. If you’ve never flown into Heathrow airport, that won’t help you, so it’s on the western fringe of London, just inside the M25, quite near the Thames. It’s where J.G. Ballard, the science fiction writer, lived. If you do fly into Heathrow, though, you can quite often see it. I’ve actually managed to make out G stage as we’ve banked overhead.

  The studios had a wonderful feel to them. It was easy to imagine them being a hive of activity in the 1950s, when all those war movies and Carry On films were made there. It’s always been a great thrill and privilege to work at Shepperton Studios, it has such an amazing history in British and indeed international cinema. Okay, so big chunks of the Harry Potter Films were shot there, Judge Dredd, Aliens, and Anna Karenina, but what about Thomas the Tank Engine? Yes, even that was made in Shepperton, I saw the set once, it was a railway modeller’s wet dream.

  What took place in the eight or nine huge cavernous studios at that time was mostly TV commercials with the occasional series like Red Dwarf and Smith and Jones. The Price is Right and other memorable game shows were made in Shepperton, I believe, but basically it had seen better days.

  However, when we were there the first year, we kept seeing all these long-haired men with dirty cloaks on wandering about. It was like being at Glastonbury Festival, great hords of wandering hippies stumbling about. Sometimes in the Shepperton canteen you’d find yourself standing in the queue behind forty heavily armed medieval soldiers. After a while we found out they were involved in a film, Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves which starred Kevin Costner.

  Yes I did see Kev. Well okay, I didn’t actually see him, but I was walking along the road in Shepperton and this huge stretch limo rumbled past. It had tinted windows so there was no way of knowing who was in there, but I could feel Kev’s presence. Mike McShane was playing Friar Tuck, I met him one day in the car park and he showed me the set. Up behind one of the studios was an enormous castle, made of polystyrene and paint, scaffold and chipboard. It looked completely real, it was huge, the castle yard was full of old peasants and weird farm animals, cows with big horns, odd-looking sheep and pigs. It was a lot more exciting than being in the studio, but it was November and it was very cold, and filming involves quite astonishing amounts of hanging around doing nothing.

  Being at Shepperton meant we spent the best part of seven weeks shut up in the huge studio, sitting in the set, living in the set, and in Craig’s case, occasionally sleeping in the set.

  Before we started recording, Ed Bye had asked me if I had any suggestions for a woman to play the part of Camille, the female mechanoid that Kryten had to fall in love with. I wracked my brains for three-quarters of a second, then said, ‘There’s this actress called Judy Pascoe I know vaguely, you could try her, she’s Australian, but she can do a very good mid-Atlantic accent.’

  They saw Judy and liked her. She got the job, so after all the moaning and complaining she’d had to listen to from me the year before, she was going to try a mask on herself. She was going to know what it was like to go ‘under rubber’.

  Contrary to what some people I have spoken to assume, I did not meet Judy on the set of Red Dwarf, we had met in Edinburgh in 1988 when we appeared at the same theatre, not at the same time, her show immediately followed mine. As I was packing up the props and costumes from another performance of Mammon, Robot Born of Woman, Judy arrived with her pint of beer. That makes her sound even rougher than she really is; the pint was a prop.

  It wasn’t, as I feared it might be, a problem working with Judy on an episode of Red Dwarf. She knew Craig from a few years before. He’d made a programme called Craig Goes Mad in Melbourne, about the Melbourne Comedy Festival in Australia. Judy had won the Melbourne Comedy Festival prize that year for her show The Last Great Adventure, and Craig had interviewed her on the programme.

  I think problems with couples who work together stem from some form of competitiveness between them, and thankfully we didn’t suffer from that. I mean, sure, Judy was very popular with the cast and crew. They all really liked her and thought she was funny, and patient, and a really nice person. They still ask about her to this day, not that I’m bitter. So what if she only did one episode and people still remember her three or four years later? That’s fine, that’s what being in love is all about. Bitch.

  On the pre-record day Judy and I both had to turn up extra early to get made up. As there were now two masks to apply, Fiona and Andrea had their work cut out. They got me done first, I think the argument was, ‘because you’re hardened to it’. Fair enough.

  I was in the studio when I first saw Judy in full make-up. It was a very strange experience, seeing someone you know so well disappear behind rubber. You look at them and you can’t recognise them at all, your eye searches madly for some sign. I first saw the back of her head and I didn’t want her to turn around. I didn’t know what it was going to be like to see her face. It’s the eyes, that’s all you have left, I could just about recognise her eyes.

  When Judy had come up to Manchester the year before to watch us record the last episode, she had been very shocked when she first saw me in the mask. She didn’t want to look, and when I tried to give her a kiss on the cheek, she screamed. I don’t want to give the impression that Judy is some sort of wimp; she spent five years touring the world in a circus company, climbing up poles and balancing three eggs on a chopstick on her nose. I suppose, however, circus work doesn’t prepare you for seeing your boyfriend with someone else’s face on. Being a stand-up comic and show-off doesn’t prepare you for seeing the woman you love with a square bald head either.

  However, it was quite romantic reliving our real-life meeting when encased in rubber and plastic. Judy and I did experience an advanced mutual compatibility on the basis of a primary initial ident, or in human terms, love at first sight, so we related to the story on that level.

  During the pre-record day, when no one was looking, around the back of the set, Kryten and Camille attempted to kiss. It wasn’t like kissing through glass, or even kissing through two very thin layers of prosthetic rubber. It was like kissing with a local anaesthetic, through a thick army blanket.

  The picture of Kryten and Camille together has become our favourite. My mum and dad had a framed print up on their wall. When my mum showed guests her family snap shots, she would say, ‘This is my eldest son with his wife and children, this is my daughter and her children, and this is my middle son who’s a robot, and that’s his girlfriend.’

  During the recording of Camille, I had to hang from a gantry, held up by straps around my lower gentlemen’s parts. Peter Wragg had set it up.

  ‘It’s like a parachute harness, Robert, don’t worry, it’s very safe,’ he said. ‘Just make sure you’re comfortable before you put your weight on it.’

  What he meant by comfortable was if you didn’t get all your bits in the right place it could really catch your breath as you swung free. It felt fine when I was standing on my feet, but as soon as I swung out, I realised I was doing irreparable damage to the family jewels.

  I was meant to be hanging from this gantry, being filmed from below, there was no way out, Kryten was doomed. Then came the moment where Camille saves Kryten’s life. As I was hanging and they were setting up the camera to try and find the shot, I was busy complaining away as usual.

  ‘Ooh, the straps are killing me, I can’t breathe. Oh God, I’m in agony.’ Now, normally you would think that you might get a bit of sympathy from your partner in a situation like this. You might hope she would r
each out to you and say, ‘Oh, you are brave, my warrior, you are so tough and manly.’

  However, now my partner was covered in rubber and as uncomfortable as me, there was no chance.

  ‘Oh, stop complaining, y’dag,’ she called from above.

  ‘That’s right, Jude, you tell him,’ said Craig.

  ‘And you can shut up, Craig, you’re a double dag mate,’ she snapped breezily. For those not familiar with Australian parlance, a ‘dag’ is the lump of fly-infested sheep excrement which dangles from the wool around a sheep’s rear downstairs section. Craig seemed quite pleased with the term.

  Camille was great fun to do though, especially dancing with a four-foot high green blob with an eye on a stalk who talked like my girlfriend.

  During the week we were recording White Hole, Ed Bye was preoccupied by the imminent arrival of his second child. Ruby Wax had been to see us during an earlier week, she was heavy with child and Ed was prepared to leave at a moment’s notice to be with Ruby for the delivery.

  As the laws of irony would have it, the morning Ed didn’t turn up was the morning of the recording. By the time the cast arrived, the whole day had been hurriedly arranged by fax, phone and courier bike. Paul Jackson, the original producer of the show and by this time a very successful TV executive, was roped in at the last moment. Paul has a reputation in the business for being a man who ‘gets the job done’, he doesn’t like to hang around and work out the philosophy behind the joke.

  ‘Paul, I er, don’t really know what this line is about,’ says the concerned actor.

  ‘Bugger what it’s about, do the line, get the laugh and we can all get off home,’ says Paul Jackson. Well, who knows really, but this is a quote often attributed to him.