The Man In the Rubber Mask

by Robert Llewellyn

  As for critical acclaim, there’s no point trying to avoid the fact that some people clearly didn’t like the way it looked. There were many complaints about the shows containing too much CGI. Many people said they preferred the wobbly sets and the model shots we had used in early series. That said, though, I think most people enjoyed it. I have met many people who loved it and were thrilled to see the show back on the small screen. What they, and indeed we, didn’t know at the time was this was just the start, the small rouge one was definitely coming back.

  Chapter 13

  I felt my mouth scream out a swear word involuntarily, I really didn’t want to swear, but I had lost all self-control. The reason behind the swearing was essentially down to my right inner ear. I only discovered this after the event, but sometimes, apparently, your inner ear gets a bit rusty as the years pass and this can lead to feelings of dizziness and disorientation. I suppose, to be fair to my trusty old right inner ear, there were some rather violent inputs that could cause such disturbance.

  I was in the middle of recording a new series of How Do They Do It? for Channel 5, once again a dream job for me. I went all over the place seeing how things were made, and if the things happened to be big diggers, high explosives, absurdly fast cars or in the case of the swearing, a Red Bull acrobatic aircraft, I’d have a go in them.

  I met the pilot of the very small Red Bull plane on a very small airfield on the Isle of Wight. He was a charming and very experienced pilot from Zimbabwe, and he had that particular clipped, slightly Afrikaans accent. He was about the same age as me, had entered many aerobatic competitions and had a long and faultless career as a pilot.

  Now I’m not totally stupid, I’d seen what the Red Bull guys do in their tiny and very powerful planes but the director assured me that wasn’t their intention, they just wanted some footage of me inside the plane as it flew. The pilot would explain how the whole thing worked as we pootled along.

  When I climbed into the incredibly small cockpit decked out with little cameras like I use on Carpool, the pilot checked my seat belt and told me not to touch the controls that were right in front of me. I was sitting in the front seat, he was sitting right behind me, and I mean, right behind. His legs were either side of me, that’s how small this plane was. Then the director asked me not to swear. I looked at him slightly confused, How Do They Do It? was an early evening show, popular with lads ‘n’ dads as the TV executives described it. I had never come close to swearing on camera, why did I need to be told now?

  We took off, and the acceleration was breathtaking. How can a spinny propeller thing pull you along that fast? Incredible. We flew level with the ground for a few hundred feet. I say level, I could tell we were level because we were no more than ten feet off the ground.

  The pilot asked, ‘Are you okay, Robert?’ over the headphones, his thick Zimbabwean accent clear above the noisy engine. I said, ‘Yeah, it’s brilliant.’ Which it was. You see, I love flying, I’ve been in two-seater Microlights, hedge hopping, I’ve flown sideways in helicopters just above the ground in the Mojave Desert, I’ve been in sail planes above Sydney, Australia, all those experiences were wonderful and memorable. I didn’t know I was about to experience something rather more extreme.

  We went from flying straight and level with the ground to flying vertically upward in less than a scream, the most violent movement my body has ever experienced. I can’t remember much about it as I immediately blacked out. When I came too I couldn’t see, well I could see red, nothing else, just red. Bit weird. I was also screaming very rude words in a torrent of total terror.

  Then my stomach hit the roof of my mouth as we levelled out and I discovered another thing to my cost. I don’t get flight sick. Apparently that stomach-hitting-roof-of-mouth thing makes most people vomit instantly, not me dammit.

  ‘Do you feel sick?’ asked the pilot. I was rapidly going off this guy.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘but–’

  Before I could say anything the sky went profoundly swirly and then a load of green field-looking things went very swirly, we were spinning and diving towards the Isle of Wight and I was screaming out more uncontrollable swear words.

  We did quite a lot more wibbly-wobbly flying and that’s when we discovered the inner ear thing. If he banked hard to the left I was happy as Larry, looking down at the green fields far below. He did many hard tight turns to the left, no problem for me. If he tipped a little bit to the right I started effing and jeffing like it was going out of fashion. Apparently my right inner ear just sent me into a head-spin, it doesn’t really make sense now but it all seemed perfectly plausible at the time.

  So here’s a tip, if you are ever unlucky enough to find yourself in the cockpit of a Red Bull aerobatic plane and the pilot asks you if you feel sick, scream ‘Yes!’ as loud as you can and then tell him you are going to turn your head and be sick all over him. That’ll make him fly steady.

  When we did eventually land and I managed to clamber out of the tiny cockpit I hugged the pilot long enough to make him uncomfortable with the whole man-on-man thing. I was so grateful to be alive and standing on the ground I couldn’t stop, I was very emotional.

  When the director looked at the footage a few days later he was in despair. There wasn’t anything but swear words. Editors will sometimes apply a sound-killing bleep over an offensive word, in this instance they had to bleep the whole thing and pixilate my mouth because it was very easy to lip read what I was saying.

  So that’s one of the many things I did between Back to Earth and Red Dwarf X. I could tell you about the lifeboat in Cornwall, that was fun. Or the military assault craft in the Baltic when I spent a week with the Royal Marines on board HMS Bulwark. Or I could mention the launch and incredible success of Carpool, my online sort-of-chat-show-but-not series. If you haven’t seen it, dig it out on YouTube or iTunes, most of the Dwarfers are on there.

  But this is a story about the small rouge one and the adventures of a bunch of now late-middle-aged space bums. Once again, when we were told about the new series, the description ended with the pointed comment, pointed as it was in my direction by Doug.

  ‘Bobby, don’t say anything on Twitter.’

  I didn’t say a word, not one tweet, even though I was constantly being asked if there was going to be a new series. My tweet stream was crystal clear, not a trace of smeg in the flow. I assume we had all been told the same, do not announce anything until it’s officially announced by UKTV and Dave.

  Craig was working on Coronation Street; I’d driven him to work in an episode of Carpool and they actually let him in through the gates so I knew he really did work there. During the period between us being told the cold hard facts of the new series and the announcement date, Craig was interviewed on a radio show in Manchester.

  ‘So, Craig, lots of rumours about a new series of Red Dwarf, have you got anything you can tell us?’ says the jocular morning show host.

  ‘No way, man, I’m not allowed to say anything about the new Red Dwarf series we’re making, I got in trouble last time, I’m keeping quiet man.’

  My tweet stream went ballistic. Hey ho.

  So in December 2011 we all gathered in a conference room at the side of K stage in Shepperton Studios. Outside there was a lot of commotion, a lot of horses and a lot of Cossacks. We discovered this was because the final scenes of Anna Karenina starring Keira Knightley were being filmed on the back lot.

  Okay, quick pointless actor’s anecdote and then I really will get down to Red Dwarf X.

  I visit my agent’s office about twice a year. I’m on the phone to them all the time, emails fly about like gnats around your privates but I don’t often actually go into the office. My wonderful agent Maureen is part of a large management group called United Agents and they represent really properly famous and actually talented actors, including Keira Knightley.

  One time when I dropped in for a meeting with Maureen, I walked past an office belonging to another agent. I wasn’t gawpi
ng or perving about to see who was in, honestly, I stared because something unusual caught my eye. There, sitting on a chair in a glass-partitioned office with her back to me was a woman with a quite inconceivably long neck. I only ever saw the back of her head so when I saw Maureen further down the corridor I gestured in big, pathetic actor-y mime talk, pointing very obviously and silently saying ‘is that Keira Knightley?’ I was quickly ushered into her office and told to behave. It was Keira Knightley by the way but I wasn’t allowed to go and stare.

  So then, first day on Red Dwarf X and there’s a load of horses and men dressed as Cossacks and loads of people in Puffa jackets carrying clipboards and in amongst this throng, trotting away from me on a beautiful horse, is a woman with an inconceivably long neck. It was Keira Knightly.

  Twice now I’ve seen the back of her head, I’ve never seen her face, not that I’m obsessed, I’m not stalking her or anything. I’ve just been quite close to her twice and never seen her. In a way it’s a metaphor for my entire life, I’ve been close to stardom, fame, glamour, an exclusive lifestyle, immense wealth and contact with the rich and powerful, but this life has always had its back to me and is moving away fast on a massive white horse.

  That, ladies and gentlemen, is a classic actor’s anecdote, long, pointless, overly dramatised and we learn absolutely nothing from the telling of it.

  So, moving on, K stage in Shepperton, inside the conference room, day one. ‘Okay, listen up people,’ said Jim Imber, the first assistant director, a man who exuded confidence and the ability to get the job done. ‘We’re going to read through the scripts now, afterwards we’ll have a meeting to discuss what we need to do, everyone ready?’

  I was as ready as I’d ever be, which is to say, woefully underprepared. There were a lot of people present, some we knew well, some we’d never met before. I’d only been sent three scripts before the first read-through and I’d read them avidly, but now, sitting in this room with all these people, I returned to my default setting for such experiences, that of not having a clue what was happening or what was expected of me.

  I love it when I receive Red Dwarf scripts through the post as I had done a few days before the read-through. They plop through the letter box and everything else has to wait; the chickens go hungry, the dog is busting for a wee and hassling me, but I’m reading scripts and they all have to wait. They were funny, punchy, classic Red Dwarf. I loved them, but then I’m just a secret fan-boy covered in rubber, what would I know? As usual the only things that filled me with dread were the long Kryten speeches, and there in the second script I read was the mother of all speeches. It was a classic chunk of Kryten exposition, a wonderfully verbose and intricate explanation of the Erroneous Reasoning Research Academy or ERRA, for short.

  Days later, I carried the script as I walked the dog through the autumn mist that covered the Cotswolds; I tried to remember the first three lines. I repeated them over and over again, glancing at the script as I walked. I got up to the first line then went totally blank. Memory’s not improved then, I said to myself.

  I have become very adept at either writing a short paragraph introducing something, or simply making it up on the spot and delivering it to camera. I must have done it thousands of times on shows like Scrapheap and How Do They Do It?. I did it while I was driving on Carpool, I’ve done hundreds this year for the Fully Charged series. I’m a bit like a goldfish, I have a really good, really efficient ultra-short-term memory. If I have longer than five seconds from the moment I drop the piece of paper to the moment the director says action, I have problems.

  I carried on walking, the dog took no notice of my struggle; she was too busy sniffing for rabbits. She’s quite old, slightly deaf and a bit blind, rabbits cavort right in front of her; they point and laugh their little rabbit laughs. They hop about with impunity, confident they are in no danger. I didn’t notice them either, I was engrossed in deep space.

  I knew the coming ten weeks were going to be a challenge. Not only were the scripts littered with killer Kryten speeches, but we were recording this series in front of an audience. That takes the whole rubber-covered experience into a brand new hall of terror, well it does for me anyway. If it’s just the cast and crew in a closed set, me fluffing my lines just requires an apology and some mild jocular teasing from my fellow performers, if I fluff a line in front of an audience, the audience tends to notice.

  Not only that, they love it when we smeg up, they are almost willing us to fail. The Smeg Ups and Smeg Outs have been hugely popular and we’ve produced bucket loads of them over the years, I have, as some of you may know, been a prime contributor to this humiliating but popular art form. So, after fourteen years of not performing covered in rubber in front of an enthusiastic audience, I knew I had to raise my game.

  The other thing I had to do was lose my hair. I haven’t got that much left anyway but I’ve learned the advantage of shaving it off. Back in the eighties when I started working on Red Dwarf I still had a proper head of hair, like thick and dark. Twenty-four years of Red Dwarf, children, Scrapheap Challenge and general domestic and financial stress has cruelly manifested itself in my once luscious locks. I now have a paltry grey covering that resembles a threadbare fifties bath mat. I sat down in the kitchen the night before I set off for Shepperton and rubber glory, and handed my daughter the hair clippers.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun making you look stupid,’ she said as she cut a swathe right across the top of my slowly balding head. ‘This is so weird.’

  Twenty minutes later, with the remnants of a fifties bath mat on the floor around my feet, I looked like the dome-headed old fool I really am.

  ‘Oh my God,’ I said, as my daughter held a mirror in front of me. ‘That is measurably tragic.’

  I went through a box of old clothes my son had once left lying on the floor. It’s one of the joys of parenthood; I grunt around the house picking up and sorting discarded clothes and shoving them in boxes, then return the box to the room of the original owner with tiresome pleading for something resembling order and tidiness.

  I’ve never been able to fully explain to my wonderful son what function a chest of drawers could serve in his life, I know he’s never used one. He’s a free spirit, a creative soul and a young man who is able to express himself in the world. For him, the floor is the perfect storage area for anything and everything. In the box among the hoodies and tattered jeans was an old woollen ski hat. I pulled it on and set off for the Dwarf.

  The first episode we recorded was Trojan, although when we recorded the episode it was entitled Slow Rescue.

  As we were rehearsing and blocking out the scenes we had to record, we became increasingly aware of the soon-to-be-arriving audience. When I’d first walked around the set there were no audience seats in place, but when we arrived for the first full day’s rehearsals, the seating banks were being fitted, a massive truck was parked outside the cargo doors and a forklift truck was trundling in and out, carting piles of lightweight aluminium flooring ready fitted with fold-down seats. How did I know so much about this temporary mass seating system used to such effect at the London 2012 Olympics? Because I’d done a voiceover about it for a Discovery series called How It’s Made. You see? I’m a mine of highly useful technical information.

  It wasn’t as if we didn’t know we were going to record in front of an audience, of course we did. But there is a huge difference between saying ‘Oh darling, we have to have a live audience,’ when you’re in a meeting, and actually recording the show with one watching. I was becoming increasingly anxious about the whole thing.

  So, we rehearse and josh about and Craig sets fire to my script and we start to get some of the scenes ‘off the page’. That’s actors’ speak for being in a mentally confident position of knowing your lines. I say we, I mean of course Chris and Craig. They were already able to run a scene without gripping onto their script. Danny was close to being in that position while I was still wandering around running my li
nes again and again, while hoping no one will notice and everyone will remain under the illusion that I am some kind of actor. All too soon for me it was time to get ready for the first audience recording; the seats were in, the lights were up, the cameras were ready.

  We did a long camera rehearsal in costume but not in make-up, this is so the lighting cameraman can adjust everything and get some idea of what we’ll look like on the night. Of course, the fact that my daughter had given me a shaved head meant there wasn’t such a big jump from the bald headed old bloke with the metal suit on, and the true glory that is Kryten 2X4B-523P.

  At the last minute I headed into the make-up department. Danny soon joined me for his wig fitting, followed by Chris and Craig for their slap-on H, hair enhancements and a bit of helpful powder. Okay, quite a lot more helpful powder than either of them needed back in 1989.

  We run lines again and again but this is mixed in with general badinage and reflection on past Red Dwarf glories and behind-the-scenes hilarity. Most of this is re-enacted by Danny, who jumps around recreating certain well-worn stories from our past, me watching him in the mirror while trying to keep my rubber head motionless. Even though I’ve heard these stories countless times, I am still prone to bursting out laughing. This doesn’t make the process of attaching the Kryten mask any easier, as you can imagine.

  For the previous lord-knows-how-many series, Andrea Finch had done Kryten’s make-up. On series 10, she was replaced by a very capable, and extremely pregnant, young woman called Liz Hart. It made the experience of having the make-up applied all the more intimate. I would try and sit in positions where my elbows didn’t make jabbing contact with Liz’s quite magnificent mummy bulge.

  No matter how much noise, laughter and obscenity were flying around the make-up room, Liz just calmly carried on working. As usual with anyone stuck in a make-up chair for hours, the make-up artist and her victim get to know about each other in some detail. Liz was very skilled, very patient and had a few surprises for me when she told me her life story. I won’t reveal anything here, she’s writing about that herself and I hope to read her book one day. Believe me, it’ll make Fifty Shades of Grey look like a toddler’s nursery rhyme collection.