The Man In the Rubber Mask

by Robert Llewellyn

  During yet another drive-by, Dawn told me not to turn around and head back, but to carry on as there was a really good cake shop about two miles down the road we were on, which was somewhere near Pinewood Studios. I laughed, I thought this was a Dawn French joke, she always wanted cake, that was her shtick, but she was serious. She leaned through into the driver’s compartment and turned off the walkie-talkie we had been using to stay in touch with the film crew.

  ‘It won’t take too long,’ she said. ‘I’ll just pop out and get a few cakes, they won’t even notice.’

  So we did, I drove into a little town, pulled up outside a cake shop; Dawn rushed in and came out two minutes later with a big box full of cakes, sticky buns and other baked delights.

  ‘Better now, back to work,’ she said.

  I also worked on a series called Boon, starring Michael Elphick and Neil Morrissey. I played an antique dealer and I can remember almost nothing about it. I can only now reflect that this kind of television is now very rarely produced. It was all very relaxed, the facilities were lavish, the actors, who’d been doing the series for many years by this time, were bored and seemed quite lazy to me. After making three series of Red Dwarf, any other TV work seemed like a walk in the park.

  I can only recall these events from my diary of the time, but I was obviously very busy. I worked on a series with Rory Bremner and appeared in a few sketches with Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones. I was also a regular on a radio series called Loose Ends which was then hosted by a wonderful old-school homosexual called Ned Sherrin who referred to me as an ‘amateur intellectual’ which, although it was probably meant as a gentle put-down, was a tag I became very fond of.

  Much later in the year, must have been during the summer when no footballer had been caught in a three-in-a-bed romp, and Princess Di hadn’t appeared at a garden party with a ladder in her tights, the News of the World ran a story with the headline ‘Kryten’s Afraid of Flying Saucers, but not the UFO kind’.

  It didn’t mention my book, made only passing reference to Red Dwarf and focused on my fights with an ex-girlfriend which had taken place eight years before. I read it and cursed myself. It was so pointless, I had been so stupid. The following day, Sonia rang me. She was working in the south of France, and so I’d stupidly thought at least she wouldn’t see it. This was before online newspapers, Facebook, Twitter, email, all the ways someone would find out now. However, friends of hers in London had rung her and read it out over the phone. I apologised, but of course Sonia was upset – who wouldn’t be? She came across as a nightmare harridan. I promised I would never do it again and Sonia, amazing woman that she is, forgave me.

  By the autumn, Judy and I were spending half our time in our little house in the Cotswolds and half in London, we were both writing and talking about books and plays and films, our lives filled with ideas, notions and daft never-to-see-the-light-of-day projects.

  In November, we flew to Australia where we planned to spend the next three months. However, simple plumbing cut my stay somewhat short.

  One beautiful early evening, as we watched the sunset over the Pacific Ocean, I received a phone call from my mother. She informed me in quite jolly tones that she’d just been to our little house and found icicles inside the kitchen. It took me a while to understand what she was on about. I was sitting in a beach house in thirty-degree heat; I couldn’t quite picture the kitchen of our house on the other side of the world. She informed me, ‘All the pipes have burst, darling, the water’s flooding everywhere, everything you own is ruined. It’s very cold here at the moment.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum,’ I said.

  So that was it, I’d been in Australia for three weeks and the next day I left Judy and flew home. I was thinking to myself how this whole house ownership thing was a right pain. I started formulating political theories about the curse of home ownership, how it was a conspiracy to keep the masses oppressed, how the fear of homelessness and the trap of the mortgage was all part of a master plan. Then I fell asleep.

  To go from hot, sun-soaked beach to cold, dark, flooded, semi-destroyed Cotswold house with no electricity is not a swollen sack of joy. To sleep in a slightly damp bed in front of a log fire with candles while the wind howls outside … actually I remember that part being quite cosy.

  So, builders arrived and we gutted the house, replaced the plumbing, windows, doors, the lot. Then we were in really serious debt.

  The other interesting event, which I recorded in my diaries at the time, was in January 1993 I first connected my laptop to the internet. Well, to be fair, I connected it to CompuServe, a kind of walled garden service that is very hard to describe to anyone under forty. To explain in it great detail, it was utter rubbish.

  Somehow, series 6 of Red Dwarf came around far too soon. I was just starting to get somewhere with my other half-baked, half-finished, half-understood projects when it was suddenly upon me.

  On 8 February 1993 the cast, producers, writers and director gathered together in a little hut next to C stage in Shepperton Studios and read-through the first three scripts. Deep joy, they were very funny.

  There were changes though; instead of Ed Bye directing, this series was to be directed by Andy De Emmony, a charming and enthusiastic overgrown teenager. He wasn’t a teenager, he just had that lovely bubbly enthusiasm that top teenagers have, unflagging energy and commitment.

  We also didn’t have anyone playing Holly, well, to put it simply, we didn’t even have Red Dwarf! No Holly, no Red Dwarf, what was this, a sitcom set in a suburban house with French windows?

  Thankfully not. Psirens, a classic episode, was to be the first we would record, but before we got in the studio in front of the audience, we would spend ten days shooting exterior scenes in various locations around London.

  For a reason that now utterly eludes me, we decided that Andy De Emmony was South African. He isn’t, by the way, but we kept talking to him using our range of thick, South African accents. If you adopt a vaguely South African accent and say ‘Andy De Emmony’ it sort of sounds right. He tolerated this confusion without malice and very soon proved himself to be a fantastic replacement for Ed Bye.

  One of the locations which became legendary in the small, inward-looking circle of the Red Dwarf cast was the large, derelict Bankside power station on the South Bank of the River Thames. We arrived there very early in the morning and had a quick wander around. Inside a truly enormous hall where massive lumps of rusting electricity turbines, pipes, piles of twisted metal resembling the remnants of Leningrad during World War II. It was the most extraordinary and filthy old dump, dark, damp and fairly stinky.

  You can visit the building now, although it looks rather different and smells a lot better. It’s called the Tate Modern art gallery. You still get a fairly good impression of the scale of the place when you go in the main entrance; it’s bloody enormous.

  We filmed several scenes from Psirens in the building, using a grubby old caravan plonked in the middle of the cavernous generator room as our base. Playing Professor Mamet was a woman I’d had a bit of a crush on since I was a kid. Jenny Agutter looked stunning as Professor Mamet, she was Kryten’s creator and although his mind was synthetic and unseducible by the evil genetically engineered insecty things, as soon as the Psiren took the form of Professor Mamet, Kryten was doomed.

  The scene required Kryten to get into the garbage compactor and crush himself into a cube. I remember reading the script and thinking it was very funny. The whole idea was that I would squat down with a box on top of me and do a slow, shuffly walk, Kryten’s flattened head sticking out of the front of the box.

  I tried it in the studio and although it wasn’t easy, it was clearly very funny. However, as is often the way in the crazy world of showbiz, the smooth studio floor and the trainers I was wearing in rehearsal were not quite the same as the metal rungs of a raised walkway and Kryten’s massive robo-boots. If you were trying to design a flooring and footwear system to ensure minimum slippage, maximum
grip, the combination present under my feet that day would be pretty close to global number one.

  So we shot all manner of scenes in the rusting works of the old Bankside power station, it was cold, damp and miserable, just how Kryten loves it. The rest of the cast were freezing, I was comfortably balmy.

  ‘Ahh, smug-mode, sirs, the very low temperatures in this vast wreck of a building are just perfect for the rubber-headed one,’ I said, as we gathered on the set. My joy was not reflected back to me, the rest of the cast were wrapped in huge warm coats until Andy De Emmony said ‘Action!’

  We were all very thrilled to be in the presence of Jenny Agutter though; for the very few of you who never saw The Railway Children it’s hard to imagine the impact of being in her presence. I believe the term MILF is now in common usage. Just as well it hadn’t been coined in 1993, as we would all have been using it far too often and that wouldn’t have been pleasant for Ms Agutter.

  Jenny and I shot the scene where Professor Mamet makes Kryten climb into the garbage compactor to be crushed into a cube of waste metal.

  I then had to go off to the little caravan and get changed into the cuboid Kryten outfit. The cube had been constructed with remnants of Kryten’s old costumes and gloves stuck on the outside, basically a perfectly square Kryten.

  My mask was semi-removed from around the back of my head and the excess rubber was stuck on the outside of the box making it look as if my head had been crushed flat. It was a difficult procedure that required me to lie on the floor of the dirty old caravan as the box was glued to me. The Kryten face, obviously with me still attached, poked through a hole in the box.

  When Jenny Agutter had finished all her scenes she entered the caravan to find me lying on the floor surrounded by busy make-up women.

  ‘I’m going to get changed now,’ she said. ‘I hope you’ll be a gentleman and not look.’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry it’s so cramped.’

  So I lay on the floor of a dirty old caravan in the middle of Bankside power station while Jenny Agutter stripped off in front of me, and guess what dear readers, as Mr Craig Charles is constantly reminding me, I am a middle-class, wet liberal twat. I didn’t even sneak a tiny peek.

  ‘What a waste!’ said Craig when he heard tell of my exemplary behaviour a little later. ‘Not even a little sneaky peek?’

  ‘No, nothing, Craigy, it would have been rude.’

  Craig walked around in circles holding his head. ‘I don’t believe it, la, he was in a caravan with Jenny Agutter fucking starkers and he didn’t give it a gawp.’

  When Jenny had left, I opened my eyes and was praised by Andrea, my long-time make-up artist, for not looking.

  ‘Very well done, Robert,’ she said as she dabbed glue behind Kryten’s flattened head, ‘I thought you’d have a little peeping Tom gawp because you’re such a pervert, but you didn’t. Jenny Agutter was standing right above you in nothing but her knickers and you didn’t look.’

  ‘She wasn’t was she?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes, Robert, she was nearly completely naked. She’s very beautiful, but of course, you’ll never know because you didn’t look.’

  Back on the set I was helped into my position for climbing out of the garbage compactor, it was only then that I realised something. If you are in a situation where you are likely to trip over and fall on your face, what is the first, totally automatic, reaction you have to the falling sensation? That’s correct, you put out your arms to break the fall and protect your head. It’s not an intellectual exercise, you don’t need to study such behaviour at postgrad level, it’s just something we all do. Well, put someone in non-slippy shoes on rusty grating walkway, enclose them in a box with their arms inside and ask them to shuffle along as best they can. Suddenly the whole tippy-forward thing becomes rather alarming.

  If I had tripped forward, the first thing to come into contact with the metal grating of the raised walkway would have been my nose. Okay, to be specific, the rubber glued to my nose, but I’ll be frank, that does not offer a great deal of protection.

  I managed to make the short walk from the garbage compactor to the edge of the platform without facial injury, this was then followed by the empty box being thrown down on the rubber and wire Psiren standing beneath, allowing Kryten to save the day.

  So, once all the pre-recording was done, we settled down to the weekly routine of rehearsing and recording the shows in front of the audience.

  I moved into my little flat above the NatWest bank on Shepperton High Street and paced around every evening trying to learn my lines. Judy was touring what would be her last one-woman show. She wasn’t having a great time. I spoke to her regularly on the phone and she said she was feeling sick, especially in the mornings.

  She came to stay in the flat for a couple of nights when she got a break in her schedule. She suggested I go down to the chemist next to the bank and buy a pregnancy test kit. I did so without really thinking what this could all mean, or what impact such an event might have. I was probably standing in the chemist reciting a long and complex Kryten speech. Probably, if memory serves, from the episode Out of Time where due to weird, sci-fi smeg, Kryten believes Lister to be a slightly inferior model of mechanoid and therefore makes Lister perform basic domestic chores, when Lister complains, Kryten corrects him most sternly saying:

  ‘You encouraged me to break my programming and ape human behaviour. Now I find out you’re no better than I! But worst of all, the most bitter pill to swallow, for four long years, I had to hand-scrub the gussets of your long johns. Now, unless you want to wallow in the eternal fires of Silicon Hell, I suggest you bring a tray of refreshments up to the cockpit, pronto!’

  Excellent stuff, but as usual, old porridge brain had to repeat it endlessly until it could be delivered without fault.

  So I returned to the flat, Judy did a wee on the pregnancy stick and ten minutes later we both studied the results.

  ‘I’m up the duff, darl,’ she said in the charming, romantic and overly sentimental Australian style I had grown used to. ‘Don’t tell anyone you gobshite.’

  I promised to keep quiet, but there’s no question, we were both thrilled to bits. I was thirty-seven years old and convinced I had ridden bikes too much, damaged my vas deferens and was unable to procreate. For those of you not au fait with the whole vas deferens thing, it’s basically the little tube arrangement that transports the sperm from the testes to the… well, you get the picture. Humans, so messy and agricultural.

  Anyway, it looked like I was finally going to be a dad, but I had to keep quiet about it.

  Many hot and long days were spent on the set, some cold and long days were spent on various gravel heaps and quarries; I remember Chris got particularly cold shooting outdoor scenes from Rimmerworld, but clearly enjoyed the chance of playing a planet load of bitter, insecure and back-stabbing cowards.

  It is strange to reflect how, at the time we made this series, Chris and Craig were still quite competitive with each other. Both had very successful TV careers and both were driven and determined to be successful. I can’t even recall all the other TV and radio shows Craig did at the time, but they were plentiful. Chris, of course, was involved in The Brittas Empire which had been running for a couple of years by the time we recorded Red Dwarf VI and Brittas was already a well-established and much-loved series.

  Danny and I, while no slouches, really didn’t try to compete with the big boys. It’s not like we were suffering, Danny was still appearing in West End musicals at the time, including Carmen Jones, and I was doing all my own writing nonsense.

  My involvement in the American Red Dwarf pilot was largely ignored by the cast, it was mentioned every now and then, with comments along the lines of, ‘Oh yeah, you took the nice middle-class white guy to Hollywood with you, la,’ from Craig, but nothing was really said. The response to this from Rob (Dr Love) Grant was, ‘You didn’t think we’d take you did you? They wanted class, not scum!’


  Charming. As you can imagine, these moments of bish-bash banter were less than comfortable for a conflicted, guilt-ridden, wishy-washy liberal, but we got through.

  Recording the episode Out of Time was enormous fun, the make-up and costumes were a source of hilarity. It’s important to remember that when we are being prepared for a scene like the entrance of the future Rimmer, Cat and Kryten, we will not have seen how each other looks. The preparation for the costume and make-up will have been done individually. Kryten was, of course, swathed in a comfortable powder blue lounge suit with white polo neck jumper and gold medallion. Basically pretty much what I wear at home when I’m chilling.

  But when I saw Danny with his comb-over and monster butt you could park a plane in, and Chris, his grey hair, middle-aged ’tash and massive gut, it was very hard not to corpse.

  Obviously Craig’s make-up was less arduous for him as he was merely a brain in a jar.

  Another very memorable episode was Gunmen of the Apocalypse. I don’t really have favourite episodes but this one has to be in the top ten. It’s a brilliant concept: a classic Red Dwarf plot where Kryten has to do battle with a particularly ruthless computer virus, which he interprets in his bizarre internal mechanoid mind as a gun battle in a cowboy town.

  As the sherriff, Kryten is faced with the four horsemen known as the Apocalypse Brothers. Kryten is a drunk, hopeless sherriff who apologises to thugs when they trip him up. That last bit was very familiar, no acting required for that skill. When people barge into me in the street I always apologise. Tragic, but true.

  The script, as usual, described something in a short sentence that took an age to actually capture on the day. For a start, this episode required horses, cowboys and a cowboy town. The first two you could imagine being able to procure in the UK, the latter? No chance, we’d have to go to Wyoming.

  Except that in Kent, strangely enough, right next to the Brands Hatch motor racing circuit, there is a small cowboy town called Laredo.