The Man In the Rubber Mask

by Robert Llewellyn

  The earnings gap between the highest paid and the rest of us numpties has opened so wide since the glory days of one M. Thatcher, that it has gone beyond the gap between Pharaoh and pyramid-building slave. So, Red Dwarf and VHS tape sales, ahh let the pain begin.

  We were always paid very well for our work, I’m not complaining about that aspect. However, just before I started working on the show back in 1989, the British actors union, Equity, signed a rather surprising agreement with an organisation called PACT, or the Producers Alliance for Cinema and Television.

  Let me just clarify that.

  Equity, the union which apparently represents British actors, signed a deal with PACT, an organisation which very professionally represents the interests of the creative business sector, whereby people who appeared in films or television programmes would be given, not offered a choice, but given a buy-out fee as part of their contract.

  In our case, that added up to around £600 per series. This was to compensate ‘upfront’ for any vaguely possible future royalties we might or might not receive from further exploitation of the work we did.

  It’s important to remember that, at the time, other than repeat fees, where an actor received a percentage of his original fee if the broadcaster showed the programme again, there was zero residual income. There wasn’t any way you could earn more money from a TV show, no DVDs, downloads or even VHS tapes. In these circumstances, getting that £600 sounded well generous.

  This agreement was signed in 1989, just before I started work on Red Dwarf III. The people at PACT were very prescient. They could clearly see what was about to happen.

  By then millions of people had bought VHS machines so they could record TV shows in the comfort of their front room. When VHS machines first appeared in the early eighties, they cost literally thousands of pounds, but they started getting cheaper. Supermarkets started stocking six-packs of blank VHS tapes. Slowly, the cost of buying something like a film on VHS came down to make the purchase of such an item within the reach of millions.

  Let’s be kind to the idiotic, short-sighted old duffers at Equity, they were not quite so prescient. In fact they were duped, fooled and suckered to a degree that is hard to imagine. Of course, they were also working in an environment created by a very corrupt regime under Margaret Thatcher that handed so much power to their paymasters, the big corporations and banks that Equity were on a hiding to nothing.

  Anyway, I didn’t know any of this when I signed my contract, an extra £600, thanks very much. Ker-ching!

  Zoom forward ten years, and during those intervening years you could walk into any branch of Woolworths (that dates it), HMV, Virgin, etc. and witness the vast stocks of Red Dwarf VHS tapes on display.

  Red Dwarf and Mr Bean were pretty much the first TV series that sold serious warehouse-loads of VHS tapes around the world. Everyone would rightly assume that the artists appearing in those shows would get a cut of the proceeds, maybe only a small percentage, but something. I can state here and now that none of us got a penny in royalties. Well, we got a £600 buy-out fee.

  When the true enormity of this folly became apparent, not long before we made series 8, I wrote a strongly worded letter to Equity. I say strongly worded, it resembled the petulant ranting of a sulky teenager. When I dropped the letter into the postbox I immediately regretted it.

  I had used foul language, I’d accused them of being idiots. I’d claimed, with nothing to back this up, that if they hadn’t signed this ridiculous agreement I would have received ‘half a million quid in royalty payments’.

  It was a silly letter, I was embarrassed, I felt like a schlemiel (Yiddish slang. A habitual bungler; a dolt).

  I got a reply from Equity within a week, a charming, long and detailed reply which clearly stated that every point I had made in my letter was accurate, that the organisation of Equity had changed since the agreement with PACT was signed and indeed I had been effectively swindled out of money I would have received under the long-established pre-1989 agreements.

  The only section of my letter they strongly disagreed with was my hare-brained estimate of how much I would have received if I had been paid my meagre percentage from the sale of many millions of VHS tapes. It would, the nice man at Equity informed me, have been just short of a million pounds.

  When you discover something like this you have to let it go or it will eat your soul. I am only reminded of it every now and then when, still to this day, I receive a royalty cheque from my appearance in Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson’s series Bottom. I played a Falklands War veteran in one episode. This was an in-house BBC production, which was on a different contract. With this contract I was eligible for royalties and a cut of video sales.

  I have been paid more for VHS tape sales from that one appearance in one episode than I was for six entire series of Red Dwarf. And just to further clarify, the sales of Bottom VHS tapes, while impressive, were but a smear compared to the gargantuan sales Red Dwarf generated.

  To again give the fullest picture possible, by the time DVDs arrived, the wickedly one-sided Equity–PACT agreement was long dead, so the situation has finally been rectified. Of course, it was rectified just in time for the plummet in DVD sales, the closing of Woolworths in the UK, the closing of massive record and video stores and the emergence of online video and all the good and bad things that implies.

  Lastly, who got the money that didn’t come to us? Very good question.

  Was it Rob and Doug? No, although they would have received proper compensation and they thoroughly deserve every penny. If anyone ever thought writing a long-running and successful TV sitcom is easy, they only needed to glance at Rob and Doug toward the end of a series to see two men who had worked really hard.

  The people, or should I say the body that would have benefitted by not giving us our fair share were the BBC, in the guise of BBC Worldwide, their commercial department. So that’s a good thing isn’t it? At least it didn’t go into the coffers of some rapacious private corporation who used it to buy massive yachts, pay for hookers at cocaine-fuelled orgies and waste it on gold trinkets.

  I think that’s how I feel.

  So, enough of that whining. On with series 8. As always happens in life, you’ve either got nothing happening and you sit alone twiddling your thumbs, or everything you’ll ever do is suddenly crammed into a few short weeks. That’s certainly what it felt like in the run-up to the recording of series 8.

  The Man on Platform 5, which I had finished writing over a year earlier, was published just before we started recording.

  I spent that time charging all over the country attending readings and book signings, doing interviews and appearing on the early morning TV shows like The Big Breakfast. The Man on Platform 5 got really good reviews in proper broadsheet newspapers, and the dream I had nurtured for most of my life of being a novelist had come true. Sort of.

  I say sort of because all the time I was engaged in this activity I was in constant touch with my agent and the Red Dwarf office trying to work out how to fit everything in.

  It was with some relief then when I finally arrived on location very early one morning to start filming. As with previous episodes, we recorded a lot of the scenes that required an exterior location a while before we started the studio work. One setting that has stayed fresh in the mind is the amazing sewage pumping station on the Isle of Dogs. A classic glamorous setting, the sort of place we had grown to love on Red Dwarf. Not an idyllic Italian castle, a Greek island, a luxury hotel in Dubai. No, a sewage pumping facility on the Isle of Dogs. For those of you not familiar with the geography of Greater London, and not wishing to denigrate the wonderful history and cultural legacy this area of London has bequeathed the world, the Isle of Dogs doesn’t feature in romantic comedies like Four Weddings and a Funeral or Notting Hill. If you want to make a movie that makes London look attractive, suave, sophisticated, the Isle of Dogs is not at the top of your possible location list.

  The only time you’d see some
where like the Isle of Dogs in a movie is if it starred Jason Statham and involves murder and car chases through abandoned warehouses.

  The sewage pumping station served as the previously unknown brig on the thirteenth floor, the floor we didn’t think existed. Yes, Red Dwarf had reappeared, reconstructed by Kryten’s tiny pals the nanobots. Obviously they’d stolen Red Dwarf, shrunken it to nano size and hidden it in Lister’s laundry basket. Oh come on, keep up.

  After donning rubber, I joined the rest of the cast outside the pumping station. This was when we first met the wonderful extras who were playing the other prisoners in the brig.

  One individual has stayed with us in terms of mental scarring. He was a very well-spoken individual, clearly well-educated and very polite. However, he did have a metal face. That may need some explanation; his face was very heavily pierced, not like one or two namby-pamby rings in his eyebrows or a little stud in his nose, it was literally covered in studs. I fear I cannot remember his name but that’s partly due to the mental scarring and the therapy I had to undergo after seeing what I saw.

  As I have explained before, Craig Charles will often say the thing I am thinking in the deepest recesses of my guilt-ridden liberal brain. On the day we met the man with the metal face, Craig immediately said, ‘Bet they love you at airport security.’

  This man had the most piercings in the history of human adornment. I think he had fifty-two studs on his face, at least, I seem to remember that being the number. But hold hard, that was nothing. He explained that he used to work in a bank, but then all his piercings were on his body and hidden by his suit. Since retiring he’d allowed the obsession to spread.

  I’m thinking, ‘I wonder how many he’s got on his body?’, but I’m not wondering that out loud, because I don’t want to know. Of course Craig immediately says, ‘How many piercings have you got then, la?’

  The man lifted his shirt. It looked like he was wearing chain mail. We all stared in open-mouthed shock. That was nothing he assured us as he dropped his trousers and we all turned away as fast as we could, but not fast enough. I’m not going to tell you what I saw, because my therapist said such knowledge is like a psychic contagion; once you know, you cannot un-know.

  Along with the motley crew of extras, we made our way into the bowels of the sewage pumping station. It was very cold and damp, just how Kryten loves it. We were then entertained by the magnificent anger of Akerman and started to get to grips with our new roles as prisoners on board Red Dwarf.

  The whole notion of Kryten being assigned to the female quarters because he ‘had nothing down there except plastic underpants and a trademark’ was a classic moment of Dwarfy madness. Not only that, but Archie, Kryten’s unruly penis, caused much mirth on set. Particularly when the cheeky little chap went on the rampage through Kochanski’s quarters.

  Once all the pre-recording days were done, we started the weekly process of rehearsing and recording the eight shows in the series. Being back in front of an audience was an absolute joy, this felt like proper Red Dwarf. The scenes in Lister and Rimmer’s cell were reminiscent of the classic sleeping quarters scenes of previous episodes.

  When Chris and Craig rehearsed these scenes, I suppose I should have been off lounging around in the green room, but I love to watch these two very funny men rehearse, so I would be standing by the side of the set laughing and giggling. It’s pure pleasure.

  Chloë and I, obviously both women, had quite a few scenes together. The moment where Kryten holds up a tampon with a ribbon tied around it and wishes Kochanski a ‘happy period’ was a moment to savour. Quite a long moment, the laughter was so intense Chloë and I just had to stand looking at each other for what felt like minutes.

  I don’t have favourite episodes but I have to say recording Krytie TV was a bit of a highlight. Yes, I had to stand in a shower with two dozen semi-naked women as they foamed their silky smooth skin. I had an umbrella and a paperback to read, as it was all so unnecessary witnessing all those inny and outy bits. This scene was shot in a rugby club shower room somewhere in Surrey, not the most glamorous location, but who cares? It was shot on a closed set which meant that the normal contingent of crew were cut to the bare minimum, rather like the swimming costumes all the young women were wearing. Once again the rubber mask worked its magic. I have never been less interested in dozens of semi-naked women soaping their svelte torsos.

  Obviously Craig was furious when he heard I hadn’t been gawping at the plethora of semi-nude female flesh on display. I told him that staring at their wet, lithe bodies would not have been gentlemanly. I leave you to imagine the verbiage of his chagrin. Add some swear words while you’re at it.

  Another wonderful experience was working with Jake Wood who played Kill Crazy and Ricky Grover who played Baxter. There is something about Ricky Grover’s face that just makes me laugh. It’s not a small face, there’s plenty to look at. He’s not a small man either, and he is very, very strong.

  The boys and girls from the Dwarf had been made to join the Canaries, the disposable rabble sent into dangerous situations to hunt down mutant GELFs. The scene was where we all sat in a pod on our way to another dangerous mission. This was a difficult scene to record as it took place in a small closed set. We pre-recorded this before the audience was in the studio.

  Kill Crazy was describing how he wouldn’t be scared of any demented GELF, and as he spoke, Ricky, who had no lines in the scene, would just look at the imaginary beast Kill Crazy was describing with such fury we all started to crack up. It was a chronic giggling fit resulting in the whole scene collapsing in disorder.

  We tried again and again to get through the scene without laughing, but none of us could help staring at Ricky’s face, the intensity of his hatred for Genetically Engineered Life Forms was palpable, terrifying.

  If you have ever seen Ricky Grover’s legendary character Buller either on TV or live on stage, it is a truly terrifying while at the same time very funny spectacle. Of course the man behind the character is one of the gentlest and most sensitive fellows I’ve ever met. Ricky is an ex-boxer and hairdresser which is in itself a fascinating mixture, and he’s also very loyal.

  Many years after his stint on Red Dwarf, I suffered a classic male lower-back strain while I was performing at the Edinburgh festival. News must have got around that I was laid up, and after a couple of hours of lying on the ground with a pack of frozen peas on my agonising back I got a text message from Ricky. It just said, ‘Who dun ya?’

  I knew that if I had indeed been ‘done’ by someone, Ricky was ready and willing to ‘give ’em a slap’. Obviously a slap from Ricky would resemble being run into by a forty-ton articulated truck travelling at speed.

  So there we were, giggling away at Ricky and Kill Crazy and things were getting seriously out of hand.

  The incident highlighted the non-technical role of a cameraman in such a situation. The set was very small, one of the camera operators was sitting right next to me to get a two shot of Danny and Chris. He was wearing headphones through which Ed Bye could communicate with him during a take. During recordings, Ed is seated in the luxury control room studying the monitors, which have feeds from all the cameras on set.

  On this particular occasion, Ed expressed his disappointment to the camera operator about the behaviour of the so-called professional actors he was trying to work with. That’s a polite interpretation of what he said. Unusually, because I was sitting right next to the camera operator I could overhear the original statement coming through the headphones, mainly I suppose because Ed was screaming down the microphone. It went something like this:

  ‘Tell that twat Llewellyn to stop fucking giggling or we’re going to be here all bloody night!’

  The camera operator then very diplomatically translated the statement to me:

  ‘Ed is wondering if you can possibly concentrate on the scene as we have quite a lot to do today.’

  We did finally manage to get through the scene despite Ricky’s faci
al antics and heard the two words I always love to hear on the set of Red Dwarf: ‘Moving on.’ This means whatever we have just been filming is okay and we can start on the next scene.

  It was during the recording of the infamous Rimmer Song that I experienced what became known as Black Thursday. Oh dear, I hang my head in shame, Black Thursday is without doubt a blot on my copy book.

  One of the things I always beg when we are in the early planning stages of a new series of Red Dwarf is very simple. I want to work. When I am in the rubber mask, I want to be on set all the time. Essentially, I don’t want to hang around waiting. One of the things anyone who’s ever appeared in a TV series or film will know is that there is always a great deal of hanging around that needs to be done. I understand why this is, the set needs to be prepared, the lights need to be set, the camera shots need to be worked out, it’s all fairly obvious and perfectly understandable. What the producers and director need during these complex times is the actors standing by. It’s the nature of the beast, if you don’t like it, get a proper job.

  However, the hanging around aspect takes on a very different hue if you are hanging around with a rubber head glued to your face. Time passes very slowly. The discomfort and restriction become very apparent, hence the reason I beg, plead and whine on like a spoilt kid. Generally speaking, the production staff and obviously lovely Ed have been brilliant in accommodating this as best they can. I don’t have to hang around too much. But on any TV production, things go wrong, lights don’t work, the picture looks wrong and something needs to be adjusted, tweaked or fiddled about with.

  This was happening in shovel loads on Black Thursday. We were shooting the Rimmer Song, the part where the crew enter the Rimmer Experience fairground ride. We’d had great fun in the morning playing the plastic versions of ourselves. Chris had been rehearsing the song and we all had its annoyingly catchy lyrics running around in our heads for days. No, months. Actually, I can still hear that damn song now!