The Man In the Rubber Mask (11 page)

So there I was, on the last day of the fourth series, in the camera rehearsal, without the mask, as usual. It's a party atmosphere, the camera crew are all joshing, the sound crew are joshing, everyone is joshing except Ed Bye, who still has to make the programme work.

Suddenly it's the lunch break, and I walk out of the studio with the camera crew and the sound crew and the actors, out into the open air, around the studio lot, to the canteen. I've never done this before on a studio day, I always went up to my room and had a lie down. I can't eat with the mask on and it can be quite depressing watching other people stuff their faces.

The rest of the day went in a blur of happiness, when we had finished the camera rehearsals at about five thirty, we all sat down for notes from Ed. I had never done this either, I would normally be in the make-up room at this time. Ed would come into the make-up room to see me separately and say, ‘Right chaps, your entrance in scene six, make it funny, that joke on page thirty-five, make that funny, and generally, make it more funny, okay chaps?'

‘Thank you, Ed.'

This day, however, I got to sit with all the cast, in the audience seats and listen as Ed, Rob and Doug gave us their notes. These normally consist of hints about camera angles on certain lines, or when to turn in a scene. It's usually a technical thing, the camera can't get to us in time, or the boom operator can't get good sound if we are in the wrong place.

Then, and this day was getting better and better by the minute, I went to supper. I went along to the canteen with Chris, Danny, Craig and Hattie and we ate food. I sat there, no rubber, no discomfort, and ate food. Oh, it was marvellous. About three-quarters of an hour before we started recording, I dawdled into the make-up department feeling very calm and suave. Normally I would have been sitting there for two hours by then.

‘Oh look at Mister Cool,' said Andrea. ‘Such a happy boy aren't we?'

‘Deeply happy,' I said. ‘Deeply satisfied with my lot. Ahhhhhh.' I sat down and luxuriated in my face. I looked at it in the mirror in which Kryten usually stared back at me. It wasn't Kryten, it was my normal face. My normal, rather ugly, bags-under-the-eyes face. As Fiona did my hair and powdered my nose, I started to get depressed. I think Kryten is a lot better looking than me. He's got beautifully chiselled features, he's got a kind but strong face. I think I've got a face that looks like an uncooked Fray Bentos meat pudding.

Finally we were all in our costumes, make-up checks done. The audience were in, it was packed to the roof as usual. We had decided that as Kryten's change to human was a surprise, we didn't want to spoil it for the live audience so I didn't go on in the early introductions. The first ten minutes of the show we had recorded the day before.

The others went on to deafening applause, the audience settled down as the title music was played, ‘It's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere, we're all alone, more or less…', then the first ten minutes of the show were shown on the many televisions that hang from the studio ceiling. At the end of this section, Kryten becomes human, and you could hear the audience react. ‘Ooooh,' they went.

Suddenly, I became very nervous. One of the odd side-effects of wearing the mask is that I have zero stage fright when I'm in it. I suppose my brain and body have so much to put up with anyway that getting nervous is just too much extra activity to bother with.

I used to get stage fright when I first started performing, sometimes for months in advance. There were times when I was preparing to do a cabaret show in a pub to sixty people when I wouldn't sleep for three nights before. I was convinced I would dry up, I would have uncontrollable adrenaline rushes, my heart rate would be over the legal limit, I was a nervous wreck. As soon as I went on the stage though I was fine and of course the relief afterwards was enormous.

The fright gradually wore off as I did more and more performing, until eventually I did so much, I was on stage more or less every night of the week, that I would forget to be nervous. This can have a very bad effect. If you are too relaxed when you go on stage you can dry up and forget things, sing flat, trip over and generally blow it. I discovered this to my cost on a couple of occasions, and so decided that I should try and hype myself up before going on stage. I would jump up and down on the spot and make funny noises, shake my hands loose and try and get going. It was always worth it.

Being in
Red Dwarf
was so utterly different to going on stage in a pub that it's hard to imagine any link at all. When I am in the mask, and someone says to the audience, ‘And here, as Kryten, is Robert Llewellyn!' I walk out in front of them already in character because there's nothing else I can do. It's not me they're seeing, it's someone else stuck on the outside.

As I was ushered into the first scene of
DNA
, where the newly human Kryten is on the medi-bed checking himself out. I was more nervous than I had been in years. I was really aware of the live audience looking at me. I felt shy, I could feel myself blushing. Obviously a lot of them were thinking, ‘Oh, is that what he looks like? What a shame.' But most of the anxiety was coming from inside me. These people were seeing me for the first time, I felt so naked. Well, I was half-naked, I only had one of those hospital gowns on which let your bum hang out.

The floor manager motioned me to start the scene and I could barely manage not to shake visibly. My mouth was dry and my hands were sweaty, it was just as bad as being under rubber only I had no excuse.

Craig came in and as soon as we started the scene I was alright. This was the now infamous double Polaroid scene where Kryten, as a human, finds he is still attracted to domestic appliances like Hoovers and washing machines, except now that mechanoid desire has turned into a sexual one, and he's noticed some activity in his lower groinal area.

Once the show was under way, I had a great time, charging about, avoiding the curry monster and not getting too hot. Of course, seeing Craig get a face full of vindaloo sauce was a wonderful, enriching experience.

Irony, however, was never too far away. It may have been the most comfortable
Red Dwarf
I was ever to record, but it was a huge disappointment for one particular ten-year-old boy. My nephew Ben had travelled a long way to see uncle Robbie be Kryten. He sat in the audience patiently and all he saw was his boring old Uncle wearing a funny suit. I don't think he's ever really forgiven me for that.

I felt sad during the party at the end of the show. All these people I had made friends with, and I would never see them again. Oh sure, I might come across them here or there, but you get close to them when you work so intensely. It was such a farewell sort of party, I danced a bit, had some sausages on sticks and then crept out so I wouldn't have to say goodbye.

 

On 15 January 1991, I set foot on some very hot tarmac in Brisbane, Australia. I'd just spent twenty-four hours inside a metal tube, sitting still. I was fine, it was a doddle, I thought nothing of it. It was just like an extra-long make-up session. I had woken up at one point during the night, or day, or whenever, opened the little plastic shutter on my window and saw huge snow-covered mountains below. I mean huge, a vast mountain range which seemed to go on forever. On the screen where they show films in the giant 747, on Qantas flights they show a map of the world with a little plane superimposed on it. There is also a list of figures which tell you where you are, how far you've come, what the time is, how high you are, what speed you're travelling and what your star sign is.

I looked at the map and saw that we were over the Himalayas, I looked out of the window again, eager to work out which one was Mount Everest. I didn't stand a chance. Every mountain I saw was massive, snow-peaked and cloud-piercing. They seemed quite close and it was only an hour later when we were over the Bangladesh flood plains, that I realised how high those mountains are. When we were over the plains and river deltas, it felt like we were five miles up, which of course we were.

Brisbane, in January, is hot. It's like a Turkish bath, steamy, close, warm, sticky. If you move, you sweat. If you stand still, you sweat.

I was in Australia for three months, to meet Judy's family and see some of the country. I travelled from Brisbane up the coast of Queensland for a while, where it was even hotter, then down south to Sydney and finally Melbourne. From Melbourne I visited the outback when I flew to Alice Springs to stay with friends.

I did actually meet one person in Brisbane who thought they'd seen
Red Dwarf
. It was shown on the ABC on a Sunday afternoon, so not exactly prime time.
²¹
One person who had seen it, though, was in one of the most far-flung places I've ever been.

The friends I stayed with in Alice Springs said that I should try to go and see Uluru, or Ayers Rock. It's seven hundred kilometres from Alice, or ‘Just down the road, mate,' to an Australian. I enquired about hiring a car, or flying, or going on a coach. I was going to stay with a man who lived at the Uluru community and ran an Aboriginal craft marketing company. He lived out in the bush so I eventually chose a hire car.

On the morning of my departure, a woman rang the people I was staying with and said, ‘Anyone there want to go to Uluru, mate? We've got a truck we need taking back there.'

An hour later I was heading out of Alice Springs in a two-ton, four-wheel drive pick-up truck belonging to the Pitanjara Women's Association. It had been left in Alice to have a service, and there was no one around to take it back out to the Pitanjara women, except me.

It was fun to drive, but very slow, I never went above fifty miles an hour, and when the road you're on stretches dead straight, dead flat and dead hot as far as you can see, it can become a bit tiresome. After driving for four hours due south, I came to a garage. I stopped and bought water and a sandwich from a small roadside café. I didn't need to buy diesel as the truck had an eighty-gallon tank and a special reserve tank that held another fifty gallons. It also had a fifty-gallon water tank.

The area I was driving through is one of the hottest and driest on earth. A few weeks before I arrived, an Aboriginal family had been driving across the bush when their pick-up had broken down. All three adults died of heat exhaustion and thirst. They buried their child in the earth to protect it from the sun, and the child survived. A horrifying story, and hard to understand unless you've been there. The sun is so hot and unforgiving, it burns your skin in seconds, it's actually painful, even a northern European like me, who likes to get a bit of a tan, didn't want to have any part of my skin exposed to this rasping glare.

The road came to a T-junction at the garage where I stopped. One road went to Adelaide, two thousand miles south, the other went to Uluru, four hundred miles to the west. I turned to a westerly direction, and put my foot down. It seemed like I'd been driving all day already and I had a long way to go.

After about three hours, I saw a sign which said ‘Curtain Springs road stop, ten miles.' I decided to pull over there and have a stretch. Just to explain, there is nothing man-made along these roads for hundreds of miles at a time, so something like the Curtain Springs road stop can fill your imagination with unexpected delights.

As it turned out, it was a tin shack with a huge TV aerial, a couple of petrol pumps and a few broken-down old cars. The man who came out to greet me was straight out of a XXXX advert. Huge, fat and red-faced. He wiped his brow in an exaggerated fashion and said, ‘Hot enough for you, mate?'

I asked how hot it was, he said, ‘Fifty-one degrees centigrade, mate.' That's about a hundred and thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.

‘Hot enough for you, mate?' he repeated. It seemed to be his mantra. I followed him into one of the tin huts, it was a rough old place, this. I was concerned the truck wouldn't start again, I didn't fancy being stranded out in the middle of this desert for too long, even at Curtain Springs. As I took another glance at the bloated outline of the proprietor I decided especially not at Curtain Springs. I pulled a bottle of near-frozen mineral water from the huge humming freezer cabinet. I noticed the seal was already broken, I assumed he refilled them, not a lot of health and safety visitors to Curtain Springs at a guess.

‘You a pom, mate?' he asked. I had been in Australia for two months and no one had yet called me a pom. I told him I was, and this led on to a discussion of the heat, the flies, the Bungs, which is the local redneck parlance for Aboriginals. Delightful. He went on at great length about what to do if you break down. All the usual outback topics. Then he asked me what I did. As I stood in a tin shack, five hundred miles from anything other than sun-baked dust, what I did seemed peculiarly irrelevant.

‘I'm a writer and actor,' I said trying to sound butch, but sounding about as fey as you always do with an English accent in Australia.

‘Oh yeah, you famous then?'

‘No, no, not at all.'

‘C'mon, what have you done? I might have seen it.'

‘Well, there's this British comedy series called
Red Dwarf
.'

‘
Red Dwarf
!'

‘Yes, it's about–', but I never got a chance. I had met Pat, the Northern Territories biggest
Red Dwarf
fan. The huge TV aerial by his shed was his only contact with the outside world. He could just about receive the ABC, Australia's equivalent to the BBC. On Sunday afternoons, his wife, who I never met, had to man the pumps while he sat back and watched the programme.

‘Never miss, mate, you smeg head.'

It took a long time to explain that I wasn't the Kryten he'd seen. He looked at me slightly sideways as I told him the episodes he'd seen didn't include me. At that time in Australia, only series 1 and 2 had been shown. I ought to go back now and see if he's still watching, but if you drove in a fast car from Brisbane, it would take five or six days to get there.

I left Pat and Curtain Springs and the flies and heat and drove for another six hours, dead flat, dead straight, dead hot. Suddenly the road had a slight bend and I caught sight of this magnificent red lump. After all those hours of flatness, Uluru just traps the eye. I drove toward it for another half an hour before I reached the gates of the Uluru National Park. The rock has been given back to the original inhabitants, who have by all accounts been around that area for about forty thousand years so they know the area well. Some of them have only come into contact with white people since the war.

I stood under the canopy of stars that night, stars like we in Europe cannot imagine. They have more of them in Australia, and they're brighter. The rock seems to glow at night, it really is the most remarkable natural object I've ever seen.

On my way back from the rock, I was given a lift in a turbo-charged, air-conditioned Land Cruiser belonging to the senator for the Northern Territories. His secretary was driving, fast. We did the same journey that had taken me ten hours in four and a half. At one road station, we saw a group of men clear the road, stop the occasional car that was travelling past, and watched a twin-engined plane come into land. An aboriginal woman was carried swiftly aboard and it took off again. She was giving birth and the delivery was getting complicated so she was flown to Alice Springs. Real Flying Doctors. I was dead chuffed I'd seen that.

I got back to England on 5 April and dived straight into rehearsals for a comedy lecture I was presenting in London. This was called
The Reconstructed Heart
and was a wry look at the male response to feminism from 1970 until 1990.
²²

I first performed the lecture at London University's Bloomsbury Theatre. It was a real unknown, I was presenting it as a serious academic lecture, with slides and statistics. I had tried it out in Australia, the first reading took place in Alice Springs, in a kitchen, in front of twenty people, a couple of dogs and a six-month-old baby. Thank goodness it worked, people laughed and
The Reconstructed Heart
was soon commissioned by Channel 4 as a comedy lecture to be broadcast on Valentine's Day the following year.

In the meantime, I made appearances in
KYTV
, where I was a roving reporter during a charity fun day, and I was hung upside down and whipped by a woman in a rubber skirt.
²³
As if that wasn't enough, I was mounted by a giant rabbit and I had to pour a bucket of water over my head. It was all good clean fun.

I also appeared in
Hysteria
, the AIDS benefit which Stephen Fry and all that lot organise each year. It was the same thing I'd seen Ed Asner and Jerry Hall doing the year before, and now I was in it. Oh swollen headedness be mine! But no, the irony light was flickering.

It was great fun to do, I even met Hugh Laurie and we compared faces. Quite a few people say I look like him, including his wife. I don't think I do, but he is the one performer I can impersonate. We stood in front of a mirror and I did my Hugh Laurie impersonation.

‘I say, that's quite remarkable,' he said, doing a much better Hugh Laurie impersonation.

The audiences at benefits are wonderful. I appeared in a short sketch which Rob and Doug had written, with Tony Slattery and Craig Ferguson. I thought it was quite good. It was cut from the final broadcast version shown to millions.

After the show, we were all invited to one of those proper showbiz parties in a trendy disco. I left by the stage door to be surrounded by fans and photographers. One Fleet Street camera jockey seemed to be looking at me and smiling. I was just about to pose for him when he shoved me out of the way and took a picture of Lenny Henry who was right behind. Lenny was surrounded by autograph hunters, but out of this melee came one young woman, she walked up to me and said, ‘You're Kryten aren't you?' I smiled and signed my name. You see, that's how shallow I am. I was thrilled. There was Lenny with his thousands of fans, but all it took to make me happy was one person. I'm cheap.

I went to the party in a van with Ed Bye and Ruby Wax, Ruby smiling for all the Fleet Street photographers who were hammering on the windows. It was very glamorous. Well, for me it was glamorous, for them it was a run-of-the-mill day I expect.

The party was jam-packed with celebs and media people, it was very funny. Media people are always tall, always attractive and always dressed in black. Celebs are instantly recognisable and scruffy, unshaven and wearing all manner of raggy old clothes. I may not have been instantly recognisable but I had the right kit on. I can't dress smartly no matter how hard I try.

Of course, Stephen Fry was very charming and friendly, as was Hugh Laurie. Now I admit I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about Oxbridge people. I say a bit of a chip, it might better be described as a sizeable chain of fish and chip emporia. I lived in Oxford for two years and worked in restaurants, serving up-and-coming BBC executives, members of Parliament and leading civil servants. They all treated me like shit and believed they ruled the earth, which they more or less do. I do sometimes rant and rave about Oxbridge people and their incredible privilege in this country, their natural feeling of superiority and self-confidence. Of course, many of them are very intelligent and they worked hard to get to Oxbridge, but it has to be remembered that you can buy your way in. The colleges deny it, but it happens all the time.

Alexei Sayle once said he doesn't want to meet the people he hates because he knows he'll probably really like them and get on with them. I never hated Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, but I always viewed what they did with a jaundiced eye. I always believed they got where they did because they knew the right people, the people who ran the BBC. Of course, they did know them because they went to the same university, but they also happen to be very talented. The whole Oxbridge debate is a complicated one, but it's the one chip that I like to keep on my shoulder for a rainy day. It's stupid to say that the civil service, the government, the armed forces and the BBC are all controlled by Oxbridge-educated people. There are people from all walks of life and backgrounds involved in those institutions. But go above a certain level in the hierarchy and all, all of them, he said polishing his chip, all of them are white, middle-class and Oxbridge. They have a stranglehold on our society and culture which only a violent and bloody revolution would dislodge. I'm not about to start ethnic cleansing NW3, so hats off to them I say. Pip pip for Oxbridge, tra la!