The Man In the Rubber Mask

by Robert Llewellyn

  However, a wonderful moment happened as Mister Lister revealed his amazement at the crudity of 23 AD beliefs and culture by saying ‘Jesus!’

  Behind him and facing away from the camera was a figure with long hair dressed in white robes. He turned around and there was young James in his Jesus wig looking like the many images painted of Him over the centuries. Yes, Jesus turned unto us and gently and without judgement of mere mortals spake, ‘Sorry, ist thou talking to me?’

  The audience instantly got it, they knew, they had followed the twists and turns of the story and knew who James was meant to be. It seems obvious now, but at the time it felt anything but straightforward. In case you’ve forgotten why we had walked all the way from the land of Albion to India, we were simply trying to build a battery for the Swedish flat-pack self-assembly time-travelling shower out of lemons, copper coins and galvanised nails. Obviously we were going to meet Jesus, especially Jesus with a kidney stone.

  So we dine with Jesus but he is being hunted down by Roman guards. Were there Roman guards in India in 23 AD? I don’t know, ask Doug, but there were some hulking big Roman guards chasing us.

  The scene where we are hiding from the guards in a store room and Kryten explains to Jesus the basic electro-chemical theory which take place in a simple lemon battery was, as you may now be able to imagine, a bit of a brain-melting moment for our rubber-headed hero. If I had worn down various kitchen floors trying to learn Kryten speeches in the past, this one would have resulted in a three-foot deep trench across the room. I paced around for hours repeating it, checking the lines, starting again. The problem was it made perfect sense, it was a very scientifically accurate description of how a battery made of lemons actually works and I needed to be word-perfect.

  When we were rehearsing this episode, the props crew put together the lemon battery just as it was described in the script. It was a perfect schoolroom experiment. One copper coin and one galvanised nail had been pushed into each lemon and short length of copper wire ran between the nail in one lemon and the coin in the next. It looked perfect but here’s the thing, Ed Moore, one of the camera technicians had a voltmeter, he put the two connectors on the ends of the wires and got a reading, 7.4 volts. It was a prop on Red Dwarf that actually worked!

  ‘That is utterly amazing!’ I said.

  ‘It’s not that amazing,’ said Craig.

  ‘I think it is fairly impressive, Craigington,’ said Chris.

  ‘It’s just a bunch of lemons with wires coming out of them,’ said Craig.

  ‘7.4 volts from a few lemons, that’s a serious amount of electric power,’ I said.

  ‘Not quite enough for one of your sad little electric cars though, Bobby,’ said Craig.

  I had to agree with him.

  ‘I’m tellin’ you, guy!’ said Danny with a big sabre-toothed grin. ‘If you had, like four tons of lemons, you could power Bobby’s car!’

  The mere mention of my electric cars makes Chris feel uncomfortable. I make a point of avoiding the topic when I am in his company, but this notion filled him with glee.

  ‘Four tons of lemons, I like it.’

  As usual, Danny’s crackpot suggestions often turn out to contain a surprising grain of truth. Ed Moore, the charming but, it has to be said, deeply nerdy camera operator did a quick bit of mental maths, he worked out there were about two and a half lemons in a pound, 2,200 pounds in a metric tonne (1,000 kilograms) so four tonnes of lemons would be about 5,500 lemons. If eight lemons produced 7.4 volts, then 5,500 lemons would produce around 8,800 volts, which would be enough power to instantly blow the car to bits. Obviously if you could design a battery management system and inverter which could control the output of the four tonnes of lemons, while taking into account the possible low wattage of the system, plus design a trailer to carry the lemons, the nails and the wires, you could probably get five or even six miles of pure lemon-powered range out of an electric car pulling a massive trailer.

  As Ed and I discussed this, I admit slightly esoteric, notion. I leave it to your imagination to picture the expression forming on Mr Charles’s face as he stood close by.

  ‘I’d normally suggest you try and get out more,’ said Craig. ‘But then who’d want to meet you?’

  When it came to recording the scene where I explain lemon power to Jesus, who clearly wouldn’t understand a word of it as he didn’t even know what a lemon was, I was under considerable stress. I had finally admitted defeat at having the speech word-perfect. I could make most of it up quite convincingly but the way Doug had structured the speech was perfect, I really didn’t want to make a hash of it.

  I therefore devised a method of having the bulk of the speech written on an idiot board I placed down on the small table on which the lemon batteries were being constructed. I half knew the speech but having the script to hand like this gave me the confidence to dive in and go for it. Strangely, I feel some pride in this admission of pathetic failure. With the help of the cast and camera crew, the scene was completed in one take. When I watch it back even I can’t tell I’m half reading it, the editors careful cutting around the scene with close-ups of the nails and coins being inserted into the lemons helped, but I just want to blow my own very small trumpet for a moment.

  Paarp.

  There, that’s enough, for someone whose head is at close to thermonuclear temperatures and who has the memory of a particularly dull goldfish, I think I pulled it off.

  Of course when Jesus asks ‘What’s a lemon?’ the audience burst into laughter. It was a recurring theme for Kryten, often in scenes with Mister Cat. Old Kryts says ‘Listen’ and then explains some mind-numbing but vitally important piece of space-time logic, there is a beat and then Mr Cat says, ‘I was with you until you said “Listen”.’ Massive laugh. Typical.

  Lemons was great fun to do, I loved the script and it has certainly stayed with me as a highlight of series 10, but the production schedule was merciless. There was no laurel-sitting for the Boys from the Dwarf, we had one day off and then we were back. We were ready to get Entangled.

  The sheer weight and bulk of Craig’s kebab used in the opening scene was impressive. The production team had procured it from the local kebab shop, and it was a monster. It was a scene Craig clearly relished filming and for once, as I was off-camera, one I could enjoy watching take place.

  The opening scene of Entangled had to be pre-recorded due to the explosions, sparks and special effects, as Lister bites into the huge chicken-doner-combo, sauce spills out all over the control surfaces of the drive room causing a small fire which he naturally puts out with beer. When Rimmer discovers him he is, as would be expected, duly appalled, but Lister reassures him that there’s no need to panic, he’s got more beer. What I would like to point out, however, is the fact that Craig ate large amounts of the kebab after the scene was completed, and then went on to have a substantial lunch. I watched him chomp away as I sucked milkshake through a straw.

  Entangled has a classic Red Dwarf storyline and some great set pieces; most memorably for me when Kryten and the Cat meet in the corridor and discover the spooky world of coincidence. This was the first scene Danny and I recorded in front of the audience that night; for some reason I have a very clear memory of standing behind the set waiting to do this scene. At the far end of the studio I could see Danny pacing around going over his lines. I became very still and silent, it flashed through my boiled brain that I really didn’t know what I was doing, and equally important, why I was doing it. I was a fifty-six-year-old man covered in rubber and plastic, about to record a scene that we had never once got completely right in rehearsal.

  Danny, as I have said many times, has a unique skill that can, at times, be complex to work with. He rarely gets anything right in rehearsals, I can say this with impunity because neither do I; however, on many occasions what you see on the screen is a performance that none of the rest of the cast have ever seen in rehearsal. On hearing the stage manager shout action, I moved forward with a
very high degree of doubt that we would ever complete the complicated scene we were about to undertake. Danny and I had to speak the same lines at the same pace with the same intonation and the same pauses between lines.

  Something magical happened. For the first time both of us were word-perfect, working in a zone of harmony and we kicked that scene out of the park. Boom. It may seem trivial in the grand scheme of things, but we were both ecstatic. It was only after it was done that I felt a huge wave of relief, realising I had been dreading the whole evening’s recording because of this one fairly short scene. The rest of the show felt like a breeze after that.

  Mr Lister had been gambling with BEGGS, Biologically Engineered Garbage Gobblers, not the sort of company you want to get tangled up with. Sadly he’d lost Starbug in the bet and, as we were to learn later, he’d lost Rimmer as well. Not only that, he was now sporting a rather fetching groinal exploder which would detonate if he reneged on the wager. Excellent stuff. All through this Rimmer was trying to instil a bit of health and safety on board Red Dwarf by issuing Lister with reams of forms to fill in.

  The scene where Kryten has to inform Rimmer that the forms may, possibly, have been accidentally evacuated into deep space is one of the few times where my mucking about during rehearsals actually made it to the screen. I have no idea what inspired it, but as we were blocking out this scene in rehearsals, Kryten was washing up cutlery when Rimmer storms in. There may well have been some fart jokes going about; if a large number of men are cooped up in a confined space for more than a few minutes, someone is going to make a fart joke. It’s all part of our rich island heritage. I think I then described how Kryten doesn’t fart, he has a heat outlet in his rear undercarriage, which, for no reason whatever, he started to use as a method of drying spoons.

  ‘It’s all perfectly hygienic sir,’ Kryten assures Rimmer.

  In the entire Red Dwarf X series, that line was my only contribution to the script.

  Entangled was a great show to record in front of the audience because a lot of it took place in the sleeping quarters and drive room, which were both directly in front of the seating banks. We had pre-recorded the scene with the BEGGS because it required so many complex camera angles and costume changes. Yet again, this scene involved actors covered in rubber, foul-smelling hessian rags and bits of hair stuck all over the place.

  The BEGGS chief was played by an old pal, in fact an old mate of Lister’s, quite literally. Steve Wickham, who we could barely recognise under his putrescent BEGGS costume and make-up, had at one time played Lister’s GELF bride in Emohawk: Polymorph II. He clearly enjoyed being once again utterly unrecognisable under the piles of rags Howard Burden had draped him in.

  The scene where Rimmer converts to soft light to enter the stasis room on board the Erroneous Reasoning Research Academy was also a pre-record. Lister almost dares to believe the sleeping life form is Kochanski, the description fits! It could be her! Rimmer’s face reveals all as he introduces the crew to Professor Edgington, a chimp. Nice.

  Oh yes, the Erroneous Reasoning Research Academy, or ERRA for short, the speech I had been dreading since day one. It was all so straightforward: we arrive at the deserted Academy, get in a lift which goes the wrong way, obviously, and as we ride to the floor containing the stasis pods, Kryten explains a brief history of the institution.

  It’s what actors do, they get a script, learn the lines and then supply a performance. Notice I used the term ‘actor’ then; a skilled professional who has honed their craft over many thousands of performances. Not an old numpty with a brain like a sieve who’s been in a rubber mask for ten hours and in that time has only consumed lukewarm tea and a milkshake.

  A member of the production crew studiously wrote out the lines in extra large letters on four bits of card– there was no way to fit this speech on one card. I’m talking big bits of card, big letters, big clear letters you could see from fifty meters. However, in the dark of the lift set, crunched up together, all attempts at making it look like I wasn’t reading were a miserable failure. We did shoot the scene in front of the audience and just about got away with it, but it was just another bit of the show we would complete in the pick-up week.

  Entangled featured two special guest stars, one in the guise of an uncannily realistic chimpanzee. This was brilliantly performed by Peter Elliott, who makes his living all over the world being a chimp. He’s trained dozens of actors in chimp behaviour and really knows his stuff. The big advantage he has with his make-up is that he can take it off quite easily between takes. I thought I got hot, let me tell you, chimp about for five minutes in a TV studio and you can create energy-generating amounts of heat.

  Also, Peter has two assistants with him at all times; although his movements are incredibly chimp-like, he has a bit of radio-controlled assistance with the chimp’s facial expressions. These were controlled by Nik Williams and Jun Matsuuva, who operated the face from just behind the cameras. Even up close, if you ignore the little whizz sounds of the tiny solenoid motors working in his chimp head, it looks incredibly realistic.

  Once the crew fathom out we could transform the chimp back into Professor Edgington, who was of course the original inventor of the groinal exploder still strapped around Lister’s nethers, we met Sydney Stevenson.

  Although in the script she appears before us completely naked, we didn’t insist on this to help us get into the scene. We may be a bunch of whacked-out space bums, but we have standards, we are gentlemen. Obviously Kryten is the last one to notice the sheer glory of such female beauty and toddles off to get a sheet to wrap the poor professor in, hesitating only because Rimmer insists he follow relevant health and safety protocols.

  Anyway, Sydney was great fun to work with and I think I even resisted telling a naff anecdote about her dad. Well, her dad has done a bit of acting here and there over the years, yes, okay, he’s quite famous I suppose.

  This fact was revealed to me in a very memorable way and this is the story I didn’t bore Sydney with during her week on the Dwarf. I’ll try and keep it short, not something actors can normally be accused of.

  In 2000 I attended the premiere of a Ben Elton musical called The Beautiful Game in London’s glittering West End. It was raining. As I trudged over the rather soggy red carpet my eyes were temporarily blinded by a thousand flash guns as a literal phalanx of paparazzi snappers started taking pictures and shouting ‘Robert! Robert, over here!’

  That’s the price you pay for being an international mega-star, I just had to deal with the pressures of fame. I was just about to stand in front of them and smile when I was gently eased out of the way by one of the smartly dressed but burly security types who stood either side of the red carpet. As I turned around, I saw the real Robert they were all shouting for, Robert Lindsay, that actor bloke who is a bit on the famous side. He’s also Sydney’s dad.

  The remaining scenes were a joy, well, they were for me; for some reason I knew my lines and we sailed through them. We save Lister’s gentlemen’s parts at the eleventh hour and Professor Edgington trips on a pile of health and safety report forms and falls into the airlock. She obviously presses the wrong button and is sucked out into space. Job done.

  Rubber off, shower, change, pack small bag for weekend and head for home. Four down, two to go.

  The following week when we arrived in the studio sacks of letters littered the set. One of the quirky little facts I learned on Red Dwarf X was that you can hire sacks of fake letters from a props supply company. Imagine keeping boxes of fake letters on a shelf in case some production company needs a pile of letters to use in their play. It would just never occur to me that there would ever be any demand for them, but there was big demand while we were recording Dear Dave.

  The opening scene of this episode finds Lister down in the dumps, missing the human race and Kryten, full of the joys of cleaning, tries to cheer him up to no avail. While we were recording that opening scene in front of, as usual, a very enthusiastic crowd, I was aware
of the insightful gaze of two women in the audience. One was my wife, Judy Pascoe, the other was my daughter Holly.

  Before I go any further I just want to point out again that my daughter was not named after the ship’s computer. She is called Holly for very different reasons. It’s a long story and I’m not going to go off on that particular tangent, suffice it to say she is a very different Holly, she actually does have quite a high IQ and she’s frighteningly sensible and grown up.

  As in any family, there has to be a certain amount of tolerance between husband and wife. I tolerate the fact that my Mrs is alarmingly clever, emotionally mature, calm, sensible, kind, gentle and patient. She tolerates the fact that I am loud, cheap, shallow, vain, sweary, hypocritical, emotionally unstable, immature and moody. It’s a perfect partnership.

  The one area where she can be a little bit prickly is when she assesses my performances either on stage or TV. I was nervous about her seeing me as Kryten again. It had been over twenty years since Judy herself donned a rubber mask and played Camille. However, she is one of the few people who knows what it’s really like. Being an Australian and growing up in quite a macho culture (she has three enormous brothers) she’s not prone to overly sympathising with a shallow actor-type who moans about being hot. I’m happy and proud to announce that after the recording that night, Judy and Holly came into the make-up room as I was being de-rubbered. Judy said, ‘Well done, darl, you were quite good tonight, you even remembered some of your lines.’ That, ladies and gentlemen, is praise indeed.

  One of the pre-recorded scenes we did for Dear Dave was when the Cat wants to tell the rest of the Red Dwarf crew something important but decides to do it in charades. There was a loose script for this scene but Doug encouraged us to do it off the page, make it up as we go along. Of course Danny was on fire with his physical antics leaving us utterly baffled by what he was trying to say; Rimmer obsessed with a giant death worm, Kryten was fearful of being replaced by a superior mechanoid and Lister is just trying to make sense of Cat’s insane mime skills.