The Man In the Rubber Mask

by Robert Llewellyn

  Thanks, yeah, okay.

  However, I think we all had the overriding sense that we were commenting on something we had done; we all used to be in this bizarre sitcom back in the twentieth century. Things had moved on, Red Dwarf was no more, held in great affection by millions but just a memory and a DVD boxed set.

  My oh my, how wrong we were.

  Chapter 12

  I would suggest that by the time I did the final day’s filming on the final episode of Scrapheap Challenge in the summer of 2007, the very idea that I would ever do another series of Red Dwarf only existed in another time dimension. One inhabited with a far better-looking version of me, a man of much greater intellect and charisma, a man who had eyebrows and the ability to see into the future with his psychic powers.

  Scrapheap had by that time filled my working life for 10 years. I have no idea how many machines I witnessed being built, it is in the many hundreds; nor how many team members I met, must be in the thousands; nor how many hours first Cathy Rogers and then Lisa (no relation) Rogers and I sat in rain, sun, mist or drizzle talking about them. How many amazing judges I spoke with, people who were leaders in their fields and who all took an immense interest in what was going on. Too many to recall without notes.

  In the ten years from 1998 until 2007 I met the most astonishing engineers, scientists, mechanics and mad-cap bodgers, or in the US, kludgers. Some brilliant, some bizarre, some just a little bit frightening but all incredibly inventive and enthusiastic. It was through working on this series that I became more and more interested in engineering, in large energy projects and more directly in alternative-fuelled vehicles. While I was working on the series in California in 2001 I had my first ride in a hybrid car, the Toyota Prius. I didn’t know what it was and I wasn’t interested when I was given a lift in one.

  This first-generation Prius belonged to a member of the production crew. To me it was just a dull, faceless and rather dusty car. It was only as we pulled away from a set of lights on Sunset Boulevard late at night that I realised something was different about this entirely unremarkable looking vehicle. It pulled away silently. It felt like it was being towed by a wire, there was no engine noise.

  ‘How did you do that?’ I asked incredulously. The woman driving the car just said, ‘It’s a hybrid.’

  I didn’t know what that meant, ‘A hybrid? A hybrid what?’ Half man, half machine? It wasn’t an explanation that meant anything. When she dropped me off outside my apartment in West Hollywood I didn’t ‘invite her in for coffee’, I asked her to ‘pop her hood’, which is a far more respectable request for a middle-aged married man to make to a young female researcher. I soon surmised that under the bonnet, as we Olde Englanders would have it, was a petrol engine and an electric motor working in spiritual harmony.

  That was a pivotal moment for me, it may seem unremarkable and dull to most normal people but for some reason that wonderful technological achievement got my imagination working overtime. From that moment on, my whole life and world had moved away from being an actor toward being a kind of weird advocate of engineering education and specifically alternative-fuelled vehicles and renewable energy.

  That was, until I got the call.

  ‘Darling, I’ve just heard from the Red Dwarf people,’ said my agent Maureen. She’s very dry, she doesn’t get excited about showbiz shenanigans because she deals with them day in, day out. ‘Apparently they want to make a new mini series.’

  ‘What, of Red Dwarf?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes darling, a three-part special for UKTV.’

  ‘What now? After all these years?’

  ‘Yes, plus they want to do something they’re calling Red Dwarf unplugged.’

  ‘Oh Lordy, what does that mean?’ I asked, immediately full of dread.

  ‘I think they expect you to improvise a live show, in a theatre, in front of an audience darling.’

  ‘A what? A live show? Red Dwarf? In costume, covered in rubber, in a theatre? Has the world gone mad?’

  ‘The world went mad a long time ago dear,’ said Maureen flatly. ‘What shall I say to them?’

  So I talked to Craig and Danny and Chris and eventually to Doug.

  Red Dwarf Back to Earth was going to be on Dave, which for those of you outside the UK media bubble isn’t a chap, it’s a cable and satellite TV channel and a very successful one. Dave showed Red Dwarf repeats on a regular basis and had decided to commission a brand new three-part mini-series plus a special called Red Dwarf Unplugged.

  Doug explained that the three-parter was entitled Back to Earth. It was to be made on a very minimal budget and I wasn’t allowed to say anything about it on Twitter. Doug was going to direct the shows and I wasn’t allowed to say anything about that on Twitter. Every description of the way we would work, or the storyline that Doug explained to me always ended with the firm request, ‘Don’t say anything on Twitter, Bobby.’

  So I didn’t say anything on Twitter. I was very good. I kept schtum. I feel it’s important at this point to remind you that the last time we’d recorded a series of Red Dwarf, back in 1998, there was not only no such thing as Twitter or Facebook, there was barely the internet. I know I had a dial-up modem at home, I would occasionally sit in front of my hefty laptop and ‘dial into the web’. Three-quarters of an hour later, I’d be online, an hour after that I may have been able to download two or even three emails. By the time Back to Earth came to be, things had moved on. I had web pages, blogs and nearly twenty thousand followers on Twitter.

  I’d joined Twitter in early 2007 when I was working in Los Angeles. During that period I went to some kind of tech party thing, I can barely remember the circumstances, but someone I met there asked me what my Twitter handle was. I thought they were being rude, assuming a Twitter handle was some kind of euphemism for gentlemen’s downstairs equipment. Once the cleanliness of the term had been established and the basic rudiments of what Twitter was all about had been explained, an enthusiastic young man signed me up for Twitter. He asked me what I wanted my Twitter handle to be.

  At that time the crew on Scrapheap had taken to calling me BobbyLlew due to the fact that my current co-host was called Bobbi Sue Luther. They found it amusing that she was Bobbi Sue and I was BobbyLlew. Well, none of them knew how to say Llewellyn, so when someone suggested I call myself bobbyllew it all seemed perfectly fine. From that day, for maybe a year and a half, my Twitter account remained resolutely dormant, one tweet, a classic from the era, read, ‘What is this?’

  The next time I checked, maybe in late 2008, I noticed I had over five thousand followers. I felt guilty, these poor five thousand people were waiting for me to say something. It was just rude to ignore them. So I typed ‘Hello’ and it’s been downhill ever since. So, Doug begged me not to say anything on Twitter.

  We were all sworn to secrecy. UKTV wanted to make the announcement on a specific day, it was all explained to us in great detail.

  Not long after we’d all had this explained to us in great detail, Craig did an interview on Radio Abergavenny or somewhere and when asked if we were ever going to make new episodes of Red Dwarf he said, ‘Yeah, we’re making a new series very soon la, but it’s all a bit hush-hush at the moment.’

  He said this live on-air. I’d say it was twenty or maybe even thirty seconds after the words left his mouth that the first tweet hit my mentions column. Within a minute I’d received maybe seven hundred tweets asking me if it was true. I still didn’t say anything, I didn’t even tweet ‘no comment’. I let it be.

  I checked later that day and estimate (it’s very hard to count tweets) that the questions were now in the many thousands.

  ‘Hey @bobbyllew, just heard new Red Dwarf!!! Is it true???’

  I spoke to Doug. ‘I think just possibly there’s a chance people are quite interested,’ I said. I explained to Doug that I was about to head off to America to attend a load of meetings and record a few episodes of Carpool, the online talk show I record inside a Toyota Prius. I was also at
tending an event called Dragon*Con in Atlanta, Georgia, listed as ‘The Biggest Science Fiction Fan Convention … In the WORLD!’

  A few days later, I was informed that I’d been invited to do an interview on KCTS television in Seattle, Washington State. KCTS is one of the PBS stations in America with a long tradition of showing Red Dwarf. I had visited Seattle with Craig in the nineties when we’d taken part in pledge drives and huge Red Dwarf events in that glorious city. Pledge drives are an unusual, and it seems uniquely North American, tradition where regular viewers and supporters of PBS television channels give financial support to the local station during a pledge drive. The channel uses ‘celebrities’ who are popular on the channel to raise the profile of the event. Craig and I spent most of the evening baffled but we joined in as best we could.

  I do love Seattle, there’s no point trying to cover it up. I am a lefty liberal and I love Seattle. Okay, pigeonhole me, I won’t complain. It’s usually dull, cold, wet and I feel completely at home there. A few adjustments to the travel logistics and it was all sorted. I was told by Doug to announce the new series while I was there.

  I flew to America with my son Louis, we stayed in a lovely old downtown hotel in Seattle, went for walks in the rain (it always rains in Seattle) did a lot of sleeping, visited various skate parks and the original Starbucks, then, after a couple of days, made our way to the KCTS studios.

  I talked about the new series we were going to make during an interview in front of an invited audience, I mentioned that we hadn’t made any Red Dwarf for ten years and I couldn’t remember how to do it. It was all very jolly.

  As the interview was broadcast live, the news spread with extreme rapidity. I started getting text messages as we walked out of the studio. Obviously, there had been discussions back in the UK. I was being asked not to say anything. I laughed nervously. It was just a bit late. The Twitterverse went ballistic.

  I then visited a wonderful man called Leo Laporte in his studio in Petaluma, a small town about sixty miles north of San Francisco. Leo had been an inspiration to me and had convinced me to start making Carpool as an online series. We are the same age and both have a traditional TV background, only he now runs a multi-million-dollar-a-year podcast company called TWIT which stands for This Week in Tech. It’s nerdgasm city, listening to TWIT is what keeps me in the loop, baby, pushing the tech envelope. You can easily find it online and if you’re the least bit interested in techie things, social media things and all related topics. I highly recommend it.

  After leaving San Francisco we flew to Atlanta and I was immediately overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the Dragon*Con event. As I waited at the airport we were herded toward a large group of actor-y types, some of whom I recognised from various sci-fi shows. I’m not talking Leonard Nimoy or Sigourney Weaver, I’m talking about that bloke, you know, the one with the funny head in Battlestar Galactica.

  We were conveyed to the hotel in a large bus and I was given an all-areas pass and a key to my suite. I had a suite, baby. Yeah. Luxury, with a fourteen-year-old son who was determined to try every caustic caffeinated ultra-high-sugar energy drink on the US market, something he was never allowed to have back in Blighty.

  ‘I want to see how long I can stay awake, Dad,’ he said to me with glee, just as I was trying to get to sleep. He had a kind of camp bed at the other end of the huge suite we were in. He moved the furniture in the night and made himself a little corner nest. I have no idea how he did it without waking me up, but when I climbed out of bed the following morning I couldn’t believe my eyes, everything in the room had moved! My son was out for the count, the one, and I say this with caution, the one advantage of ultra-high caffeine ‘energy boost’ drinks is once they wear off, even my son, who has never done the sleeping thing easily, just hit the deck.

  On the first day of the convention proper I found my signing table, I was situated right next to Micky Dolenz. For those of you not old enough to know about Micky, he’s a legend. He used to be in the Monkees, a sixties American version of the Beatles. Micky Dolenz was a massive star in his time, girls screamed when he walked down the street, girls had pictures of him on their bedroom walls. I’m talking proper famous. He was very charming but he looked a bit bored as he signed pictures for a huge queue of middle-aged women who clearly still loved him.

  I sat behind my table a little forlorn. This was such a massive event, there were so many TV stars sitting behind tables in this huge cavernous hall, some of whom you’d all know, some of whom I’d put money on you never having heard of even if you’d seen the show they were in. But they all had a queue of people waiting to meet them. I, on the other hand, had not a soul.

  To say this was embarrassing was to put it mildly. The other actor-y types had huge pictures behind them from the various movies and TV shows they’d appeared in. All I had was a tatty handwritten sign put up by the organisers with my name written on in marker pen, spelled incorrectly.

  I’d come all the way to Atlanta for this, when I could be at home pottering about in my garden. I crowned myself the Arch Duke of Numpties. Then a very nice man came up to my table.

  ‘Oh my God! It’s Kryten from Red Dwarf!’ he shook my hand with enthusiasm and I signed a picture for him, he then got his friend to take a picture of the two of us. I was thrilled, one person out of the twenty-five thousand people attending knew who I was. He disappeared and I stared in mild embarrassment at the hordes of people passing by to meet the girl who’d delivered two lines in a Harry Potter film.

  Half an hour later, some stewards arrived to take control of my queue, it had got completely out of hand. It stretched out of the door and apparently halfway down the enormous corridor outside. The word had spread through the convention that I was there. Twitter be damned, this was old-school word-of-mouth, the fastest non-digital communication system … in the world.

  I glanced at Micky Dolenz every now and then, he wasn’t that busy any more. His queue had diminished to a couple of very overweight but highly enthusiastic fans who kept asking him questions, which he clearly didn’t have much interest in answering. Naturally, I felt guilty.

  I signed pictures until my right hand had cramp. There is no question, Red Dwarf is very popular in America. Okay, let’s granulate that data claim a little; Red Dwarf is very popular in the America that is keen on British comedy. Okay, let’s refine that down a bit more, Red Dwarf is very popular among the quite large proportion of the crowds at Dragon*Con who are keen on British comedy.

  During my days at the monster convention I also took part in numerous panels and discussions, all these events were packed to the roof. In the evening we retired to one of the dozens of eateries dotted about the three massive hotels that housed Dragon*Con. One night we had a meal with some actors from Australia who were in a sci-fi drama series I’d never heard of. My son had hooked up with them, he’s half-Australian and always seems able to hunt down Aussies wherever he is in the world. This crowd were all very friendly and very funny and I realised then how much more fun the experience of this insane event would be if I was with my fellow Dwarfers. I’m not dissing the company of my wonderful offspring, he had a whale of a time and is blessed with very advanced social skills. He became pals with all sorts of people while we were there and although officially he was there to help his dad, I barely saw him. He found helping other people much more to his liking.

  At one of these expansive evening meals I sat next to a very tall woman who looked stunning, even more so when I discovered she was older than me! I eventually learned that this woman was none other than Virginia Hey, the female archery demon dressed in sandblasted white in Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. She was the woman with the bow and arrow. Legend. I was most impressed.

  Later that evening, I walked about the convention floors marvelling at the costumes people had made for the event. These creations were far better than anything I’d seen on a film set or TV studio. Extraordinary care and skill had gone into them. We had seen people dress up as charac
ters from Red Dwarf at conventions in the UK, and while I have no wish to denigrate their efforts, the elaborate costumes people were sporting at Dragon*Con were staggering, some on the very outer reaches of what would be considered respectable in normal society.

  As I queued for coffee the following morning, I noticed a very voluptuous woman sporting an incredibly elaborate and professional body paint job. She was not sporting much else. In fact, she may not have been sporting anything else. She was soon surrounded by hundreds of slightly sweaty young men with camera phones and she was clearly loving every minute. I never got close enough to see if any cloth-based items were involved in her get-up, but if they were, they were minimal in the extreme. So, unnecessary, and in this particular example, ample, inny and outy bits all over the show. What do male humanoids see in it?

  It was exhausting and wonderful. On the long flight back home, even though we’d been bumped up into business class, and my son had a choice of hundreds of movies to watch, he slept through the entire flight.

  Not long after I got back to the UK, I received the first draft scripts for the new Red Dwarf adventure from Doug. As I read through I remember thinking, ‘This is it then, he’s going to finish the whole thing off at last.’

  The crew of Red Dwarf arrive back on earth and discover they have been represented by human actors, they then discover that the final script has been written and they’re all going to be killed off.

  It was a brilliant mash-up of Blade Runner and Red Dwarf. As usual for Doug, it was incredibly ambitious and very complex, and it even involved shooting scenes on Coronation Street. That’s when I knew it would all change; the amount of times we’d been promised beaches in Morocco, or mountain scenes to be shot in Switzerland that never happened. No way were we going to be allowed to record anything on Coronation Street.