The Man In the Rubber Mask

by Robert Llewellyn

  I had the mask glued on at about six-thirty in the morning, did a little bit of filming around nine o’clock, and then, nothing. I hung about with Danny, joshing and listening to his bonkers stories. I’d hung around with Craig, reminiscing and joking. I’d discussed various brands of classic car and the sounds of various Second World War aircraft with Chris.

  Time dragged on, by four-thirty in the afternoon I’d still not done anything. I’d been in the mask for close to ten hours and only shot one scene. I started to fret, which is a bad idea. I use all my energy to steer myself away from fretting. Fretting in a rubber mask is a very bad idea. But the fretting got the better of me. Craig loves a good fret every now and then, so we both started fretting. We were walking up and down the corridor outside the studio in a right old fret. The fretting developed into a full-on actor-whinge, a stroppy moan fest, and then to the full-blown effing and jeffing expostulation of an affronted thespian.

  What, during this expression of frustration, we had forgotten was that we were both wearing carefully concealed radio microphones, and what we learned later was that the sound department were playing our self-righteous indignation to the rest of the crew and in particular, Ed Bye. Poor Ed, who was up against it as usual trying to get complicated shots in the can and the last thing he needed was two moody actors, but that’s what he had.

  I want to point out that we all got over it. We did shoot the scene and it’s clearly very popular, but it was a bad day. I vowed to myself that I would never allow myself to get in such a state again, if for no other reason that it always makes a bad situation worse.

  We finished filming just before Christmas 1998, but during the last few weeks in the studio there was much talk of the Red Dwarf movie. In fact, it was all Doug would talk about between takes. That was going to be the next thing we’d all do together, it all seemed very likely.

  When Red Dwarf VIII was broadcast the following year it got the biggest viewing figures of any show on BBC2. Ever. This record has still not been broken. That is pretty amazing isn’t it? It couldn’t happen now, there are too many TV channels and what were reliable TV audiences are now dissipated through a myriad of screen-based entertainment options.

  In late 1999 after the show had gone out, I attended a party at the BBC where the then director Michael Jackson, thanked everyone who had helped make the channel such a success in the previous year.

  I was standing politely listening to him when someone grabbed my arse. Not a gentle pinch but quite a muscular grapple. I turned around to see the Two Fat Ladies, Clarissa Dickson Wright and Jennifer Paterson, sitting on chairs behind me. Jennifer Paterson, who was sadly to pass away very soon after this, said, ‘Such a delicious pair of buttocks, I couldn’t help myself.’ I smiled and said, ‘Help yourself, love,’ and turned my back to them. My buttocks then took a right old pummelling. The flattery I got from the Two Fat Ladies was then nicely counterbalanced when an enormously tall man with curly hair stood over me and asked what car I drove.

  Yes, it was the man himself, Mr J. Clarkson. I laughed and said, ‘I don’t believe you really ask people that when you meet them.’ He didn’t crack a smile. He just repeated the question. I knew he lived quite near me, although I’d never met him before. So it was possible he’d seen me driving in the area. I also knew that whatever car I said I drove would undoubtedly be ‘the worst car … in the world’. Does it really matter what car you drive? Do people really judge you because of it? I know I don’t, but I know he does.

  I had two cars at the time, one was a VW Golf VR6, an unnecessarily fast Golf with an engine out of a truck. The other was a Land Rover Defender. I thought the second one was probably a safe bet so I told him, ‘I drive a Land Rover.’

  Still no smile, just a curt nod and ‘Good car.’ Then a shadow fell across his enormous face, ‘Does it have big knobbly American tyres that only a c**t would fit on a classic British Land Rover?’

  I knew at once that he had seen me in the Land Rover in the market square in Chipping Norton. How else would he have known that my Land Rover was indeed kitted out with Grabber All Terrain American tyres? Massive great fat knobbly things that I thought at the time looked really manly and butch. I nodded in embarrassment.

  ‘You realise you have degraded a perfectly decent British vehicle and made it into a four-wheeled abortion don’t you?’

  I hadn’t known that but thanked him for informing me. However, I didn’t feel picked on by the big, balding, bullying, homophobic, right-wing, middle-aged-man-in-jeans-nutbag we all know and love.

  When the boss of BBC2 gave his thank you speech later that evening he said, ‘I’ve had a wonderful time meeting you all tonight, I’ve also learned tonight that I drive around in an underpowered Nazi staff car that only a c**t would drive, I don’t need to tell you who furnished me with this opinion.’

  Fair do’s Mr C.

  Chapter 11

  Come with me now as we travel through a tear in the fabric of space-time and jump ahead to the year 2001. It’s late April. Cue spinny lights and whizzy stars backed up by ethereal music as we jump across a fold in the cosmic order, where two differing sectors meet in a way that is most unnatural.

  We arrive in Shepperton Studios, to be most specific, the orangery of the old Shepperton Manor. Oh what a lovely setting. Very spacious and airy. Outside above the busy car park that was once an ornate garden, the birds are singing, the jets are flying low on their way into Heathrow and a bit of old script is blowing in the damp morning air.

  Craig Charles, Chris Barrie, Danny John-Jules, Chloë Anett, Norman Lovett and I were standing in the delightful old building reading through a scene of Red Dwarf: The Movie, blocking out various scenes with director Ed Bye. I had flown back from Los Angeles specifically for this event and it was all very exciting.

  I had been living with my growing family (by that I mean the kids were bigger, we still only had two), in Sydney, Australia for the previous six months and then two months working in Los Angeles on series 4 of Scrapheap Challenge. The weird, quirky one-off Channel 4 series had become rather popular. So popular in fact it was also by then an American series called Junkyard Wars. ‘In Britain it’s a Challenge, in America, it’s a War!’

  I’d arrived back in England to record a BBC series called Hollywood Science. It was a simple premise; scientist Jonathan Hare and I tested out the scientific veracity of various plots and stunts in big blockbuster Hollywood movies. We would then conduct experiments in the back garden of a suburban house to find out if, for example, it was really possible for Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock to make a bus jump a forty-foot gap in a Los Angeles freeway overpass.

  If you are interested, it is technically possible, but the bus would need to be travelling at over 400,000 miles an hour, not fifty-two.

  As we sat having lunch in the kitchen of the house we were recording the series in, a motorbike messenger arrived with a package for me. It was the script for Red Dwarf: The Movie.

  I started to read the first few pages as the camera crew started setting up for the test to see what would really happen if you jumped off a high tower with a fire hose wrapped around your waist. If you’re interested, this was a stunt from the Bruce Willis smash hit Die Hard, the original one. We soon discovered that if you jumped off the Nakatomi Tower, dropping at terminal velocity and suddenly stopped when the non-elasticated fire hose went tight, this would result in Bruce and Willis dropping to the ground in a rather unpleasant and very separated manner.

  As soon as we’d finished, I devoured the script. It was very, very funny. It was so brilliantly constructed by Doug Naylor that if you’d never seen an episode … I’ll go further, if you’d never even heard of Red Dwarf, it would still make perfect sense. But likewise if you’d seen every episode over one hundred times, had all the VHS tapes and books, the Tshirts and nodding head Kryten figures and you wore a glittering H stuck to your forehead when you went to parties, you’d still get a hell of a kick out of it.

  Doug had
been writing the script and going to meetings to try and raise the money for the film and it all seemed to be coming together. We were all very excited about it.

  So it was with some anticipation, and of course rubber mask trepidation, that I made my way to Shepperton on the first day of rehearsal a few weeks later. Apart from the core boys from the Dwarf, Chloë was in the film playing Kochanski. Norman was back as Holly the ship’s computer. He was grumbling and moody as always, but he was back. There were fabulous rumours that Madonna was going to play a role, a merciless GELF queen who does her best to kill us all. There were brilliant slapstick scenes with Kryten and various groinal attachments that doubled as non-lethal weapons.

  I had managed to arrange my schedule to allow six weeks rehearsal before I returned to Los Angeles to complete that year’s series of Scrapheap. I would then return in the autumn to shoot the film.

  While we read through the script and blocked out various scenes at Shepperton I also went through the process of having a new head cast for a new mask and a new body cast for an amazing new Kryten body, complete with pistons and tubing at my knees and elbows.

  This head casting was the first one I’d ever had a problem with. I’m not saying it’s a whole bunch of fun having your head encased in alginate and plaster of Paris bandage, but it wasn’t exactly a new experience for me. I sat in the chair with a bald cap glued over my hair, the plastic cape over my shoulders; they rubbed the Vaseline over what represents my eyebrows. I harbour deep genetic shame around my lack of eyebrows and a deep jealousy of Dennis Healy, the British politician who has truly spectacular brows.

  Then shlumph, on goes the alginate, cold and minty, in the gob, over the eyes, all over the head, small hole for the nose. Everything fine.

  Wallop, on goes the plaster bandage, suddenly your head gets heavy and then hot as the plaster starts to set. Still fine, no problem, breathe calmly, in, pause, out, pause, in. Keep the pulse low, keep calm, stay silent in the imagination, picture white light, meditate, calm; be very, very calm.

  I can’t hear anything except muffled noises of the crew patting the plaster bandage into shape on my now massive and very heavy head.

  Breath in, pause, out, pause, cough. Oh, problem. Major massive life-threatening problem. Can’t cough, something in throat, can’t breathe. Alarm signals rush through the fight-or-flight sectors of my crude, lower mammalian brain. Can’t fight, can’t flight. Massive panic descends and yet there is no physical movement I am aware of. Can’t swallow, can’t cough, can’t breathe, can’t move, about to die. Childhood flashes through my mind’s eye, picking peas in the vegetable garden with my mum on a summer evening when I was eight years old. Standing next to my dad on bonfire night when I was five. It’s all there in hyperspeed.

  I suddenly sense movement outside, people ripping and levering at my massive plaster head. I can feel movement now, someone is shouting ‘Lean forward!’ in my right ear. I lean forward and the front half of my head comes away and I cough and splutter and wheeze. I apologise and cough some more, I breathe in like a pearl diver who only just made it back to the surface.

  Later, my long-suffering and ever-patient make-up woman, Andrea Finch, explained to me what they saw. I was sitting very relaxed, my hands resting on my thighs, then suddenly my hands started gripping each other. Whenever she is with someone when they have a head cast, Andrea explained, she just watches the hands. Apparently my hands were going ballistic, flippering about like a puppy’s ears in a strong wind. She knew something was up, and thankfully for all involved two very important things didn’t happen.

  One, for me the most important, was that I didn’t die. The second, much more important for everyone else, the plaster had set enough for the casting to be useable. They would be able to use it for the new mask. I’d done it, without question, the very worst part of the whole process of Red Dwarf: The Movie, was over for me. From now on it would be just one big glorious bag of laughs. However, that experience under plaster would haunt me for the remainder of my involvement in the series.

  We spent an afternoon looking at the storyboards; elaborate drawings of each scene, mock-ups of the shots that would go to make the movie. Incredible designs for sets and life-size Starbug constructions.

  Yes, you heard right, the plan was to build a life-size Starbug front section which would be mounted to the front of a huge hydraulic crane, this would lower down slowly with us inside looking out of the windows. We would then emerge down the exit ladder and into the new world we were visiting. Aliens eat your heart out, this was the big time for the boys from the Dwarf. It was all very heady major motion picture stuff.

  This was taking place before Facebook and Twitter were an itch on the back of a nerd’s neck, but I did run a web page at the time. Remember them? A web page, so cute. ‘Welcome to the official page of Robert Llewellyn’ it said on the homepage. Yes, homepage, how wonderfully modern. It had links to stuff about Red Dwarf and Scrapheap Challenge, it had links to the Amazon pages for my books. It was an absolutely cutting-edge, cross-platform, multimedia wonderland.

  I’m not sure there was even an official Red Dwarf web page at the time, there were certainly loads of fan sites and chat rooms, all of which were buzzing with excitement about the film. As we rehearsed scenes and got rewrites from Doug, attended meetings with line producers who’d worked on films we’d heard of and saw the latest designs for sets and storyboard updates, it all started to get very concrete.

  Then, one day as I was getting ready to head to Shepperton Studios for more rehearsals, the phone rang. It was Doug, he sounded exhausted and crestfallen. It was all off. The money that had been promised from who knows where, I truly don’t know, had disappeared. The deals had fallen through, the final lynch pin had dropped out and the whole Red Dwarf movie machine ground to a sickening halt.

  It wasn’t that we would never make the film, I was assured, it was just that we’d have to postpone the shoot until the finances were secure. To say it was a bit depressing is a bit of an understatement, it was heartbreaking.

  I am happy to admit that I don’t know a great deal about film financing, but I think it’s generally accepted that it can often involve very wealthy people who live on the fringes of what most of us would consider legal. Without question some of the people you see at the Cannes film festival are seriously dodgy-looking. The sort of people you never see shopping at B&Q on a Saturday, in fact the sort of people you never see anywhere; they live in another world. I’m not suggesting that Doug was involved with dodgy back-room film financiers, in fact the BBC had put some of the money up for the project, but it is a notoriously flaky business populated by an enormous number of flaky people who can talk the talk but little else.

  I had arranged my whole working year around the Red Dwarf movie. An entire production team had spent weeks planning the schedule of Scrapheap Challenge in Los Angeles to accommodate my trip back to London. Judy had stayed in Sydney with the children because I’d be working away all year and suddenly the whole thing came tumbling down.

  I met up with Chris, Danny and Craig and we talked over what had happened but there was nothing we could do. We knew Doug was frantically going around trying to salvage a deal to raise the money. We eventually went our separate ways, I went back to Los Angeles and the whole project faded into the background.

  I eventually ended up back in England in early September. I spent a few days in New York on my way home and stayed with Chris Eigman, who’d played Rimmer in the ill-fated Red Dwarf US pilot. Chris lives in a lovely old house in Brooklyn. On my last morning there, we walked his dog along the Brooklyn Heights shoreline, it was 8 September 2001, a beautiful crystal clear sky above the mind-boggling Manhattan skyline that was still, on that day, totally dominated by those two enormous towers. I arrived back in England on 9 September 2001 and, well, you know the rest.

  The Red Dwarf movie soon became a distant memory. My life had taken a different turn; I was busy doing so many other things I barely thought about
it. I still have the script, it’s a brilliant script and it’s a small tragedy that we never got to do it. I like to keep tragedies like that in perspective, it was just a comedy science fiction film, not an earth-shattering event or a game-changing piece of technology, but it’s a shame none the less.

  For the next few years I didn’t see the rest of the cast that often, although we did all gather together to record the cast commentary tracks for the DVDs. The shows had been out on VHS tapes for years, but in the early noughties, the entire smegload was released on DVD, eventually resulting in the big fat boxed set.

  Spending all day sitting together in a small audio studio watching telly was enormous fun. It reminded me how much I enjoyed being with the rest of the cast, the long and rich history we had together, the in-jokes, the constant banter and the hysterical laughter which would suddenly explode. One of the things that surprised us all was the amount of Red Dwarf we had completely forgotten; no surprise in my case but even Craig would occasionally pipe up and say, ‘I don’t remember doing that!’

  It is a very peculiar feeling watching yourself on telly and having no recall of that moment. Generally when I watch an old episode of Red Dwarf I not only remember the actual recording but also events in my life around that time, the visual stimulus of seeing Kryten’s absurd head knobbing about causes connections in my fetid brain matter and events come swirling back. Judy being pregnant, or the period when we moved into our house just before we recorded series 5, or the day I took my old Land Rover to the garage when the exhaust had fallen off. Weird unconnected memories from fifteen or even twenty years earlier come bobbing back over the calm waters of the distant past.

  So when I watch a scene I don’t recall it’s quite disturbing: Kryten walking along a corridor in Red Dwarf with Mr Rimmer and Mr Lister. Nothing. It’s like I’m watching it for the first time. How could I not remember anything about it? Every now and then as we recorded the cast commentary the sound engineer would speak to us over our headphones, ‘Doug has asked if you can try and stop saying “I don’t remember doing this”, especially you, Robert.’