The Man In the Rubber Mask

by Robert Llewellyn

  Six weeks later I walked down Coronation Street in full Kryten make-up, possibly one of the most bizarre and genuinely confusing experiences in my life. I found Doug, who looked anxious.

  ‘This is unbelievable, Dougy,’ I said. ‘I cannot believe I’m here.’

  ‘Wait till you see Starbug,’ said Doug.

  I had no idea what he was talking about. Starbug? What, had they made a life-sized mock-up of Starbug, was one of those massive cranes going to lower it onto Coronation Street? I knew we did a scene in a Smart car, it said so in the script. What had Starbug got to do with it?

  While I was in the costume department, where on a normal day proper actors get ready to work on Corrie, Danny came running in wearing full Cat get-up.

  ‘Guy, this you have got to see.’

  I followed him out onto the lot, around the corner and onto the life-size set that is the Coronation Street you see in the soap opera. Bouncing down the cobbled street came the most ridiculous vehicle I’ve ever seen, and after ten years on Scrapheap, I’d seen a few.

  It was a Smart car that had been dressed in full Starbug outfit. It just about drove along, its various farings, wings and add-ons wobbled and scraped on the cobbles alarmingly. When it pulled to a halt we all walked around it staring in admiration.

  As we were getting ready to shoot the sequence where we arrive in Coronation Street to try and find an actor called Craig Charles who played Lister in the earth-based series – come on, keep up – it was discovered that somehow, no one seemed to know how, the keys to the little Smart car that was the basis for the Starbug-mobile were locked inside the car.

  Everyone stood around with various theories as to how to open it. Helen Norman, long-time Red Dwarf stalwart and the wonderful woman who runs the office, called the AA.

  ‘We’ve locked our keys in the car, can you send someone?’ she said.

  The person on the other end of the line said, ‘Where are you?’

  ‘We’re on Coronation Street,’ Helen told them. The person at the AA didn’t quite believe her.

  ‘What sort of car?’ they asked.

  ‘Well, it’s green,’ said Helen. ‘It looks like a space ship but I think it’s a Smart car underneath.’

  In the end the AA weren’t needed because someone from the props department found a hammer, smashed one of the quarter light windows and opened the door which is why you only ever see the Starbug Smart car from one side.

  We spent a long day ‘on the street’ which was bizarre enough for us but must have been mind-melting for Craig, who by then had been a regular on the soap for four years. Once everything was done in Manchester we decamped back to Shepperton to start to rehearse recording the rest of the episodes.

  It wasn’t until the first morning that we all gathered on the set, all in full costume, that I said, ‘Blimey, it feels like we’ve only had a week off.’

  The others had all been saying exactly the same thing. Looking at Craig as Lister was so completely natural, Chris as Rimmer, normal, that’s him, Danny as Cat, who else?

  It was a full ten years since we’d been in that situation: me pacing around trying to learn a speech, Chris explaining the beauty of a 1934 straight-6 petrol engine to a member of the crew, Danny laughing very loudly and doing a couple of impressive dance moves. It was so similar because at one point Craig came up to me and said, ‘Hey, Bobby man, let me see your script for a minute, which scene are we doing, man?’ I gave him my script. ‘It’s episode 2, scene 5,’ I said helpfully. Craig then walked to the nearest bin and threw my script into it. He’s been doing that for nearly twenty-three years and I still fall for it. Craig would have known all his lines from the moment he picked the script up. I generally just about know mine when we’ve finished recording the scene.

  For the first time on Red Dwarf, and very possibly the first time on any British comedy show, we were recording the series using a totally new technology. The Red camera. An American man called Jim Jannard, who is quite rich, developed this revolutionary camera. Jim used to run this little sunglasses company called Oakley that he sold in 2007 for two billion dollars. Then he started making the Red camera. Not on his own, I’m sure, I think he hired a couple of clever people to help him. The Red is known as a 4K camera. It’s all very technical and complicated, but essentially it was one of the first cameras where the resulting video footage was on a par with 35-mm film stock. Basically you just get more picture in your picture. What comes out of this little box of tricks is a picture so humongously enormous it baffles the eye.

  When we watch HD telly at home, well, frankly in comparison to what the Red produces it’s all a bit embarrassing. A lot of the films we now see at the cinema are not shot on film at all. Oh no, it’s all gone digital, darling.

  When we saw the playback of shots we’d done on a truly enormous screen, the image quality was breathtaking. If there was a shot of myself and Danny standing next to each other, the editor could expand the picture so it’s just a shot of Danny, basically turning a two shot into a single, and there was no discernable lowering of quality. This clearly gave Doug and the editor a lot more freedom when they cut the shows together.

  The only problem with all this newfangled technology is that it is pushing the limits of the computers and hard drives that have to process the video to the very bleeding edge of the possibility envelope. However, on the plus side, where a normal broadcast camera can cost anything up to £80,000, the Red camera is about £10,000. But that’s just a little box with wires coming out of it. If you actually want to shoot something with it you have to fit a lens (£60,000) and a huge array of hard drives and computers (£25,000) to store the immense amounts of data the camera spews out every second.

  This was so different to the broadcast videotapes everyone was used to working with. There was much tension every day as the camera crew backed up the vast files we produced, hundreds of hard drives spinning away into the night. I don’t know how much space we used up shooting Back to Earth, I would guess loads of USB key fobs, like ten truckloads.

  Imagine if you will – indulge me for a moment here – imagine me in a dressing gown, a rubber head and a pair of Crocs standing in the studio next to the Red camera explaining this fascinating technology to Craig.

  ‘Oh wow, look at that, Craigy, it’s the Red camera, this is the first one I’ve seen in the wild,’ I said staring at the complex box festooned with wires, lenses and back-up drives.

  ‘It’s not red, it’s black,’ said Craig.

  ‘It’s called a Red camera, Craigy, that’s like, the name of it.’

  ‘Bit of a stupid name if it’s black.’

  ‘But it’s a revolutionary piece of tech, it’s cutting edge.’

  ‘You need to get out more, Bobby.’

  ‘You see, it records in 4K,’ I said with enormous enthusiasm, ‘and it doesn’t record to tape, tape just can’t cope with the data load, it records direct to hard disks, massive spinning platters of bulk data storage, the picture is just huge, the file sizes are massive…’

  ‘Bobby, steady, man,’ said Craig. ‘Remember who you’re talking to, don’t confuse me with someone who is the least bit interested in anything you’ve ever said.’

  ‘Sorry, Craig. I forgot,’ I said.

  Then Craig borrowed my script again, took it outside and set fire to it so he could light his cigarette from it.

  Then there was the squid.

  Every now and then, when we’ve made an episode of Red Dwarf, we engage in a scene that requires a certain amount of physical danger, it’s all conducted in a controlled environment and every safety precaution is taken. Like with the squid.

  In the story of Red Dwarf: Back to Earth, the crew discover the massive water tanks were running low and then find out that a giant squid has made its home in the tanks. How did it get there? Possibly, just possibly Cat had put a little fishy in there at some time and due to general sci-fi-smeg, it had grown into a multi-tentacled, psychopathic leviathan. As we all know o
n the small rouge one, smeg happens.

  So Rimmer lowers Cat, Kryten and Lister down into the storage tank in a submersible to try and catch the beast, and it attacks the submersible, sending some of its giant tentacles inside. That’s what it said in the script.

  Easy-peasy.

  So we get in the small submersible set that had been built up on a raised platform. This allowed the special effects chaps to get underneath and control the massive, heavy, thick, solid tentacly things made of thick, heavy solid rubbery stuff. Easy peasy.

  All we had to do was wrestle with the tentacles in a very confined space, with some splashy water. The tentacles looked very convincing, they looked quite dangerous, little fear-acting required, they scared the bejeezus out of me as they thrashed around the tiny space we were in.

  Craig and I took a right battering. It’s fine for him, he’s tough, he does all his own stunts. I’m a wet liberal pacifist, that’s essentially a politically correct term for out-and-out limp-wristed coward.

  I slammed around in that stoutly built box with very little physical restraint as the out-of-control tentacles thrashed about in chaos. It seemed to go on for hours. A number of different camera angles and only one camera meant we needed to perform the battle again and again.

  I’m making it sound less fun than it was, actually it was brilliant, but we did get quite badly bashed about. I smashed part of the set with my head, it’s amazing how little protection a rubber head gives you. Craig got seven bells knocked out of him, but then he does that fighty stuff with gusto and never complained. Danny’s hair got very slightly messed up and that was a tragedy.

  We then started working with Sophie Winkleman who, apart from being just ever-so-slightly gorgeous, is frighteningly clever and quite posh. The cast of Red Dwarf don’t really do poshness, we don’t quite know how to handle it, but to give Sophie her due, she didn’t seem to hold it against us.

  As former Red Dwarf science officer Katerina Bartikovsky, she was meant to be clipped, efficient and slightly frightening, which she did with panache.

  I’d seen some of the very funny sketches Sophie wrote for the Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse show: the sketches where Harry plays a louche trustafarian who runs a shop in Notting Hill that sells tiny cushions for £450. Women come into the chintzy emporium (called ‘I Saw You Coming’) with their husband’s credit card and fall for every half-baked sales technique the poshly pouting Harry throws at them. When they can’t remember their husband’s credit card PIN, Harry obliges, assuring them he does. Top stuff, and if you’ve ever walked around the posher parts of Notting Hill near where the Camerons live, it’s frighteningly accurate.

  While we were working with Sophie, we heard she was getting married. How lovely! I think we all pictured a nice wedding ceremony in some outer London suburb, maybe even a Rolls-Royce her dad hired for the day. In fact, she was due to marry Lord Frederick Windsor at Hampton Court Palace, I think the fleet of Rolls-Royces came from Buckingham Palace and I have to say, we weren’t overly shocked when none of us received an invite.

  The final scenes were shot in the studio where we met our creator, brilliantly played by Richard O’Callaghan. He’s effectively playing Doug, the creator of Red Dwarf the TV series based on the lives and adventures of the Red Dwarf crew – come on, keep up. The Creator had written the last episode of Red Dwarf, the episode where we all die.

  The chase sequence through the night-time market was an amazing experience. Everyone who could be corralled into action gathered in the studio that night. A few extras, friends of friends, anyone hanging about was dressed by the ever-resourceful Howard Burden. If you’d seen the set in daylight it would have looked like a bunch of students in cloaks with weird hats standing next to some tables, but at night, it looked like a futuristic Blade Runner marketplace. We had to run out of a building and through the market being chased by the Creator who was determined to kill us.

  On the second take, some plastic bins filled with paper were placed in our way, my job was to kick one out of the way to add a bit of drama to the chase. When I was a kid, I could walk up to a stationary football with the determined intention of kicking it. I would invariably miss. I am utterly useless at sport.

  However, on the night shoot, I suddenly gained incredible skill in the kicking arena. I kicked the bin with enormous force and it flew away, as I continued to run, following Craig through the parting crowds, we heard a loud bang, actually more of an explosion. I thought it was part of the scene, a special effect, it sounded very realistic and I was very impressed. Once we had passed the camera and stopped, we discovered that the bin I had kicked with such skill had hit a big light stand, sending it toppling to the ground. On impact the bulb exploded, casting the whole set darkness.

  If you accidentally knock over a lamp at home, it might cost a couple of quid, your mum gets cross and you have to get out the dustpan and brush, but if you knock over a massive film light, well, let’s just say there may have been a substantial insurance claim.

  The finale of this scene was a recreation of the replicant death scene from Blade Runner, when Harrison Ford shoots the replicant woman in the back and she crashes through panes of glass in a slow-mo. It’s okay, it’s not meant to be an actual woman, it’s a replicant so it’s okay for hero Harrison to shoot her in the back. He doesn’t enjoy it, he’s all conflicted and troubled which, apparently, so many ladies have informed me, makes him even more sexy. Ultra-violent but troubled, that’s the way to attract the ladies, chaps. Hey ho.

  For many hours, the special effects team hung huge sheets of sugar glass into a makeshift frame, there was going to be no rehearsal for this shot. It was to be a one-take wonder.

  Craig’s family arrived on the set as we were getting ready to shoot the sequence, there was much jollity and everyone was excited to see the crashing death sequence.

  The special effects crew explained what was going to happen, how we needed to keep going as we crashed through the sheets of sugar glass and dived on the crash mat the other side. None of us knew if they would break easily, we’d used sugar glass bottles in the past, when you bust one over your head, although it shatters and won’t cut you, they are quite hard and they can hurt. Massive sheets of the stuff were a complete unknown, and we didn’t have enough spare sheets to have a practice run.

  Everybody was under strict instructions to move carefully, the area of the studio where the sugar glass was hanging was cordoned off, you couldn’t even breath heavily on this stuff it was that delicate.

  When everything was ready, Doug called action and we just ran, I was right next to Craig who was headbutting his way through the sheets, I was of course slightly chicken and used my protected Kryten arm to break the glass. It was tougher than we expected and very dramatic, shattering in clouds of shards as we barged through. One by one we collapsed on the fake snow-covered crash mat and lay very still. There was silence, we were waiting for Doug to shout ‘cut’.

  There was a long pause, I started to worry that the whole thing had gone wrong or it looked rubbish, but suddenly I heard Doug shout ‘Cut!’ and then he said ‘Fantastic!’ which, believe me, is unusual for Doug. We all gathered around a massive monitor screen a few moments later and watched the sequence in super slow motion. I was almost of a mind to explain to Craig that the Red camera was capable of shooting at seventy frames a second allowing this sort of incredibly smooth slow-mo action, but I thought better of it. The sequence did look amazing, although as always I was disappointed that I hadn’t charged through the plate glass using my big rubber head as a battering ram.

  When the final shot was in the can – how dated that term is now – when the final shot was backed up onto remote servers, the make-up was stripped off, the set started to be dismantled and the weary actors wandered off, it was anyone’s guess how the show was going to be received.

  It certainly got a lot of attention from the press and a few weeks later we all gathered at the offices of UKTV in the centre of London to do a
load of interviews. As Chris, Danny and I walked up the street towards the office we noticed a lot of paparazzi hanging around in the street outside. Oh yes, it’s celebrity time, loads of attention from the tabloid press, welcome to the modern world.

  We soon learned, however, that they weren’t hanging around to see us. They were hanging around a hotel next door, a hotel where the BBC was holding a press conference for a new series of Doctor Who. Hey ho, not a problem, Red Dwarf exists in a universe of its own.

  Unusually for us, there was big press launch where the shows were first seen by a lot of people in a posh preview theatre. Again it was just Chris, Danny and I from the cast as Craig was filming Coronation Street and couldn’t make it. It was a great shame and we all missed him, but watching the finished shows when for a large proportion of the time we had no idea what they would look like was quite a revelation.

  All we had seen for many sequences were huge green screens which we were told would be finished to look like we were in massive Red Dwarf storage areas. When we saw it, there we were, standing in massive Red Dwarf storage areas, it was seamless, it looked amazing. Shots of Craig walking along a corridor looked totally convincing, even though he’d actually been walking along a raised walkway with nothing around him but vast expanses of green cloth.

  A big surprise for all of us was seeing the scene where Lister drives off in the Smart car Starbug with Kochanski. Only Craig and Chloë were present on that day so we hadn’t seen any of that sequence.

  The shows were broadcast over Easter of 2009. The audience figures, which we heard about a few days later, were nothing short of extraordinary. More than four million people tuned in to see the first episode. On Dave, I mean, I don’t want to show off too much, I know it’s not that important in the grand scheme of things, but four million. Blimey! Okay, in the UK if four million people watched that meant around fifty-six million people didn’t watch, but still. Come on. The small rouge one rocks!