The Man In the Rubber Mask (8 page)

As the make-up came off for the last time, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Never again would I have to sit still for five hours having someone dab my face with a sponge. Never again would my eyes be glued open and have bright lights shone in them. Never again would I sweat so much each day I wouldn't have to take a pee. It was all over. Forever.

As I walked from the BBC studios to the rooms we were having the last night party in, I was a deeply happy individual. I felt a great sense of achievement, I'd worn a full-face, full-head prosthetic mask for eighteen days and I hadn't killed myself or anyone else.

The party was great fun, I'd made friends with a lot of new people but I knew what would happen, as soon as we all went our separate ways, no matter what promises we'd make, we'd never see each other again.

At one point Chris Barrie stood up in the corner of the room and did a short routine depicting a day on the
Red Dwarf
set which had everyone on the floor laughing. His impressions of Rob, Doug and Ed were amazing in their observation. His Craig Charles was breathtaking. ‘Hey man, I do me own stunts, just stuff a load of explosives down me jock strap, no problem man.'

He did a wonderfully funny impression of Peter Wragg, the special effects and model wizard, his Danny John-Jules was magnificent, and watching the people's faces who are being impersonated is fascinating. They stare with slack jaw, trying to work out who it is he's doing. People very rarely recognise themselves, but everyone else does immediately. Chris only had to pull a face and we all knew who he was being. He didn't do a Robert Llewellyn at the party, I would have to wait for that dubious privilege.

The next morning it was the long, and even for me, slightly hung-over coach ride back to Acton. Once in the car park we bid our farewells and that was an end to it. I had great fun doing the series, but they had made three and the general feeling going around was that this was the last one.

 

I didn't see the warning light, I didn't hear the klaxon. In the huge irony control room in the sky, men in white coats were running about with clipboards making notes.

‘Looks like 8289-27663-RL is going through an irony warp,' says an operative who starts punching in data. I didn't hear them, I didn't know that 8289-27663-RL was me.

On 5 November 1990, less than a year since I had the last mask removed, I was sitting in a make-up chair in a location make-up lorry, parked next to a huge disused pumping station just below a flyover in west London. I was having a new mask stuck on.

When I say a new mask, I mean this was a completely new mask. Many people don't realise that each time Kryten appears on the screen, it's actually a new mask. I can only wear them once, they're like paper knickers, wear once and throw them away. When they're removed, they're ripped to bits, quite often by me, so my make-up chair is surrounded by sweaty bits of Kryten's head. Sad really.

In the intervening year I'd been to see a skin allergist,
¹⁹
and found out that I am allergic to nothing except exhaustion. The reason my face was so sore the year before was because it had a rubber mask stuck all over it all day. ‘What d'you expect?' said the doctor.

I had been to have my head re-cast. I went back to the BBC special effects department in Acton, where I met Andrea Pennell. She was the new head make-up person on
Red Dwarf IV
. She watched as they made another mould of my head and then she and Peter Wragg pointed at the cast with pens and rulers and measuring tapes. They tapped it, drew lines on it and talked for ages about feather edges and splits, about foam compounds and cooking times. I nodded in my special ‘I understand all about foam' type of way, when in reality I was thinking about kinky sex.

For the fourth series I had two new make-up women, Andrea and Fiona Kemp. I say they were my make-up women, of course they weren't. They were independent women who controlled their own destiny. Not only that, they also did Chris and Craig's make-up, so there was very little exclusivity about the arrangement. They did spend more time with me though, and it is a well-known fact in the entertainment industry that make-up women know everything about their artists and everything about the production company and everything about everything really. Quite a lot of male performers marry their make-up women. I don't want to list some of the more contemporary make-up women–male performer liaisons. I'd just like to state now, unequivocally, that I have never had sexual congress with a make-up woman.

After a few long sessions, even the tongue of a seasoned non-gossiper starts to wiggle a bit, and if they're like me, I am blurting everything out before my arse hits the chair. I walk in the door in the morning and before they can say ‘Good morning, Robert' I'm off.

‘I'm really depressed about my life, I feel old and fat. I don't think my girlfriend fancies me anymore. I don't think my mum ever really loved me, I'm very confused about my life and sexuality, I don't know what to do about my career, I quite fancy the woman who's doing the vision mixing, what d'you know about her? No I shouldn't. I'm in a regular, ongoing-type relationship which I'm really happy in, at least I think I'm happy…'. This is before I take my coat off.

‘Are you warm enough, Robert?' asked Andrea on that first morning in the make-up truck. Andrea always goes for the simple to solve problems first. If you're cold, she gets the fire on, if you're depressed about the state of the universe, she needs a couple of hours to sort it out.

Fiona was a very patient woman too, she had a small baby boy who she had to leave at the crack of dawn to stand by my rubber head and sniff glue for three or four hours a day. Fiona did have a tendency to lose glue brushes though. The glue they use to attach Kryten's head to me is some sort of medical, heavy-duty skin-ripper stuff, which dries very quickly and was used in Vietnam for sticking GIs stomachs together to ‘get them heli-vacced the hell outta here!' Kaboom, rat-at-at-tat. ‘I love the smell of napalm, it's the smell of victory…' Sorry.

Fiona would stand by me for minutes at a time, looking all over the place for the missing glue brush, which was invariably stuck to my back or the arm of the chair or something.

It was very early in the morning that first day, and bitterly cold. Everyone on the crew was wearing those big quilted jackets that film crew-type people always wear on location. I was boiling. Once you cover every inch of your head in rubber, you're warm, full stop. Chris, Craig and Danny were all standing around shivering, I think this was one of the two or three times in four years where I almost felt more sorry for them than I did for myself.

‘Ahh, perfect weather for Kryten,' I said as I joined them.

‘Shut up you smug bastard,' said Craig, then laughed through his teeth and hussled someone for a cigarette.

Craig and cigarettes. Okay, it's a little-known fact that Craig Charles is on a mission, that is to borrow a cigarette off every living smoker on the planet. He has so far clocked up forty-seven thousand, eight hundred and fifteen people. This isn't to say Craig never buys them, he buys them and loses them; in fact, during the read-through of the fourth series, he came in with hundreds of packs of cigarettes and distributed them around the room.

Even here, in this obscure corner of irony control, there was a little light flashing. In January 1990 I gave up smoking. I'd been a smoker for nearly twenty years, ever since I had a pull on a Number Six filter tip behind the chemistry lab,
²⁰
I was hooked. This time, however, I'd really kicked the habit. I have a very strange photograph someone took during the making of the third series where you can see Kryten smoking. It looks all wrong somehow. Kryten wouldn't understand smoking, and it would make the laundry smell which is such a shame.

There was Craig during series 3, ‘Hey, Robert you middle-class bastard, give us a smoke man.' Then, at the start of series 4, Madame Bountiful wanders around doling out ciggies like they're going out of style. ‘Oh, you gave up, man, you can't have any.' said Craig, ‘You've become a safety Nazi.'

We were standing around in the cold because we were once again filming inserts for the next series. Once I was fully kitted up in Kryten's Krippling Kostume I climbed the wide stairs, carefully not tripping over the thick twists of cable which ran from the generator trucks to the array of lights John Pomphrey had installed.

Inside this huge building was a breathtaking sight: two gigantic steam-driven pumps, one at either end of the building. A giant Meccano set of a machine which once upon a time pumped water up to thirty miles away, supplying millions of homes and businesses. It has long since been shut down, but I had the strange feeling I'd seen it before. As I wandered around in this vast echoing chamber I asked John Pomphrey why it might be I recognised it.

‘
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
was filmed in here,' said John as though everyone had been asking him all day. They had.

‘Toot Sweets,' I said. ‘The Toot Sweet song, of course.'

I wandered about the building singing ‘Toot sweets, toot sweets, the pom poms you blow on, the whistles you eat' dressed as a mechanoid with a rubber head. Irony warning light number seven blew a fuse. I was beginning to understand how to get through this time. It helped me if I went slightly mad. I seemed to end up in the oddest places with a rubber head on. It was best, I felt, if I sang a song from a popular children's film of the sixties. Preferably featuring the many talents of Mister Dick Van Dyke.

We spent the rest of the day wearing ridiculous foam rubber and plastic flashing shoes called escort boots. These were made at great expense and with great difficulty by the Peter Wragg Diva Posse as they'd come to be known. We broke them within about ten minutes, the combination of our clumsiness and the fact that as a cast, we are very good at breaking props. We can break virtually anything. However, we had great fun stomping about in these things that were almost impossible to walk in. They escorted us into the justice zone, another of Rob and Doug's brilliant concepts. A zone where whatever crime you commit, the resultant misfortune happens to you. I mean, how do they come up with it? What goes through their minds? When we're actually in situ, working out how to film something, it rarely occurs to me where all these ideas come from. I suppose they must sit around and say things like:

‘What would happen if you were in a world where crime was impossible.'

‘How could it be impossible?'

‘If every time you committed a crime it was against yourself.'

‘Yeah, no, yeah. Good. So there'd be no point to crime so you'd stop.'

‘You'd never start.'

‘Yeah, no, yeah, you'd never start, and if you gave someone a present, you'd get it back.'

‘Yeah. Great. And if you whacked them over the head with a hammer, you'd feel the pain yourself.'

That's how those two men earn their living, by coming up with absurd notions and developing them into storylines.

Of course, the other thing I think they do when I'm trying to learn some difficult lines late at night, wearing a mini Grand Canyon into my kitchen floor, when I'm feeling paranoid as I've failed to remember some excruciating logical twist, I'm sure, I'm convinced that months before they have sat around and said something like:

‘Okay, we've got our storylines worked out, the structure's there right. Okay, what we really need to do now is—'

‘—give Robert some really hard speeches to learn!'

‘Yeah, yeah, ha ha ha.'

‘Ha ha ha.'

‘I compared your mother to a bloated blubbery fish.'

‘A simple-minded scaly old piscine.'

‘Ah ha ha. That really screwed him in the last series didn't it? Soft middle-class bastard.'

‘Did you see his face as he was trying to learn that? Hopeless. He spent hours trying to do that one.'

‘Hey, hey. Hold on, steady. Hold on. Here we go, what about, in
Justice
, when Rimmer is on trial for killing the crew of
Red Dwarf
, Kryten has to defend him.'

‘And do a very long speech.'

‘A very, very long speech. Yeah. With lots of facts and twisted logic in it.'

‘Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. A long speech. Ten, twelve pages.'

‘Yeah, that'll do his head in. Know-all bastard.'

‘Smug git.'

‘Hey, hey, I know what will really do him in!'

‘What, what, what?'

‘Right at the very end, right, at the very, very end, when he's done this long, killer speech, we give Danny a one-word punch line and a massive woof.'

‘Yeah, yeah, no, yeah. Great.'

I'm sure nothing of the sort really happens, but one thing is for sure, none of us in the cast will ever know what they say about us. Sometimes we can guess, just by what happens to us in the series. Craig gets blown up, strangled, shot to bits and covered in curry. He says, ‘Hey, guys, how come I'm always the one that gets done in, la? What have I done?'

‘You got up this morning,' says Rob as he walks past.

‘They're hard bastards,' says Craig.

‘Very bitter men,' I say.

‘Very bitter hard bastards,' says Chris. ‘Who happen to be very deeply talented.'

‘I ain't saying nothin', geezer,' says Danny.

Teasing Rob and Doug is one of the mainstays of our weekly routine when we are recording a series. They are referred to as The Boys, The Comedy Gestapo, The Comedy Boot Boys, The Comedy Police and Keep your heads down, they're in.

They take this ribbing very well, in the spirit in which it is intended.

‘Shut your face you bastard,' says Rob as he head-butts you. No, no, I jest. It's all good, clean boysy fun. They are very involved in the day-to-day process of creating the series, and by series 4, the production company had changed from Paul Jackson Productions to Grant Naylor Productions.

‘Hey, Rob and Doug, la,' says Craig during a read-through session, ‘got your own production company now I see. Grant Naylor, you'll have a helicopter next, la.'

‘It's on order,' says Doug.

‘But when we get it,' says Rob, ‘you can't have a ride in it.' Rob Grant's nickname is Doctor Love. He's the man everyone turns to with their problems. I've had dreams where Rob is on a radio problem programme, people ring him up to get advice.

‘Doctor Love, what do I do? My wife's left me!' asks a distraught caller.

‘It's your own fault you miserable bastard,' answers Doctor Love.

Series 4 was a very different experience for everyone, though. The first three series had been rehearsed in London and recorded in Manchester. This time we were under a completely new regime. We rehearsed and recorded in the same studio, G stage at Shepperton. This was decided officially because the shooting was so technical it was much easier for all concerned if we had access to the set all week. I think the reason was to give everyone a hard time because we all had to get to Shepperton every day.