The Man In the Rubber Mask (29 page)

To say this was embarrassing was to put it mildly. The other actor-y types had huge pictures behind them from the various movies and TV shows they'd appeared in. All I had was a tatty handwritten sign put up by the organisers with my name written on in marker pen, spelled incorrectly.

I'd come all the way to Atlanta for this, when I could be at home pottering about in my garden. I crowned myself the Arch Duke of Numpties. Then a very nice man came up to my table.

‘Oh my God! It's Kryten from
Red Dwarf
!' he shook my hand with enthusiasm and I signed a picture for him, he then got his friend to take a picture of the two of us. I was thrilled, one person out of the twenty-five thousand people attending knew who I was. He disappeared and I stared in mild embarrassment at the hordes of people passing by to meet the girl who'd delivered two lines in a Harry Potter film.

Half an hour later, some stewards arrived to take control of my queue, it had got completely out of hand. It stretched out of the door and apparently halfway down the enormous corridor outside. The word had spread through the convention that I was there. Twitter be damned, this was old-school word-of-mouth, the fastest non-digital communication system
…
in the world.

I glanced at Micky Dolenz every now and then, he wasn't that busy any more. His queue had diminished to a couple of very overweight but highly enthusiastic fans who kept asking him questions, which he clearly didn't have much interest in answering. Naturally, I felt guilty.

I signed pictures until my right hand had cramp. There is no question,
Red Dwarf
is very popular in America. Okay, let's granulate that data claim a little;
Red Dwarf
is very popular in the America that is keen on British comedy. Okay, let's refine that down a bit more,
Red Dwarf
is very popular among the quite large proportion of the crowds at Dragon*Con who are keen on British comedy.

During my days at the monster convention I also took part in numerous panels and discussions, all these events were packed to the roof. In the evening we retired to one of the dozens of eateries dotted about the three massive hotels that housed Dragon*Con. One night we had a meal with some actors from Australia who were in a sci-fi drama series I'd never heard of. My son had hooked up with them, he's half-Australian and always seems able to hunt down Aussies wherever he is in the world. This crowd were all very friendly and very funny and I realised then how much more fun the experience of this insane event would be if I was with my fellow Dwarfers. I'm not dissing the company of my wonderful offspring, he had a whale of a time and is blessed with very advanced social skills. He became pals with all sorts of people while we were there and although officially he was there to help his dad, I barely saw him. He found helping other people much more to his liking.

At one of these expansive evening meals I sat next to a very tall woman who looked stunning, even more so when I discovered she was older than me! I eventually learned that this woman was none other than Virginia Hey, the female archery demon dressed in sandblasted white in
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
. She was the woman with the bow and arrow. Legend. I was most impressed.

Later that evening, I walked about the convention floors marvelling at the costumes people had made for the event. These creations were far better than anything I'd seen on a film set or TV studio. Extraordinary care and skill had gone into them. We had seen people dress up as characters from
Red Dwarf
at conventions in the UK, and while I have no wish to denigrate their efforts, the elaborate costumes people were sporting at Dragon*Con were staggering, some on the very outer reaches of what would be considered respectable in normal society.

As I queued for coffee the following morning, I noticed a very voluptuous woman sporting an incredibly elaborate and professional body paint job. She was not sporting much else. In fact, she may not have been sporting anything else. She was soon surrounded by hundreds of slightly sweaty young men with camera phones and she was clearly loving every minute. I never got close enough to see if any cloth-based items were involved in her get-up, but if they were, they were minimal in the extreme. So, unnecessary, and in this particular example, ample, inny and outy bits all over the show. What do male humanoids see in it?

It was exhausting and wonderful. On the long flight back home, even though we'd been bumped up into business class, and my son had a choice of hundreds of movies to watch, he slept through the entire flight.

Not long after I got back to the UK, I received the first draft scripts for the new
Red Dwarf
adventure from Doug. As I read through I remember thinking, ‘This is it then, he's going to finish the whole thing off at last.'

The crew of
Red Dwarf
arrive back on earth and discover they have been represented by human actors, they then discover that the final script has been written and they're all going to be killed off.

It was a brilliant mash-up of
Blade Runner
and
Red Dwarf
. As usual for Doug, it was incredibly ambitious and very complex, and it even involved shooting scenes on Coronation Street. That's when I knew it would all change; the amount of times we'd been promised beaches in Morocco, or mountain scenes to be shot in Switzerland that never happened. No way were we going to be allowed to record anything on Coronation Street.

Six weeks later I walked down Coronation Street in full Kryten make-up, possibly one of the most bizarre and genuinely confusing experiences in my life. I found Doug, who looked anxious.

‘This is unbelievable, Dougy,' I said. ‘I cannot believe I'm here.'

‘Wait till you see
Starbug
,' said Doug.

I had no idea what he was talking about.
Starbug
? What, had they made a life-sized mock-up of
Starbug
, was one of those massive cranes going to lower it onto Coronation Street? I knew we did a scene in a Smart car, it said so in the script. What had
Starbug
got to do with it?

While I was in the costume department, where on a normal day proper actors get ready to work on Corrie, Danny came running in wearing full Cat get-up.

‘Guy, this you have got to see.'

I followed him out onto the lot, around the corner and onto the life-size set that is the Coronation Street you see in the soap opera. Bouncing down the cobbled street came the most ridiculous vehicle I've ever seen, and after ten years on
Scrapheap
, I'd seen a few.

It was a Smart car that had been dressed in full
Starbug
outfit. It just about drove along, its various farings, wings and add-ons wobbled and scraped on the cobbles alarmingly. When it pulled to a halt we all walked around it staring in admiration.

As we were getting ready to shoot the sequence where we arrive in Coronation Street to try and find an actor called Craig Charles who played Lister in the earth-based series – come on, keep up – it was discovered that somehow, no one seemed to know how, the keys to the little Smart car that was the basis for the
Starbug
-mobile were locked inside the car.

Everyone stood around with various theories as to how to open it. Helen Norman, long-time
Red Dwarf
stalwart and the wonderful woman who runs the office, called the AA.

‘We've locked our keys in the car, can you send someone?' she said.

The person on the other end of the line said, ‘Where are you?'

‘We're on Coronation Street,' Helen told them. The person at the AA didn't quite believe her.

‘What sort of car?' they asked.

‘Well, it's green,' said Helen. ‘It looks like a space ship but I think it's a Smart car underneath.'

In the end the AA weren't needed because someone from the props department found a hammer, smashed one of the quarter light windows and opened the door which is why you only ever see the
Starbug
Smart car from one side.

We spent a long day ‘on the street' which was bizarre enough for us but must have been mind-melting for Craig, who by then had been a regular on the soap for four years. Once everything was done in Manchester we decamped back to Shepperton to start to rehearse recording the rest of the episodes.

It wasn't until the first morning that we all gathered on the set, all in full costume, that I said, ‘Blimey, it feels like we've only had a week off.'

The others had all been saying exactly the same thing. Looking at Craig as Lister was so completely natural, Chris as Rimmer, normal, that's him, Danny as Cat, who else?

It was a full ten years since we'd been in that situation: me pacing around trying to learn a speech, Chris explaining the beauty of a 1934 straight-6 petrol engine to a member of the crew, Danny laughing very loudly and doing a couple of impressive dance moves. It was so similar because at one point Craig came up to me and said, ‘Hey, Bobby man, let me see your script for a minute, which scene are we doing, man?' I gave him my script. ‘It's episode 2, scene 5,' I said helpfully. Craig then walked to the nearest bin and threw my script into it. He's been doing that for nearly twenty-three years and I still fall for it. Craig would have known all his lines from the moment he picked the script up. I generally just about know mine when we've finished recording the scene.

For the first time on
Red Dwarf
, and very possibly the first time on any British comedy show, we were recording the series using a totally new technology. The Red camera. An American man called Jim Jannard, who is quite rich, developed this revolutionary camera. Jim used to run this little sunglasses company called Oakley that he sold in 2007 for two billion dollars. Then he started making the Red camera. Not on his own, I'm sure, I think he hired a couple of clever people to help him. The Red is known as a 4K camera. It's all very technical and complicated, but essentially it was one of the first cameras where the resulting video footage was on a par with 35-mm film stock. Basically you just get more picture in your picture. What comes out of this little box of tricks is a picture so humongously enormous it baffles the eye.

When we watch HD telly at home, well, frankly in comparison to what the Red produces it's all a bit embarrassing. A lot of the films we now see at the cinema are not shot on film at all. Oh no, it's all gone digital, darling.

When we saw the playback of shots we'd done on a truly enormous screen, the image quality was breathtaking. If there was a shot of myself and Danny standing next to each other, the editor could expand the picture so it's just a shot of Danny, basically turning a two shot into a single, and there was no discernable lowering of quality. This clearly gave Doug and the editor a lot more freedom when they cut the shows together.

The only problem with all this newfangled technology is that it is pushing the limits of the computers and hard drives that have to process the video to the very bleeding edge of the possibility envelope. However, on the plus side, where a normal broadcast camera can cost anything up to £80,000, the Red camera is about £10,000. But that's just a little box with wires coming out of it. If you actually want to shoot something with it you have to fit a lens (£60,000) and a huge array of hard drives and computers (£25,000) to store the immense amounts of data the camera spews out every second.

This was so different to the broadcast videotapes everyone was used to working with. There was much tension every day as the camera crew backed up the vast files we produced, hundreds of hard drives spinning away into the night. I don't know how much space we used up shooting Back to Earth, I would guess loads of USB key fobs, like ten truckloads.

Imagine if you will – indulge me for a moment here – imagine me in a dressing gown, a rubber head and a pair of Crocs standing in the studio next to the Red camera explaining this fascinating technology to Craig.

‘Oh wow, look at that, Craigy, it's the Red camera, this is the first one I've seen in the wild,' I said staring at the complex box festooned with wires, lenses and back-up drives.

‘It's not red, it's black,' said Craig.

‘It's called a Red camera, Craigy, that's like, the name of it.'

‘Bit of a stupid name if it's black.'

‘But it's a revolutionary piece of tech, it's cutting edge.'

‘You need to get out more, Bobby.'

‘You see, it records in 4K,' I said with enormous enthusiasm, ‘and it doesn't record to tape, tape just can't cope with the data load, it records direct to hard disks, massive spinning platters of bulk data storage, the picture is just huge, the file sizes are massive…'

‘Bobby, steady, man,' said Craig. ‘Remember who you're talking to, don't confuse me with someone who is the least bit interested in anything you've ever said.'

‘Sorry, Craig. I forgot,' I said.

Then Craig borrowed my script again, took it outside and set fire to it so he could light his cigarette from it.

Then there was the squid.

Every now and then, when we've made an episode of
Red Dwarf
, we engage in a scene that requires a certain amount of physical danger, it's all conducted in a controlled environment and every safety precaution is taken. Like with the squid.

In the story of
Red Dwarf: Back to Earth
, the crew discover the massive water tanks were running low and then find out that a giant squid has made its home in the tanks. How did it get there? Possibly, just possibly Cat had put a little fishy in there at some time and due to general sci-fi-smeg, it had grown into a multi-tentacled, psychopathic leviathan. As we all know on the small rouge one, smeg happens.

So Rimmer lowers Cat, Kryten and Lister down into the storage tank in a submersible to try and catch the beast, and it attacks the submersible, sending some of its giant tentacles inside. That's what it said in the script.