The Man In the Rubber Mask

by Robert Llewellyn

  Next it was down a flight of stairs to the costume department, where I was fitted up in the full Kryten by the charming Katarina Cappellazzi, Howard Burden’s new assistant. She learned to be very patient with us too; as you can imagine with a name like that, both Mr Barrie and myself had to keep repeating her name with as strong an Italian accent as we could manage, which, considering our prodigious vocal talents, was both technically accurate and very loud.

  ‘Katarrrreeeena Cappellaaaaaaaaazzi.’

  I should point out that Katarina was born in England and doesn’t have the vaguest trace of an Italian accent, but why let mere facts stop you expressing yourself?

  When everyone was ready, we heard from Helen Norman that the seating banks were chock-full and Doug was about to go in and make an announcement.

  It’s important to record that the only reason we recorded the show in front of an audience was because Craig, Chris, Danny, Doug and I insisted on it. It makes everything much harder and more expensive, it puts enormous pressure on the camera and sound crew, it’s as if you are used to cooking over a pile of smouldering sticks and suddenly you’re using a nuclear-powered pressure cooker. Everything is condensed and faster, the pressure to get the show done in under two hours is enormous.

  We made our way through the dark tangle of wires and props at the back of the set and waited nervously. I have since confirmed with my fellow Dwarfers that we were all really nervous that night; we hadn’t performed in Red Dwarf in front of an audience for fourteen years. It was a leap of faith, surely they would enjoy it, surely they would laugh like they used to? That’s what we hoped, but there was no way of knowing.

  When Doug appeared at the front of the set the noise was incredible. He made a short speech pleading with the audience not to post spoilers on Twitter and Facebook. He explained about the battle we’d been through to get a live audience and if the web were to be flooded with spoilers we’d never convince broadcasters to let us do it again. I am very pleased to report that all the wonderful audiences who attended the recordings were incredibly honourable and posted not a smeg stain of spoilerdom.

  Our indefatigable warm-up artist Ray Peacock introduced us one by one in alphabetical order, which meant I went on last. I heard the rip-roaring cheer as Rimmer marched out into the light, looking, as Lister had once commented, ‘Like he was invading Poland.’ I assume he performed the Rimmer salute to welcome the hordes. They went ape. He was followed by a scruffy but lovable Lister, another deafening roar of greeting. Next, Mister Cat emerged, resplendent in a glittering suit and Cuban-heeled boots. He did a few ridiculously energetic Cat dance moves, not bad for a bloke over fifty and of course this was greeted with screams, yelps, cheers and whistles. Finally, old Kryters hobbled toward the waiting crowd and I knew at once that these four lovable characters had been much missed. But then we had to record the actual show.

  The first scene we recorded that night took place in the drive room when Cat and Lister discuss the weird facts Lister had learned from a book he’d found that, three million years earlier, had belonged to Peterson. It was all about the Moose causing road accidents in Sweden in the seventies. As usual, we had to shoot the scene a couple of times to get all the shots recorded. Standard practice.

  Next was the scene in the sleeping quarters, Rimmer swatting for his Officers’ exam. He wasn’t doing well, particularly on the lateral thinking questions; the one about the Moose causing accidents had him stumped.

  We ran through the scene, the audience loved it, they laughed and clapped, it was fast-paced with multiple entrances and exits, and we didn’t trip over, I remembered my lines, Danny remembered his, Chris was brilliant, Craig was fantastic, and to top the whole thing off we got it in one take.

  This is not usual, this was a fluke, doing a whole scene in one take with no pick-ups means everything worked, the actors, the cameras, the sound, the lights, the moves, the lines, the shots. A huge list of tasks, any one of which could have gone a bit wibbly-wobbly. When we gathered together to do the next scene, we knew, finally, the old Boys from the Dwarf were back. It was such a good start that we approached the next scene in high spirits, but the next scene, as they say in America, was a doozie.

  Not so much because of the story or the scripts, the costumes, make-up, wigs, hair weaves and teeth extensions, that was all regular stuff. This one was a killer because of the set. The Quantum Twister is a supremely advanced Space Corps ship we stumble across, abandoned in deep space. Rimmer is of course most impressed, it’s the pride of the Space Corps, manned by heroic officers who are all ripped and pipped and ready to defend our way of life.

  The set was fantastic, it looked great, the captain’s chair on its special plinth with hundreds of special buttons was a dream for Rimmer. However, it was a bit of a nightmare for the camera crew and Doug. It’s all about getting the angles, getting the shots of each of us and making it look like we’re all in the same space. There was just something about the layout that made this incredibly hard. We spent literally hours rehearsing on the set; Danny and I at our front consoles, Craig sitting to one side on the phone waiting for his call to be put through, Chris obviously lording it in his special big Captain’s chair. It’s where Chris should always be, he needs one of those in his house.

  During camera rehearsal we had to deliver our lines, then step back to allow the camera to take our place, then move back into position for the next line. The scene was also quite long and the set was at the far end of the studio, not directly in front of the audience. This meant getting audience feedback, our bread and butter when we’re recording, was slightly delayed and distant.

  However, the performance of the wonderful Mark Dexter as Rimmer’s brother Howard was a treat to behold, that young man is a natural. We did it, we got it in the can, the audience were fantastic and they’d clearly enjoyed it. It was such a relief to get the first episode done even though we knew there were pick-ups, scenes we didn’t have time to record when the audience were present, they clearly understood the story, loved the jokes, laughed in the right places. After fourteen years off, after countless false starts and heartbreaking let-downs, it really did feel like the show was back. But no sooner had the dust settled on the first episode, we were deep into rehearsals on the second episode, Fathers and Suns.

  At the read-through we first met Rebecca Blackstone who played the newly rebooted ship’s computer, Pree. She is not only a rather beautiful young lady but also endowed with prodigious piles of talent. She had an incredible range of voices and as you may remember, an uncanny ability to keep her eyes open. I’m sure an avid viewer might be able to catch her blinking as she tells the crew how doomed they are, but I never saw her so much as flicker.

  We were shooting this episode in the week before Christmas. It was mercifully cold which may sound a bit odd, but when we did the long day’s pre-shoot, that meant I was in the Kryten costume from seven in the morning until around seven at night. As usual in this sorry tale I have no wish to go into detail, but let’s just say it all gets a little moist and clammy under the pristine Kryten exterior. Knowing it was bloody freezing outside meant I could go out of the studio for the odd break and cool down and it actually made a difference. I would stand outside the studio, balance my lukewarm milky tea on a car bonnet, rest my script next to it and try and actually learn my lines.

  A new aspect of my experience in rubber soon came to the fore. Due to far too many hours in front of crude early computer screens, my once perfect 20/20 vision has gone down the pan, I need my specs or all I can see is the odd blob of colour and light. I certainly can’t read a script without my glasses.

  I have a tatty collection of old specs including a pair that have bendy side bits. I can expand them and ease them over Kryten’s ears, and that allows me to see the print on the page. It must look very weird but the rest of the cast and crew got used to it very quickly.

  So I’m outside, steam escaping from my neck hole, script on the bonnet of a car, glasses on and a pl
astic cup of lukewarm milky tea with a straw in it. The glamour. The lovely members of crew who supplied my tea around the clock (I told them I was happy to make my own but they got in there too quickly) soon learned that I wanted my tea vaguely warm, bit of milk, bit of sugar, virtually undrinkable in normal life. I said, ‘Just make a shit cup of tea, that’ll be perfect.’ From then on it became known as ‘shit tea’. Reece, a wonderful young chap who looked after us very well, would approach with a tray, ‘Coffee for you, Chris, and a cup of shit tea for Robert.’

  Thanks muchly.

  Because I drink the tea through a straw to stop it getting on Kryten’s rubber lips it can’t be too hot. I can’t feel my lips so there is no warning as to how hot the tea is. If you want to try this experiment please go ahead, but it really does hurt. Get a cup of steaming hot tea and shove a drinking straw into it, then put the straw in your mouth and suck. You may need hospital treatment for mouth blisters so I advise not trying it and don’t try to sue me. Just believe me, shit tea is the stuff you need.

  One of the big problems we had during the shooting of Fathers and Suns was Craig. He is nothing if not highly professional. I know he has a reputation for being a bit of a lad, and true, a bottle of Rosé doesn’t last long when Craig’s in the room. A vindaloo that could peel paint is seen as a light zesty snack by this man of iron, but he’s always at work on time and he always knows his lines. However, during the rehearsals it was very clear he was seriously under the weather, he had proper full-on man-flu. He had actual doctors look at him and shake their heads.

  So, Craig spent two days in bed and we did what we could without him, which, if you remember the episode, wasn’t a great deal. This episode really revolved around him and his issues with fatherhood from the point of view of both father and son. Well, Lister is his own dad, but you all know that. It’s all to do with, as Lister so rightly said, ‘time-travelly sci-fi paradoxy smeg.’

  Chris and I recorded the scene when Pree refits the corridor on B deck and everything goes wrong; explosions, sparks and a terrible mess. We gather on the set and run through the scene for the cameras and special effects team. The whole place had been wired with small charges, smoke machines, sparky wiring and bits dropping off the ceiling. We’re used to this kind of thing, we are battle-hardened space bums, a few explosions don’t worry us.

  We start the scene and of course it all goes wrong. It has to, it wouldn’t be Red Dwarf if it didn’t go wrong. As the team got stuck into refitting the charges and wiring everything up again, I realise that I’ve finally matured a tiny bit. For once it wasn’t my fault that it all went wrong and there’s nothing I can personally do to make it go right, all I can do is get out of the way and let the professionals take over. In my early days on Red Dwarf I would worry and feel guilty about everything. Even if it wasn’t my fault, I’d somehow work it out that it really was, somewhere along the line, my incompetence had let everyone down.

  Second time around and it all went swimmingly; all the explosions exploded, the lights flashed and all the sparks went fitzzzz. Chris and I had to talk to a blank screen that would, we were assured, eventually show the face of Pree. Rebecca was sitting at the side of the set shouting out her lines so we could react to them. It all got a bit noisy with explosions, wind machines, smoke machines and general chaos. Pree explained to us that she had carried out the essential repair work in exactly the manner it would have been done if we had done it ourselves, i.e. utterly rubbish.

  Craig recovered from his mega-man-flu and returned to the studio looking suitably rough for his role as his own father. He recorded the sequences as his dad who was berating his son David while getting drunk. His drunk-acting is unsurpassed. No one without deep, personal experience of such states could hope to achieve such a breathtaking and yet underplayed and subtle portrayal of inebriation. All Craig was actually drinking was apple juice, he got through many cartons. ‘It’s weird isn’t it?’ Craig said to me as he wiped his make-up off after the recording, ‘I’ve drunk loads of this stuff and I’m not pissed. Something tells me it’s not part of me regular diet, la.’

  Two days before Christmas we got ready for the audience again. There was a bit of a party atmosphere going on as the crowds arrived. Once again we were introduced and started recording episode two. The show went really well, the scenes with Pree were brilliant, the story held together and at the end of a long night, another episode was in the can. Well, most of it. There were still crucial scenes that needed recording, complex, critical, crucial scenes, but we’d do them later in the pick-up week. It was just the start, we had plenty of time, that was the general consensus.

  I spent a quiet Christmas day with my family, it was lovely; I was lovely, the Mrs was lovely and the children were lovely. Even the dog made an effort. The family snaps taken of the day make us look like a normal, happy, well-functioning family unit, which alone is something of an achievement. The only tragic thing about the family pictures is the totally bald bloke holding up a small glass of red wine.

  ‘Look at that massive loser,’ my lovely eighteen-year-old son Louis said later when he saw the pictures.

  After two weeks off, it was back to the studio for the long run, four episodes to record plus all the pick-ups. Oh yes, the pick-ups. They loomed over us, an ever-growing list of little scenes and close-ups, reaction shots and special effect sequences that we would do, ‘in the pick-up week’.

  Episode three was a real highlight. It includes the only scene we shot outside the studio. In the past we would often spend a week shooting special exterior scenes before the studio recordings in front of the audience. In Red Dwarf X, this was not to be; budget restrictions prohibited dragging the entire team to a gravel pit in Kent or a sewage works on the Isle of Dogs. The only exterior sequence was when the crew of Red Dwarf had completed building the flat-pack Swedish self-assembly time-travelling shower unit and ended up in Albion in the year 23 ad. As you do.

  It was a very cold day and the crew were all wrapped up in winter coats, thick socks, boots, gloves, woolly hats, the works. The cast had thick overcoats draped over their shoulders, Kryten was in need of none of these crude, humanoid-warming systems. Minus five Celsius is just about the perfect operating temperature for a rubber-headed mechanoid.

  The shot we were doing was a one-take; we had to arrive in the woods and start walking on a pre-arranged route, the cameras tracking us from a distance. We did it fairly fast and completed a few takes of the scene before returning to the warmth of the studio and hot, or in my case lukewarm, tea.

  A few days later we learned there was a problem with the scene. Once again not us, not me, not the sound, this time it was the Red epic cameras. It seemed they didn’t like the cold. Watching the footage back on a small monitor didn’t show the error, in fact you could watch it on a big monitor and not notice anything was wrong; however, as soon as you were told ‘it’s dropped frames’ you’d see the little jump. I found it uniquely annoying, I was saying things like ‘no one will notice’ and ‘surely it doesn’t matter that much’. One tiddly frame dropped, it seemed so minor. Naturally everyone else thought it did matter and rightly so, it was a disaster, we’d have to shoot it again, in the pick-up week.

  All the time we’d been rehearsing episode three, Lemons, we had been aware that a rather elaborate set was being built where before Christmas the Quantum Twister had been located. This was going to be the Indian market square and as it came together it looked more and more amazing. A wonderful Australian production designer called Michael Ralph built all the sets for Red Dwarf X, including this remarkable installation.

  We started working with James Baxter who was playing Jesus, another fine young actor who did us proud. Once the crew of Red Dwarf find themselves in 23 AD, they realise they have the remote for the flat-pack Swedish self-assembly time-travelling shower unit, but no battery, so being the ever-resourceful, battled-hardened space bums we are we decide to make one, using lemons. So we walk three thousand miles across central E
urope and Asia and into India, as you do, to buy a few lemons.

  Once again, the background to this story was extraordinary, as Doug explained to us the slightly bonkers theory that Judas was in fact the identical twin brother of Jesus. Judas was crucified, Jesus lived on, thus explaining the notion for being raised from the dead; in this story, Jesus went to live and breed in the south of France, etcetera. I say bonkers theory, but that didn’t stop Dan Brown and all the book sales for The Da Vinci Code, which is based on much the same premise.

  So anyway, the set of the Indian market unlike any other set in the history of Red Dwarf smelt absolutely gorgeous. My sense of smell is a bit smegged up by years of smoking. Yes I’ve given up … loads of times, it’s been my only physically damaging vice, all my other vices are perfectly healthy, but even with my rubber-covered proboscis I could smell the spices piled up in beautiful brass containers all over the set. Normally a set on Red Dwarf smells of burnt plastic, rubber and fresh paint. This set smelled of hessian, spices and all manner of exotic fruit. Gorgeous. We all walked around sniffing things. The set was incredibly detailed and busy, and that was before all the extras arrived.

  We don’t often have extras in Red Dwarf, but when we were pre-recording in the Indian Market set, it was chock full of them. Lovely and very patient Indian people dressed appropriately stared on slightly bemused by the antics of such an odd-looking crew. We were also attired in appropriate clothing, Danny’s hat naturally being a creation of rare beauty.

  Come the night of the live recording, we started the scene where Kryten explains how different everything was back in 23 ad. The storyline of Lemons is challenging enough when you watch the finished thing, but the audience were only party to a slightly disjointed rendering of the tale, quite a few missing scenes and a bit of explanation from members of the cast was all they had to go on.