The Man In the Rubber Mask

by Robert Llewellyn

  We often descended into hysterics as both Danny’s mime and our responses became more and more absurd. It turns out Mr Cat was trying to tell us a mail pod has crashed into his washing line that was hanging in a cargo deck. I long to see a scene where the Cat looks after his enormous wardrobe, it’s never been seen on Red Dwarf but clearly he does all his own washing, something I’m sure Kryten would be a little put out by.

  So Lister gets a letter from Hayley Summers, a long-lost lover who informs him she is pregnant and doesn’t know if Lister is the father. This episode contains a scene with Lister and Cat that proved yet again Danny can pull something out of the hat that none of us had ever seen before. We all know Danny well enough to believe that on the night, he’ll deliver. Boy, did he deliver that night.

  I watched Craig and Danny rehearse the scene where the Cat tries to get Lister to stop thinking about Hayley Summers who worked in the bank, by painting vivid pictures of what she did with Roy and his finger-wetting machine. It never went well, Craig always ended up looking a bit despondent, Danny was all over the place and I’m generally laughing too much, which doesn’t help.

  I admit to being quite tense on the night when they started recording this scene. I’d had time to drop some of my costume and stand at the side of the studio to cool down with various members of the crew. A large monitor on a stand allowed us to see the scene take place.

  Danny enters, it all goes well but my toes are curled up in my Kryten boots in case the whole thing grinds to a halt. Craig is brilliant, underplayed and confident all the way through, and Danny hits every line spot on. The audience loved it, it was like watching a well-oiled machine that had been running perfectly for years. I’m sure no one watching that night had any clue that this was, for all intents and purposes, the first time any of us, including Danny and Craig, had ever experienced the whole scene in one go. Amazing.

  Of course, I am forgetting the vending machines and Lister’s slightly dodgy relationships with dispensing machine 32. Okay, I’ll admit Kryten has always had a bit of a soft spot for 32 but she is such a flirt with her shiny logo and clean dispensing tray. Most disconcerting. Witnessing Rimmer’s face when he catches Lister trying to heave dispenser 32 into an upright position sent me straight back to my first ever series in 1989 when I was trying to remove Lister’s shrinking boxer shorts, and the immortal line, ‘You’ll bonk anything, Lister,’ which Craig and I couldn’t hear due to the audience screaming with laughter. Blimey, we’ve been doing this show for a long time.

  After the make-up was removed, the studio was closed down for the weekend, I returned home to try and rest before the final week’s live recording, when we would start The Beginning.

  Somehow, in all the chaos, the scripts, the set changes and line-learning it didn’t feel like the last episode. By the time we got to The Beginning we were all right in the Red Dwarf groove; it completely takes over your life. I was getting emails and messages about other things I was involved in, but it all had to wait. The Dwarf is all-powerful, the Dwarf must be obeyed, the Dwarf owns your life.

  The big scene in The Beginning, which took a lot of preparation and had to be pre-recorded, was when Hogey the Roguey gets into the sleeping quarters and challenges Lister to a duel across time and space.

  Richard O’Callaghan who’d played ‘The Creator’ in Back to Earth returned in a slightly different guise as Hogey, and as far as suffering under make-up goes, Richard deserves the medal in this episode. He couldn’t really see anything, he looked amazing, but boy, that took some serious glue and paint to achieve. Many long hours in the make-up chair, but Richard is a proper actor and never complained.

  Hogey reveals a map he’s stolen from some rogue simulants, but he doesn’t accept that he might have been followed. He thinks he’s been as ‘clever as a hedgehog’ and outwitted the evil killer rogue simulants moments before a rogue simulant death ship fires a bunch of missiles at Red Dwarf. Obviously they have not been outwitted. You should never mess with rogue simulants, everyone knows that.

  A breach in the hull, as any hardened space bum knows, can be a bit of a problem. The air in Red Dwarf gets sucked out into the void of space, everything gets very messy and it takes ages to tidy it all up. Most annoying. To create this sequence we had to use some fairly powerful wind machines. Interestingly, when we used wind machines back in 1989, when I had my eyes glued open and soap flakes blasted into them as I pulled Mr Cat along on a sleigh, the wind machines were powered by VW Beetle engines, air-cooled as any decent car nerd would know.

  Now they are powered by electric motors. I’m not saying this because I firmly believe we are seeing the beginning of the end of internal combustion engines, and don’t tell Chris Barrie I said this, but we are seeing the beginning of the end of internal combustion engines.

  That said, even if it is powered by a beefy but quiet electric motor a big wind machine still makes a lot of noise. It’s all to do with the propeller tips nearly reaching the speed of sound, I’ve explained it on Scrapheap Challenge and done voiceovers about it on How Do They Do It? Spin a propeller fast enough and it’s deafening. Everything in the set was sent swirling around, we were shouting at the top of our lungs but still couldn’t be heard above the din.

  In the middle of the chaos Kryten enters to tidy Lister’s quarters but doesn’t realise he has company. He then asks for his scheduled lesson in human modes of speech, all shouted at maximum volume. I could only guess my cue from watching Craig’s mouth, I couldn’t hear a word he said.

  We had to record the scene again and again as quite often large parts of the set would collapse or come away in our hands. Years of practice at horrendous catastrophic space-ship-trauma acting had meant we were very good at grabbing onto something and flailing around. A few of the things I grabbed onto, like a wall, came away in the chaos, resulting in a reshoot.

  Also, it said in the script that ‘Hogey’s comb-over gets blown over the wrong way.’ Just that. Simple, there’s a wind machine, there’s Hogey with his tragic simulant comb-over, badda boom, badda bing, nothing.

  For some reason even with all the wind and flying debris, Hogey’s comb-over stayed resolutely in place. Bring out the leaf blower (electric) and point it at the comb-over from two inches away. Only that amount of staggeringly powerful and focused wind would cause the comb-over to give up the ghost and flop to one side as only a comb-over can. I feel sorry for young people these days, when I was a lad a comb-over was a common sight. You’d be walking down a street with your teenage pals and you’d see a man with a comb-over. Cue much snickering and pointing; they were such ridiculous attempts that bald men made to pretend they still had hair.

  I remember waiting for a bus once on the Caledonian Road in Islington. It was a very windy day, a man I had seen before was waiting for the bus, he had a truly tragic, swirl around the back, plenty of Brylcreem stuck down on the bald head, comb-over. It looked hysterically tragic.

  As the bus approached the sudden change in wind direction and an extra gust caused the carefully applied side hair comb-over to lift up like a bin lid. I don’t think he noticed. Back in the late seventies there were more than a handful of well-known TV personalities, newsreaders, sports pundits all sporting comb-overs. Oh, how I miss those heady days.

  Back in the studio we got to watch some other very fine actors ply their trade, particularly Gary Cady as Dominator Zlurth and Alex Hardy as the brilliantly funny Chancellor Wednesday. His accidental hari-kari moment was pure joy to witness. Although we didn’t have any scenes directly with the rogue simulants it was great fun watching them work.

  Another part of The Beginning we never saw recorded was the Rimmer flashback sequence when Rimmer is caught out by his overbearing father in the schoolroom. Great stuff. It’s always a thrill on recording night: we gather around a monitor, sometimes even squash between people in the audience seating, and watch the pre-recorded sequences. Most of the scenes we shot in front of the audience for the final show were in the drive roo
m set, rapidly converted to be the interior of Blue Midget. By this late stage in the series, as always seems to be the case, budget restrictions, as in we’d spent all the money, required some creative tailoring of what we already had.

  The final sequence was total chaos, we hadn’t rehearsed the scene, we didn’t even have a script until the middle of the week. For reasons that were not clear to us during the recording, not only was Doug directing, producing and shooting the series, he was also rewriting scripts during the night. Many of the first-draft scripts, which we never saw, had to be dumped because of budget restrictions. Doug is nothing if not ambitious, he’d probably written episodes that required ten thousand extras and needed to be shot in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. Strangely, we couldn’t quite afford to do that, so all the way through the series there were rewrites, amendments and cuts which often didn’t get to us until the last moment. On the night of recording the last episode these were slightly after the last moment.

  The audience that night were the only ones to witness the mildly tragic sight of seeing Kryten don his robo-glasses and read the scene from the script, each of us acting out the sequence as best we could. Amazingly, seeing four middle-aged men in ridiculous costumes reading a script didn’t seem to diminish the audience’s response, they laughed and clapped just as hard.

  ‘Hey, Dougie,’ said Craig, after the recording. ‘We could save a shit load of money if we did Red Dwarf as a radio play, even Bobby could keep up if he’s got his specs on.’

  Doug laughed through the pain.

  The final episode was done, well, most of the final episode was done, all we had now … was the pick-up week.

  Ahh yes, the pick-up week. The deep joy the memory of the pick-up week brings back to me. In a normal week on Red Dwarf I will wear the mask for two days, a long day when we pre-record and a shorter but much more intense day when we record the show live. During the pick-up week, it’s one long mask-a-thon.

  I stayed in the hotel in Shepperton with Craig during the week because after a day in the mask, my eyes sort of give up working and just become swollen slits where my eyes normally are. We’d become regulars in the hotel bar, the locals would stop by and have a chat. I’d sip a small glass of red wine and Craig would have something a little stronger.

  Then we’d wander off through the bitterly cold night to a truly fabulous Shepperton curry house, stuff our faces with, in my case, a mild chicken korma and in Craig’s case, a specially prepared mutton vindaloo with a bit of extra chilli to give it some pep. I only had to sniff Craig’s exquisite-looking dish and my already swollen eyes would start to tear up, and it wasn’t because I felt sad for the curry. That stuff could be used for rocket fuel. We’d then stumble back to the hotel, go to bed early because long, long before it got light, we’d be back on the Dwarf.

  On one of those stumbles back to the hotel, Craig was on a roll. I wish I could remember exactly what it was he said. I know it was very funny because I was resting on all fours trying to get my breath back. I had laughed myself into an exhausted state of collapse. I think he simply repeated a profoundly offensive joke, he had to repeat it because I’m so rubbish at oneliner jokes I often don’t get it. I have a very clear memory of looking at the damp Shepperton pavement from very close up, tears streaming down my face, all decorum lost to the hysterical laughter that wracked my old frame. He is a very funny man.

  At the same time I was on my hands and knees in a Shepperton side street, Mr Barrie was out on a floodlit field playing football. Incredible. We’d been slogging away in the studio all day and after work, he gets in his kit; I’m sure Chris will have all the right equipment, and he plays football against teams half his age. I know many ladies find Chris very attractive, and so they should, he is a very fit chap but, before you get too interested ladies, Chris is a very happily married man. Danny would have been at home with his two very young children, in terms of relaxing, chilling, kicking back and all those other things people like to do, having two young children puts a bit of a crimp on such relaxing past times.

  No doubt Doug was rewriting a scene we were due to shoot the following day, and reviewing the scenes we’d shot that day, and making decisions about the budget, and the costumes, and the PR stuff, and the photo shoot we were due to do, and deciding about the set, the lights and the camera angles. Yeah, but I was busy laughing at one of Craig’s most profoundly offensive jokes, that takes a lot of energy and commitment.

  So, in the pick-up week we did rather a lot. The studio was split in two with a giant black curtain separating off a large section of the floor space. Behind this curtain a team was recording the model shots including a newly refurbished model of Red Dwarf. We all had a look at this amazing model, originally made by the sadly missed Peter Wragg. In the olden days of telly, the model would be hanging on wires and would then be moved past the static camera. In the modern world, the model is mounted on a black post with black curtains behind it, and the camera is moved past the model on a complex camera rig.

  I have to say that although all the shots of space ships, Rogue Simulant Death Ship, Red Dwarf, Blue Midget, etc., are actually models, because the cameras are so good it almost looks like CGI. Sure there are some CGI tweaks added after the original footage has been shot, explosions, etc., but they still don’t look like the Thunderbirds quality of the old Starbug sequences. I know it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things but I loved those shots.

  Of course, we had to reshoot the exterior scene from Lemons where we walked through the winter woodlands of Shepperton, this time we kept the cameras warm enough and it all went very well. We shot some green screen moments from The Beginning where the missiles from the rogue simulant ships pass through the hull of Blue Midget after Lister has fired the wibbly gun, or ‘more correctly described as the molecular destabiliser gun, sir.’ In fact in the pick-up week we did a ridiculous amount; some of it made sense to us, some of it was utterly baffling. Jim Imber, our relentlessly energetic and positive first assistant director would just say, ‘Walk in there, Robert, look shocked, turn around and walk out, taking the files with you, and … Action!’

  Not a great deal of rehearsal time, no chance of me saying, ‘But Jim, what’s my emotional motivation in this scene? I’m not feeling it.’

  The days blurred together but on the final day, with a list of pick-up shots that seemed to go on forever, the whole studio was alive with energy. I do not know how we did it, but everyone pulled out all the stops and finally, after what seemed like a month of pick-up shots, Jim shouted, ‘It’s a wrap!’

  Red Dwarf X was on multiple hard drives, backed up and secure. As far as the cast were concerned it was done, we’d shot everything. As far as Doug was concerned, it was half done.

  In fact, as far as we all were concerned, it was 99 per cent done because a few weeks after we’d finished, when I was in the middle of shooting a new series of Fully Charged, I had to go to a sound engineers studio and re-record the dialogue from the simulant attack scene with the wind machines. All you could hear on the sound track was a thundering racket with a few shouty sounds in the background. I admit I did feel a right numpty standing in a quiet studio with headphones on doing shouty talking, but after a few attempts it all seemed to hold together.

  What was exciting though was seeing a scene completed. Although it’s obvious I have ‘seen’ every moment of a new series of Red Dwarf, it doesn’t actually feel like it until you have been able to watch a sequence on a big screen. All the way through the process we all had, I think it’s fair to say, a background anxiety that this new series wouldn’t be as good as the ones we’d made back in the last century. Watching that short sequence started to wear away that anxiety; this looked good.

  Three months later a package arrived for me in the mail. Doug had warned me it was coming so as I eagerly ripped the small box open, I knew what was inside. Six DVDs, the final edit and broadcast version of Red Dwarf X complete with opening titles and end credits. DVDs, old-school. I hav
e moved on in my technology, I live in a download world. I stream video across multiple devices in a totally wireless environment. I’m cutting edge, baby, which means nothing works very well and I get frustrated and give up.

  I dig out an old computer that had a quaint old DVD drive in the side, sat down, headphones on, cup of tea. Sorted.

  More than three hours later I emerged, goggle-eyed and overwhelmed. I was amazed not only by what we’d all accomplished as a team, but by what Doug and the editors had managed to create with the raw material. It really lifted my spirits, the future was looking good for the small rouge one. By the end of September I was getting tweets from all over the UK, people had started spotting posters in train stations, Tube stations and even on big poster sites on the street. Craig sent me a text containing a picture of a poster in Manchester, he’d seen it on his way to work on Coronation Street. ‘A brand new smegging series’ said the strapline. This kind of promotion had never happened when we were on the BBC.

  On 3 October we gathered for a press launch and public viewing. I say we, sadly Danny was still in Guadeloupe filming Murder in Paradise with Ben Miller. Getting all the Dwarfy space bums together in one place at one time is incredibly difficult.

  In a small and very chaotic hotel room near Leicester Square we all gathered together and got transformed into our characters. We then walked down the street, which it has to be noted, caused a small amount of bafflement to the passing tourists and delivery van drivers. We turned into Leicester Square and were confronted by a proper gaggle of photographers, all of who were shouting ‘Over here!’ and ‘On the left!’ and ‘In the middle!’ at once.