The Man In the Rubber Mask (24 page)

The other event, which still makes me a little tense when I remember it, was when we were invited into the cockpit of the 747 by the Captain. One of the attendants came up to us halfway through the flight and said, ‘The Captain has asked if you'd like to join him in the cockpit.'

We implied we'd like that very much and we just walked in, the door was open. The Captain was a charming chap, very posh, probably ex-RAF and a really big
Red Dwarf
fan. ‘I've got all the videos,' he said, referring to VHS tapes. ‘I'm very thrilled to have Lister and Kryten on board.'

He showed us around the slightly cramped quarters, he suggested I sit in the navigator's seat behind the two seats facing front, I had a look at all the charts and little lights and computery things. He let Craig sit in his seat. Yes, Craig Charles at the controls of a fully loaded 747, because, according to the Captain, ‘That's where you'd sit in
Starbug
.'

Now I should explain that planes, once they're up and running, fly themselves. The autopilot was on when Craig took his
Starbug
position, but he was still sitting there, holding the control thing that Captains do steering with.

‘Ever seen any UFOs?' Craig asked. The Captain claimed he hadn't, but then explained that very often when flying over the United States he'd seen something fly up from the ground very fast, then disappear much higher than the 35,000 feet we were travelling at, and there was no trace of it on their navigation radar.

‘No idea what they are,' he said.

I then explained, in as jocular a manner as I could manage, that Craig had a fairly well-founded reputation on
Red Dwarf
for breaking props, hence my nervousness with him sitting at the controls. I explained that on
Red Dwarf
the definition of a working prop was something Craig hadn't touched. The Captain liked this, but then I pointed to Craig happily fiddling with knobs and switches and doing racing driver actions with the Captain's steering thing and said maybe we should worry just a bit.

Craig looked above him, the ceiling above the Captain's position is festooned with more switches and lights than you can poke a stick at. Without hesitation Craig reached up and said, ‘What does this one do?'

That's when, finally, the Captain reacted firmly but gently and grabbed hold of Craig's wrist.

‘That's the autopilot switch,' he said, with a slightly forced smile. ‘Best we don't fiddle with that one, Craig.'

‘Fair do's, Capitano,' said Craig.

To this day the people on that flight have no idea how close they were to severe danger. If the Captain hadn't been keeping a wary eye on us, well, it doesn't bear thinking about.

So once back in England, I sat down in my writing shed and came up with a load of possible plots for episodes of
Red Dwarf
. They were all pretty rubbish, except maybe one.

At the time there was a surge, one could almost say plague, of long dress dramas on the TV. I suppose there still is, we love long dress dramas in Good Olde Englande.

Endless renderings of eighteenth-century romantic novels with ladies in pretty frocks and severe gentlemen in breeches, always filmed at grand country houses, always a scene with a horse-drawn carriage pulling up outside the big house, always a glamorous ball with violins and dancing.

I was a little cynical about this British obsession and wrote a story where Kochanski (as yet uncast) uploaded her favourite educational software to the artificial reality suite.

With this, Kochanski, Lister and Cat entered Jane Austen World, Danny as a brave Hussar and Craig, for reasons I now forget, as the village vicar. They would take tea with the Bennet sisters in Mister Bingley's gazebo.

There wasn't much of a story except in the first version I wrote, Kryten had been preparing a lobster for two days when they decided to go into Jane Austen world, then later Kryten's head blew up when Lister asked for some ketchup to ‘pep it up a bit' (Doug's line).

The rest of the story was the hunt for a spare head, which they eventually found, meaning that Kryten wasn't in the episode much, meaning that I wouldn't have to wear so many masks.

It was a simple ploy. Many actors are driven by inner demons to be in every scene and steal the show. Not so yours truly, and especially not in
Red Dwarf
. I thought I could subtly write an episode I barely appeared in and Doug wouldn't notice. I'd still get paid the same but could spend a couple of days lounging around doing nothing. Bliss.

How our simple plans run aground.

In the many, many rewrites and script meetings I had with Doug, we came up with more and more elaborate plots as to where Lister, Cat and Kochanski found a spare head, which included the introduction of Kryten's brother, Able.

By the time the script was finished, Kryten was in the whole damn thing, and to make it worse, I would also have to play Able, the Otrozone abusing, no-hoper brother.

However, to counterbalance this cruel turn of events, we discovered that a British man had bought a T-72 tank in Russia and brought it back to England. This massive machine was used in the James Bond film Goldeneye – we were going to use a tank that Pierce Brosnan had driven.

As the production dates approached, we started to learn that this was going to be a very different
Red Dwarf
experience. For a start we weren't going to be filming it in front of an audience for the first time in the show's history. We would be shooting it on a closed set in Shepperton, mainly using one camera like on a movie. When we'd shot episodes previously there were four, or sometimes five cameras used to record a scene. We would run whole scenes in effectively one take, with a live audience watching the proceedings.
Red Dwarf VII
was going to be very different.

When we all got together at the start of production we met Chloë Annett for the first time. She had been cast as Kochanski, Lister's love interest and Kryten's nemesis. In reality of course we all got along like a happy pile of thespians. Chloë fitted in very quickly, although on day one we all stared at her amazing bum for five solid minutes, with her permission, so we didn't keep glancing at it during takes.

The other big difference in series 7 was that Mr Barrie was only going to appear in a few of the eight episodes we were going to record. That felt decidedly weird.

To counterbalance that (series 7 was a multiple series of counterbalances), Ed Bye was returning as director. So the first read-through also contained a long explanation of what was going on from Doug. Many new writers, Ed directing, Chloë playing Kochanski, and Chris only around for a few episodes. He was right in the middle of shooting a new series of The Brittas Empire and the schedules clashed rather badly.

When the first production day arrived, I met Andrea Finch in the make-up department. She showed me inside a cupboard, row after row of Kryten masks ready for action.

‘Oh my God,' I said when I saw them. They represented in the most graphic detail what was coming. Many, many days of sucking through a straw and hundreds of hours of sweaty on-screen action. Does that sound wrong? Good.

We filmed the series over the summer of 1996 almost three years since we last made a series. Judy was pregnant again, this time with our daughter Holly. And just in case you're thinking it, she was not named after the ship's computer. Her name is Holly Matilda; Holly for the UK, Matilda for Australia. How this came about? Put it down to exhaustion and our conviction that she would be a boy.

Again I rented a small apartment in Shepperton, this time over a photography shop. I'd walk through the suburban streets of Shepperton endlessly repeating my lines. As it was summer, these walks would be delightful, the sky was bright, the air was warm. Delightful until you are under rubber.

An abiding memory from series 7 is shooting
Tikka to Ride
. We go back in time to buy Lister an extra hot vindaloo curry and end up in a town called Dallas in November 1963. I loved the script of
Tikka to Ride
. As we were preparing for this episode, Doug brought in a very large coffee table book he'd used to research the events of that fateful day.

It was very comprehensive as, for the first time since the assassination of Kennedy, many formerly top-secret papers had been released. It didn't exactly state that there had been more than one gunman, but it kind of allowed you to accept that there might have been.

I've never been one for conspiracy theories but the very gruesome black and white photographs of Kennedy's body taken in the Dallas Hospital make one thing very clear. He received a bullet to the front of his head. Now, okay, those pictures could have been doctored any number of times over the years, even I could do a fairly decent job using Photoshop, but who knows?

The most chilling part of the book was rows of small black and white pictures down the side of each page. Under each picture was a name, date of death, and cause of death.

These were pictures of police officers, nurses, ambulance drivers, surgeons, hospital porters who all died within a year of the Kennedy assassination. They were all people who had first-hand exposure to the body when it was taken to the hospital. They died in car crashes, random shootings and, on one occasion, a suicide by gunshot to the back of the head. Mmm, original.

I was only seven when Kennedy was shot but I do remember the event, my mum cried when she heard and she didn't cry very often. We still have to wait until 2017 for all the records relating to the Kennedy assassination to be released, although I don't really expect to learn anything new.

Filming the interiors of Tikka to Ride was fine, the recreation of the interior of the Texas Book Depository where we accidentally knocked Lee Harvey Oswald out of the window was great fun.

Filming outside in bright sunshine on a hot day was very uncomfortable. Apart from the heat, the sunlight bounces off Kryten's unusual shaped face and double blinds you. I had a big umbrella to stand under when I wasn't on camera just to keep myself in the shade.

The very first shot we filmed for series 7 was when we walked through the streets of Dallas after we had accidentally knocked Lee Harvey Oswald out of the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository and changed history. We filmed this at Farnborough airfield as the buildings were, I seem to recall, originally built by the Americans when they used the base during the Cold War. It looked great, we had some wonderful American cars of the period parked on the street, all very high-end and professional. The only thing that had been slightly overlooked by the location team was the runway. The buildings we were filming amongst were situated at one end of the runway and as we were to discover, it was the noisy end.

When three fighter jets taxi to their take-off position, they make quite a lot of noise. While they sit there waiting for the all-clear, there is just a faint background whine the sound department decided we could live with. The cameras were positioned, everything was ready, Ed Bye shouted ‘Action!' and four space bums started to pick their way through post-apocalyptic Dallas. That's when ground control gave the all-clear and three F-16 fighters opened up the afterburners. To call it loud is emasculating for the nations who own these terror craft, the whole idea is they are not silent. They are deafening.

The ground shook beneath our feet, the air seemed to bend before our eyes the shockwaves were so intense. (Look darling, I'm an actor, I have to make everything dramatic.)

Once they had taken off, we saw Ed walking around in furious circles and we burst out laughing. This was compounded when Chris decided they were hacking into our walkie-talkies, waiting until someone said action and then giving the go-ahead. Chris' impression of ground-control talking to the pilots was priceless.

‘This is Farnborough control to Delta Charlie Foxtrot one niner seven, we are waiting on the signal from the
Red Dwarf
luvvies in sector three. Full afterburners on my mark.'

The rest of that day was spent hurriedly trying to finish sequences before another massive transport plane came into land, passing only a few feet above our heads. We were filming on an active airfield; it was very, very busy.

We also shot some sequences in the wind tunnel at Farnborough and this was a truly spectacular environment, a massive circular tube, with an even more impressive propeller built into it. They could blow wind at very high speed in this thing to test the aerodynamics of wings, missiles, planes, or cars – anything that went fast. It was made of metal, it was cold and damp, the floor was lethally slippery and we had fun sliding about in there. I remember these days as a bag of laughs, I imagine Ed Bye's memory is less rosy as he tried desperately to get everything done while also ‘herding cats', the common term used by those who try and organise the cast of
Red Dwarf
.