I also spent a day driving a taxi with Dawn French in the back. I was a cabby in an episode of Murder Most Horrid. Dawn and I talked about setting up a special school where young men could be trained to be better lovers. She wanted to be headmistress. While all this was going on, Red Dwarf 5 was brewing on the horizon. Was there going to be another series? Would I do it? Would any of us do it? The mystery and prevarication had become a yearly tradition.
I was also busy preparing The Reconstructed Heart for TV: meeting actors to play the study group, spending hours in front of a huge computer monitor, helping redesign all the comedy graphs and charts.
Suddenly everything seemed to be happening at once. While I was rehearsing the lecture (I had to learn the damn thing now, of course) we did the first read-through of Red Dwarf V.
The read-through is often the first time we all meet up again. Sitting around a huge table with a huge pile of scripts in the middle. There’s Chris Barrie with his mobile phone. Craig is wearing a groovy new jacket and Danny has a sweatshirt with the letters K.M.B.B.A.24 emblazoned across the front. Hattie was wearing one of her stunning big red frocks, I was in sad old cycling trousers and a ripped T-shirt.
‘You look like a tramp, man,’ said Craig as he gave me a hug.
‘I know, I’m really sorry, it doesn’t matter how hard I try, I’ll never be smart.’
‘Middle-class bastard,’ said Craig.
The reading went well, even I was reading better. Practice helps I suppose, all I was doing at the time was learning lines and saying them over and over. If you do that enough your brain goes to putty but your mouth and tongue get a He-Man workout.
After the read-through, Rob and Doug took me into their small annexe office for ‘a quick word’. I thought, oh no, this is it, they have realised I’m crap and they’re giving me the Spanish archer.25 Tony Slattery has said he’s happy to wear the mask and he won’t complain.
‘Bobby,’ said Rob, ‘we’ve just heard from Universal Television in Los Angeles that we are going to be making a pilot of Red Dwarf in January, and they want you to play Kryten.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Wow.’
I don’t think I said anything else at that point. I was so surprised at the whole notion. Doug explained that they were recasting the rest of the actors with Americans, but the producers in America really liked my performance and wanted me in it. My mood went from grim foreboding to swollen-headedness faster than a limp penis raises its purple helmet in a dirty book shop.
Rob and Doug asked me to keep the whole thing quiet as nothing was worked out and they didn’t want to talk about it with the rest of the cast. I walked out of that office feeling fairly confused. Was this really going to happen? Was I really going to go to America and be in an American version of Red Dwarf? For the first time, I think I actually became aware of Irony Control. I could almost see the big red light flashing, the men with the clipboards recording readings. Men with headphones flicking switches and giving concerned glances to the officer in control.
‘We have a very high irony reading on subject Llewellyn, sir. He could blow.’
How come it could be possible for me to get an opportunity like this, only the opportunity meant I had to wear a rubber mask for even longer? I had to leave all those speculative thoughts to one side and get on with the job in hand. My comedy lecture.
We recorded The Reconstructed Heart at the Greenwood Theatre in London. It’s where the Jonathan Ross show comes from. The Greenwood Theatre is part of Guy’s Hospital, and when you arrive there you wonder, ‘Why did a hospital build a theatre, surely that’s a bit odd?’ I asked someone who worked there and this is the explanation, verbatim.
‘Someone died and left a lot of money to Guy’s Hospital saying it was to build a theatre. An operating theatre or a theatre theatre, no one knew. They argued about it for years and eventually decided on a theatre theatre.’
Now forgive me, but I think that’s a bit weird. If I left money to a hospital, I think I would have wanted them to build something useful for a hospital. Like an operating theatre. If I left money to a theatre, I wouldn’t expect them to build a car park.
My mum and sister and brother and all my friends came along to the recording, along with about five hundred other people. It was very hard work,26 but I was quite proud of it.
On 21 October, at six-thirty in the morning, I was sitting in a make-up chair in a location make-up lorry, parked next to a huge disused pumping station just below a flyover in west London, having a new mask stuck on.
I had a strange feeling of déjà vu. It wasn’t that funny, we were using exactly the same location as the year before. I did have a new make-up woman though, Nina Gan was working with Andrea on my head.
‘You be nice to Nina, Robert,’ said Andrea as soon as I had sat down.
‘I’m nice to everyone,’ I said.
‘Yes, but you do moan a lot, Nina doesn’t want to hear you going on and on. Just try and shut up, that’s what I mean by nice.’
The first thing I had to do on the first day was a huge long complicated speech, while standing in a smelly, dripping, freezing cold lower level of a leaking old water pumping station. I had only had time to glance at this speech before the first day of recording. I was utterly unprepared.
The new director that year was Juliet May. I didn’t know her, she didn’t know me, I could tell this by the fact that she said, very kindly and innocently, ‘Just have a quick look at this script then we’ll shoot it.’
Any proper actor would have been able to oblige, but Juliet didn’t know she was dealing with the human sieve brain. Information can leave my brain like shit off a shovel. Luckily Kerry Waddell, who was assistant floor manager the year before, and floor manager on series 5, knew me well. She started writing my speech down on a big sheet of card and held it up near the camera. There is a technical term for this sort of acting. It’s called cheating, and I am quite good at it. We got the shot done eventually and the sequence became part of Back to Reality.27 We also shot other complicated sequences which were never used, as usual the old irony warning klaxon was honking away unnoticed as Craig, Danny and I stood ankle-deep in stinking oily water, doing a scene which never saw the light of a flickering screen.
One sequence that was used, though, was the chase and explosion scene from The Inquisitor. John Docherty as the Inquisitor was chasing us through the endless walkways of Red Dwarf, firing his lethal Time Gauntlet.
Peter Wragg was on the case, he was carrying his trusty switch box and a reel of cable.
‘We’re going to have a fairly substantial explosion here, Robert,’ he told me, pointing to a contraption on the floor. ‘This is the scene where you and Craig are being chased by the Inquisitor, and he blasts the other Lister.’
‘I’m glad you understand the script, Peter,’ I said.
‘I don’t,’ said Peter, ‘all I know is they want a fucking big explosion, so that’s what they’re getting.’
Craig and I, chained together at the ankle and wrist for added ease of movement, had to run along a narrow gangway, duck behind a big pipe, wait for a massive explosion and then run through the smoke, pick up the alternative Lister’s severed hand, which I couldn’t see, and run away.
It’s so easy to explain, so easy to watch, so incredibly difficult to film. Everything always goes wrong. The explosion doesn’t explode, the chains holding our ankles together trip us up, or break, or both. Remember I was chained to Mister Craig Charles, head prop breaker of the northern hemisphere. Even then, when all the technical stuff happened, the explosion blows us off our feet, which it did, the chains don’t break, we don’t trip, you have to add to that the desire for me to remember a line.
Somehow, after a long, hard day, we managed to get the whole thing ‘in the can’. I was cleared and ran to the make-up truck.
‘Where are we tomorrow, Andrea?’ I asked holding the soaking cotton pads over my eyes.
‘Back here I’m afraid.’
‘Wh
at is it with Rob and Doug, man?’ said Craig who was seated beside me. ‘What is it with this bloody pumping station, have they got shares in it or something? Every year we come to the bloody pumping station and freeze our butts.’
‘They’re doing the shot where Lister has hung the Inquisitor by a rope over the edge of a huge chasm,’ said Andrea, completely ignoring Craig’s complaints. ‘They’re filming way up in the roof, it’s really dangerous, Craig, you’ll like that.’
Andrea was right of course, she knows us all well. Craig’s face lit up. There was danger in the air, he was going to be two hundred feet up above a concrete and steel floor, with no safety harness.
‘Hey, great, I do all me own stunts, man.’
By nine o’clock the next morning, there we were, right up in the roof of this huge old building. A stuntman, dressed in the Inquisitor’s costume, was dangling from a rope at least a hundred feet above the floor. Just looking up at him from ground level made me dizzy. Then I was told I had to go up there as well, to shoot the final sequence.
I said to Craig, ‘I don’t do all my own stunts,’ to which he replied, ‘Middle-class wimp, stop moaning and get up there.’ I always turn to Craig for emotional support in times of stress.
I have never suffered badly from vertigo. I’ve been up the Empire State building and the World Trade Centre in New York, fine, no problem. I’ve been in a helicopter that hovered over Tower Bridge in London, exhilarating. I’ve looked over the edge of all sorts of cliffs and towers, easy. The only place where I have really gone dizzy and felt sick is halfway up that damn pumping station in west London.
I assume it was the mask that restricted my peripheral vision, but as I climbed the last steel ladder up onto a wobbly moving crane I was shaking like a leaf. It did seem very high up, even though we were inside. How the stuntman hung from a rope up here I’ll never know.
Then there was The Night Shoot. I had heard about the night shoot for a while. One of the pre-recording days was going to be a pre-recording night. We would start work as it got dark and work right through. Being night owls, Danny and Craig were happy to be up all night, Chris and I however were less thrilled. I like to get to bed at about ten-thirty with a good book, a mug of cocoa and a healthy erection. Chris can’t be bothered with the book and the cocoa.
At about nine-thirty at night I arrived on the back lot at Shepperton, a small scrubby area of trees and man-made lakes, which were once ornamental gardens belonging to the house. I wandered around, able to see because of the twenty arc lights that John Pomphrey had set around the grounds. Chris was recording the fight sequence for Terraform, where his Self-Confidence and Self-Respect, dressed as Musketeers, fight off the hordes of Self-Loathing, cloaked creatures with red eyes. It all looked amazing, smoke blowing through the woods, coloured lights shining up into the trees. I had a cup of tea with the lads, the technical crew who were standing around the tea table. It was great, this is what filming is all about I thought, being warm and comfortable, but being outside, somewhere weird, at night. I asked the guys what the building behind us was. It was an old broken-down greenhouse, overgrown with ivy.
‘It’s not real, Robert, it’s a set,’ said Chris Squelch, the man who lifted cameras about and drove the huge control truck. ‘For a movie called The Crying Game.’
If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know what the greenhouse looks like, it’s where Stephen Rea holds the British soldier (played by Forest Whitaker) hostage at the beginning of the film. When I saw the movie a year or so later, the early part of the film didn’t really work for me because I knew the greenhouse wasn’t in Ireland, it was on a scrubby bit of old garden in Middlesex, and it wasn’t a real greenhouse. It was made of balsa wood and polystyrene. The other reason I didn’t really like the beginning part of that film is because Forest Whitaker is an American actor, who is, let’s face it, a little on the tubby side. He was supposed to be a British soldier from Tottenham, it was one of those awful bits of casting which British filmmakers do every now and then to try and guarantee a film will work in America. It’s so stupid, there must be at least twenty-five or thirty really good black British actors who actually look like soldiers who would have done the part much more successfully. Luckily, it didn’t ruin what I thought was a brilliant film.
Anyway, I couldn’t hang around on the set having fun looking at fake greenhouses. This was Red Dwarf, I had to head for the make-up van.
The make-up van was warm and inviting, Andrea was in fine fettle. ‘Good evening, Robert,’ she said as I pulled open the door, ‘happy to be wearing the mask all night, in the cold, splashing about in freezing water?’
‘That’s comedy,’ I said and took my seat.
Two and a half hours later, I returned to the set in full Kryten. We recorded a lot of sequences for Terraform that night, most of the events are lost under a film of exhaustion (luvvvie-ometer warning buzzer) but at about three-thirty in the morning we had to get into a punt on the lake and paddle through sheets of flame bubbling out of the water.
That’s just the sort of thing that happens on Red Dwarf. You’ll suddenly realise that you’re covered in rubber and plastic, sitting in a leaking punt on a lake, with Craig Charles and Danny John-Jules, both of whom are in high spirits, and you can’t swim.
‘You can’t swim! You really are a wimp aren’t you, man?’ said Craig, giving me a friendly hug.
‘I’ve tried to learn,’ I said hopelessly. ‘But it’s true, I can’t swim.’
‘Come on, Dan, let’s chuck him in, that’ll teach him,’ said Craig, jostling me toward the lake.
‘Yeah, guy, that’s a really good idea,’ said Danny without paying much attention. Peter Wragg appeared dressed in a skin-diver’s suit. He was joined by Chris Squelch from the camera crew, who is also a very experienced skin-diver. They sank into the muddy freezing water and held the punt steady as the Boys from the Dwarf stumbled aboard.
‘Now listen everybody,’ said Peter Wragg, over the side of the boat. ‘All around the lake we’ve got submerged butane gas bottles. The gas bubbles up and is ignited by a fire lighter. They’re quite safe, but don’t go too near them.’
‘Okay Wraggy, man,’ said Craig.
We started paddling out into the lake, and immediately, somehow, Craig was steering straight for a twenty-foot high sheet of flame.
‘You heard what the man said,’ Danny hissed as the flames started to lick the front of the boat. Danny was sitting at the front and was obviously feeling the heat. We could hear the shouts from Rob, Doug and Juliet from the bank, but their cries of warning fell on deaf ears. Craig was looking for a light for his cigarette and there, in front of him, was the biggest light he’d ever seen. That lake looked like a Kuwaiti oil field, flickering sheets of yellow flame tonguing the velvet night. As the boat floated serenely past the roaring pillar of flame, Craig popped a cigarette in his mouth and leaned over. He leaned over a long way. The boat was at its maximum tilt. I knew I was going to die. I was going to drown in a lake in Shepperton while making a British comedy programme. I was going to die because Craig Charles wanted a light. Then he sat back and exhaled a plume of smoke.
‘Paddle on, dudes,’ he said to me and Danny, who by now were both useless with laughter and fatigue. We eventually started paddling, around in circles. We were hopeless at making that boat go straight. It seemed naturally attracted to the flames.
‘We’re heading for the flames again, guy,’ wailed Dan from the front.
‘Go to the left, Dan,’ I said from the middle.
‘Get it together guys,’ said Craig from the back, he was now laying sprawled out in the soaking rear section.
‘Try and paddle toward the camera light,’ shouted Rob Grant from the bank. This caused more hoots of laughter, we were so tired and dizzy, paddling through a lake that seemed to be on fire, and we had to aim for a tiny red light on a camera three hundred feet away.
Somehow Juliet and the crew managed to get some usable shots out of this sequence,
but I don’t know how. We were all out of control with hysterical laughter for most of the time we were in the boat. I completely forgot that I couldn’t swim. I was having a great time paddling around this lake, occasionally seeing Peter Wragg’s worried face as he swam through the murk keeping an eye on us.
I think we had a day off after that night shoot. It was certainly getting light as I fell in the back of the Red Dwarf company car and was whisked back into London before the morning rush.
The following week we started rehearsals proper and we got to know our new director, Juliet May. I suppose she had her work cut out, handling the Boys from the Dwarf, but she did so very well. This isn’t to say we were being overly sexist, there have been accusations in the past that we are a very sexist group of men and I dispute that. We are a fairly honest group, and if someone has airs and graces they seem to bite the dust fairly quickly, but we all got on well with Juliet.
The first scene on the first day was set in the cockpit of Starbug. We sat in our positions with our scripts, Craig took hold of the newly devised Starbug steering column and it came away in his hand.
‘I hardly touched it!’ he said with offended innocence.
‘That lasted a long time, guy,’ said Danny flatly. For some reason this became the motto of series 5. Whenever something didn’t quite work, we’d all say, ‘That lasted a long time, guy.’
As usual, the schedule was gruelling, the make-up horrendous and the scripts were killers to learn. Those issues apart, the big difference for me during this series was my frequent visits to Rob and Doug’s office after work. They would tell me excitedly how everything was going in Los Angeles.
‘Looks like it’s all going ahead, Bobby,’ said Rob. ‘There’s this bloke called Linwood Boomer who’s producing it. He’s supposed to have written a script, and as soon as we get it, we’ll let you see a copy.’
The Man In the Rubber Mask Page 11