Dear Reader,

The book you are holding came about from a rather different publisher than most. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound.

Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.

This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. Here, at the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.

Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.

If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type MITR15 in the promo code box when you check out.

Thank you for your support,

Dan, Justin and John

Founders, Unbound

Prologue

When I first published this book back in 1994, I felt a little anxious that was just jumping on the Red Dwarf bandwagon. I mentioned this fear to Craig Charles, whose response was, 'You're so middle-class, Bobby, always feeling guilty about something' which didn't really help.

Danny John-Jules, however, had a slightly different take: 'You've been helpin' push the bandwagon uphill, covered in rubber, for the last twenty-three years, guy, you may as well jump on.'

Fair enough.

ROBERT LLEWELLYN, 2012

Robert Llewellyn is an actor, novelist, screenwriter, comedian and TV presenter. As well as starring in Red Dwarf he has presented Scrapheap Challenge and How Do They Do It? and his own online show Carpool. He is the author of five novels including News from Gardenia published by Unbound. He writes under a rack of solar panels in Gloucestershire.

Chapter 1

In the giant control room in the sky, there are banks and banks of lights on a huge, smooth black control board, each one connected to an emotion, or a significant experience of a human being on earth. If only we were aware of them, our lives would be transformed. If only I’d known that my irony warning light had been burning so regularly over the last five years that the bulb needed constant replacing.

The irony light was full on when I was carrying the last bag of props down seven flights of stone steps in an Edinburgh apartment building. It was on because I thought carrying seven bags of props was hard work. I thought life was tough and the rest of the world was sitting around chatting and having tea, having sex or sleeping off the copious poisons of a night’s debauchery. How come, I thought, I was heaving great big boxes of heavy stuff about so early on a Sunday morning?

It was the beginning of September in 1988, the end of the Edinburgh International Festival of theatre, music, dance, poetry, opera, jazz, film, television and shagging. I always had the feeling that there was a lot of the latter going on in Edinburgh, in between all the former.

This was the time of year when Edinburgh turns into a ‘thespian village’. This was a concept that came from some old luvvie who made an opening speech at the festival club along the lines of, ‘Once a year the City of Edinburgh is turned into a giant thespian village.’ To which one embittered and no doubt hung-over member of the audience mumbled ‘wanker’ under his breath.

Apart from shagging and thespians, there was an astonishing amount of drinking taking place, astonishing for me because I don’t drink very much. Half a pint of watered-down lager and I’m performing a sad, comedy stripagram on a bar-room table before you can say ‘keep your dignity’. If I drink a double whisky I’m transformed into a smiling human vomit cannon in about thirty seconds, so I stick to orange juice and very expensive mineral water.

However, unlike most non-drinkers, I quite enjoy the company of drunk people.[1]

There are two bars during the Edinburgh Festival where people I know lean against the wall and talk a lot. The Assembly Rooms and the Gilded Balloon. In the Assembly Rooms, we all stand around under huge, posh chandeliers, shouting and laughing in a loud show-off sort of way. All the time we are talking to someone, we are looking around the room hoping to meet someone really famous. It’s a complaint called Edinburgh neck, an involuntary spinal twitch that ruins any conversation and reduces all communication to gag try-out and witty put-down. The room is packed full of insecure, loud-mouthed performers, agents and TV executives. I love it.

The Gilded Balloon bar is slightly different. It is where the exact same crowd go when they are pretending they hate the Assembly Rooms bar. I love doing that. I love going to the Gilded Balloon after I have been in the Assembly Rooms, twitching my head like a demented automaton, and then slagging everyone off for being so posey.

‘I can’t stand the Assembly Rooms. It’s just utterly full of people looking around to see who’s in. I mean, Lenny[2]

and Dawn[3]

walked in, and everyone looked at them. It’s pathetic.’

I said this to Arthur Smith, the man who played the Barman in Backwards,[4]

and he said to me, ‘I met Lenny Henry once. Well, I didn’t actually meet him, I saw him at a party.’

The Gilded Balloon bar isn’t quite as glamorous as the Assembly Rooms. It is in fact a narrow corridor leading to the toilet, but it will accommodate up to one hundred and seventy very drunk comedians. Drunk comedians stand very close to you when they are in full flow. They tell you what you should do with your show, your life and your lover. By three in the morning, it can begin to look rather sad, and if you are not ‘deeply relaxed’ after seven pints of designer lager (total cost £304.76p) then the best bet is to head for home.

The final bag was stuffed into my small, rusty hatchback car and we set off. I breathed in the crisp Scottish air and brewery fumes for the last time, little knowing that by the time I got twelve miles down the road, one of the new, super-cheap remould tyres I had bought to get the car through its MOT would tear apart like a wet paper bag in a wind tunnel.

My two companions, Martin Pople (who could have gone out with Greta Scacchi, but didn’t) and Deborah John Wilson (whose brother is Yaphet Kotto, the black guy in the original Alien movie), sat on the side of the road laughing as I struggled to get the spare wheel out from under the monstrous amount of stuff we were carrying.

By some fluke the spare wheel was pumped up, I found a jack and a spanner, so after a few more comedy wheel-changing moments we were on our way.

The reason I had super-cheap, fell-off-the-back-of-a-lorry, good-as-new tyres on the car was because I was skint. This was my normal state of affairs: nothing to worry about, I got by, somehow. It was only odd because I had just completed a sell-out run of a play I had written called (and you should read this bit as if you were announcing an upcoming science fiction movie, the classic deep American rumble voice) Mammon, Robot Born of Woman.

It had been nominated for the Perrier Award.[5]

Plays don’t normally get nominated, stand-up comics normally get nominated, so that meant it must have been good, even though it didn’t actually win. Not that I cared of course, I’m not competitive, I’m a thespian, I didn’t care when Simon Fanshawe[6]

gave me a big hug in the bar of the Assembly Rooms and told me with barely concealed delight that I hadn’t won.

‘Robbie, darling!’ he shouted. ‘You haven’t won, isn’t it absolutely dreadful!’

Okay, if I’m really, really honest it would have been quite nice to win, but as soon as the play was nominated it was packed to the roof. Even the bloke who runs the Assembly Rooms, Bill Coutts, couldn’t get in. He had to bring his own chair and sit behind the stage to watch.

The play was about a robot, as you can probably tell from the title; not at all like Kryten. Mammon was supposed to be a robot who resembled a human to such a degree that no one other than his maker could tell. It was sort of the Frankenstein story, mixed with a bit of Robocop, a bit of Terminator and a few silly walks. The twist was that instead of the maker being a mad male scientist, she was a mad female scientist. Dawn Raid (played by Deborah John Wilson) was a black woman who had made ‘the perfect white man’ in order to enter ‘the market place’ or the Stock Exchange and start making money. Remember, this was 1988, before Black Wednesday, Black Friday and that rather dull grey Tuesday morning in early April. At this time there were still wide boys in the City of London pulling down 800k a year gross and thinking they were terribly clever. I was brought up to believe it was very bad manners to laugh at other people’s misfortune, but the day after Black Wednesday I cycled through the City of London laughing my head off and pointing at sad dejected-looking businessmen in their crumpled pinstripes. It was an amazing sight to see so many deeply unhappy seriously rich people.

In the story Mammon made money on the stock market very successfully, but as he progressed, Dawn noticed he started to develop certain human characteristics. He was designed to blend in with his environment, which is what he did. He started to become like the men he worked with. Dawn, being a slightly mad scientist, takes the next step: she introduces ‘Lust mode 691, the ultimate in sexuality software’ into Mammon’s computer brain. At this point Mammon copulated with everything on the stage, including some members of the audience unlucky enough to be seated in the front row. It was a disgusting spectacle and should have been banned.

I remember thinking, during those rare moments of speculative thought actors have during performing, that it was an odd thing for a grown man to be doing. Pretend to copulate with a desk in front of two hundred people in a small room in Edinburgh. Little did I know the irony warning light was flicking on the big control panel in the sky. I had seen nothing yet.

With a new super-cheap remould tyre fitted to the super-cheap car, we continued our journey south. I dropped Deborah off in Manchester, where she was staying with some friends for a while to recover from the Edinburgh trauma. Next stop, Leicester, where I dropped off Martin (the man who directed Mammon) at his parents'. We had a cup of tea and I asked him if the playwright Joe Orton,[7]

who came from Leicester, used to live near them. He didn’t.

I drove the last leg of the journey alone, arriving in London in the early hours of the morning, dumped all the props and bags in the hall, listened to the three messages on my answer machine from my mum and collapsed into bed.

One of the first things I did the following day was go through the press list to see who had come to see the play. During the hectic schedule of doing the show every day, and getting in and out of the theatre in such a short time, meant that I only took the barest note of what people said to me. All sorts of heavyweight (as in influential, not overweight as in tubby) media people came to see the show, and as I scanned the list I saw a name that I knew. Paul Jackson, I knew he did The Young Ones, and loads of other things — he was one of those people who did a lot of stuff on telly. Other than that I thought nothing of his attendance, the play had been commissioned as a six-part sitcom by Channel 4, Mammon was going to be on the small screen, that’s what was really exciting.

I had discovered this over lunch one day in Edinburgh, Seamus Cassidy, the head honcho for mirth makers at Channel 4 had seen the show and liked it. I’d worked with Seamus on a not-so-glowingly-successful sitcom I co-wrote for Channel 4 in 1986 called The Cornerhouse. This particular sitcom was made up of a great deal of sit, and not very much com. Ah well, we all have to fail, sometime, but why so publicly? If an accountant fails, only he and one or two other people know about it. If an actor fails, everyone you know will have seen what you do.

They will smile and say, ‘You know your sitcom, The Cornerhouse, it was on the telly last night Bob.’ And I nod proudly, waiting for the praise.

‘You failed Bob,’ they say sadly, ‘you really, really failed.’ Therefore Mammon’s success was of great importance to me.

I don’t want to go too far back, but when my mum used to change my nappy… No, no, that’s too far, just a couple of years back. Before, before all this I was in a four-man comedy, satire, slapstick and music group called The Joeys. I did that from 1980 until 1985, it was very successful, especially considering we hardly appeared on telly. Anyway, that’s another story, all I’m saying is that between 1985 and 1988, I’d been busy, but busy in a sort of cold miserable failure type of way rather than a warm glowing success type of way.

Seamus Cassidy had commissioned me to convert Mammon into a six-episode situation comedy. It was great; I worked day and night on the scripts and storylines, developing the characters, introducing new ones, throwing the whole thing away and staring again. It was two years later that I discovered Channel 4 couldn’t afford to make the series, but by then everything had changed anyway.

Mammon never made it to the screen, not in the original way I had intended anyway, but on 10 July, about nine months later (the gestation period for babies and weird events) I locked my push-bike to a lamp post on the Charing Cross Road. I was going to have a meeting with Paul Jackson, and some other blokes, about some sort of part in some sort of sitcom. That’s all I knew. I entered the little door at the old Noel Gay office and was met by Paul Jackson’s braces and tie. As the glowing sensation settled in my eyeballs, I shook hands with the figure behind. Paul immediately showed me downstairs; I entered a basement office to see three men sat around a table. A tall gangly skinny one called Ed, and two slightly shorter stockier ones called Rob and Doug. As soon as I was told their names I forgot because, as Rob, Doug and Ed would no doubt confirm, I have a memory like a sieve.

We talked about robots and funny walks and accents and trying to avoid all the old comedy robots like R2D2 and Marvin the Paranoid Android. Looking back, it was the first time I experienced the Grant Naylor gaze. There has sometimes been confusion about this name, I’ve met people who thought Red Dwarf was written by one man called Grant, second name Naylor. We always knew them as Rob and Doug, but their combined surnames make the name of the production company Grant Naylor Productions. However, if you made a particularly unsuitable ‘comedy’ suggestion, you would often be the recipient of the Grant Naylor gaze: four often very tired eyes staring at you blankly. It wasn’t a pleasant experience and we avoided it at all costs.

After this meeting I realised what they were talking about. I had seen about three episodes of the first two series of Red Dwarf, but as I worked at night as a stand-up comic and actor I missed a lot of telly. I knew Norman Lovett from the comedy circuit. We had worked together on various things over the years, in fact my first ever experience of working in television was with Norman. It was on a Channel 4 show called, wait for it, this is what it was called, I promise you, Book ’em and Risk it! It had the exclamation mark at the end of it like that. Book ’em and Risk it! Brilliant. This programme presented the talents of people like Steve Frost and Mark Arden (I bet he drinks Carling Black Label), Ben Elton (yes indeed ladies and gentlemen) and The Joeys (oh wow, mime!).

The idea was that because we were aspiring young performers we would ‘do anything’ to get on a telly show. We were supposed to be storming the entrance lobby of a TV company and ‘doing the show right here’. The director, Mr Brian Izzard, would not contradict me I think, if I said he was ‘not Britain’s leading Non-Sexist man’. A charming and hard-working individual who had been in the business many years, he dealt with me very kindly when I tried to point out to him that The Joeys were trying to create a new form of non-sexist, non-racist humour, and we didn’t really like his references to ‘secretaries with big tits’ etcetera. He put his arm around me and stared into the middle distance. With a tight smile he said, ‘I still love you Robert, but you do your job, and I’ll do mine. Okay love? I still love you.’ With that he gently pushed me away as he got on with his job.

As the rehearsals continued, Norman, whom I’d only just met, seemed to get even more depressed. He really wasn’t happy about something, probably being called a ‘child’ by the director. Mr Izzard had a habit of saying ‘Come along now children’ to the cast, whose ages ranged from nineteen to fifty. As we were doing some sort of blocking and confusing rehearsal, Norman said something like, ‘Sod this for a lark’ and walked out, never to be seen again. He didn’t miss much, the show went out early in Channel 4’s history and thankfully sank without trace.

I saw Norman regularly over the next eight years or so. One very memorable time was when I was compère at a comedy club in Woolwich, south London, called the Tramshed. Just before I went on stage to announce him, Norman asked me to time him from when he went on stage to when he first spoke. I nodded, not really understanding what he was asking. I went onto the stage and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together in a warm and supportive manner for the very wonderful Mister Norman Lovett.’ The crowd went bananas and Norman sloped onto the stage looking slightly moth-eaten and miserable. He stood behind the microphone, the clapping died down, and the room became quieter as the audience waited for the first gag. Norman stood there in silence, someone laughed, Norman looked at them, the whole audience laughed. He looked at the whole audience. They laughed again. Norman hadn’t uttered a sound. I was looking at my watch at the side of the stage, two minutes. The other comics on that night crowded around. They knew Norman was going for his record. He stood motionless, picked out by the single spotlight. The audience went silent again, not a sound. Norman stared at them. It was a comic’s nightmare, standing there in utter silence. Then someone snickered, Norman gave the person the most cursory of glances and immediately the whole audience started laughing again. Four minutes. He’d been standing on the stage in front of three hundred people for four minutes, entertaining them, somehow, by doing absolutely nothing. It was very funny, it was utterly infectious, even the hardened old pros at the side of the stage were roaring with laughter. There must have been ten periods of nerve-racking silence, each one broken by someone bursting out laughing, looking at this gaunt, miserable bloke, standing on a stage wearing a cardigan. At seven minutes twenty seconds, after a huge prolonged wave of laughter, Norman said ‘What?’ He got an ovation.

I saw Norman’s face on a screen, on the wall of some sleeping quarters in a sitcom, set in space, with Craig Charles, who I’d seen in the bar of the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh. I’d rubber-necked as I was talking to someone else, I thought, ‘There’s that bloke, the one who’s married to that women who was in Mona Lisa with Bob Thingummy.’ Then I looked at the woman sitting next to him. It was that woman from Mona Lisa with Bob Thingummy.

There was another man with an H on his forehead, I recognised him too, it was Chris Barrie. I’d seen him at the Comedy Store, years before, doing amazing impressions. E-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-extraordinary David Coleman. Then another man came in, he had amazing clothes on, and big teeth, he was called Cat. I didn’t know him. I’d never seen him anywhere. That’s because I hadn’t been to see the three hundred West End musicals Danny John-Jules had already found Diva-dom in.

About three weeks after I went to meet Rob, Doug, Ed and Paul Jackson, I drove into the BBC special effects department in Acton. I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for. I was, like most of the world’s population, a prosthetic virgin. If only I’d been aware of the irony warning light flashing in the heavens when I’d spoken to Rob and Doug. I had explained to them that I was slightly concerned about playing a robot, or a mechanoid, because I was midway through developing a series for Channel 4 about a robot, and I didn’t want to get typecast. Rob and Doug assured me that it wouldn’t be a problem, they thought that very few people would recognise me. I think it’s important to remember that I was very reassured by this. When I say important, I mean to keep the concept of this importance in context. It wasn’t very important in the grand scheme of things, like, it wouldn’t be very important to someone in Northern Thailand, or in the horn of Africa. It was only important to me, for about a minute, which isn’t very high on a world rating of important things.

I entered the special effects room and was greeted by Peter Wragg, the master, the genius, the man behind Thunderbirds, the quiet, retiring master of special effects.

‘This shouldn’t take too long, Robert,’ he said. ‘We’re just going to cover your head with dental mould and about fifteen pounds of plaster bandage. D’you want a cup of tea?’

He lead me through rooms where men in white overalls were making exploding chairs for Noel Edmonds’ Big Big Breakfast Show, this was the room they made the Daleks in, the Cybermen’s wellington boots were sprayed silver in this very building. Everywhere I looked there were old rubber monsters, slavering beasts with eyes on stalks, there were severed heads and rubber arms, model space ships and boats, men sitting at benches sawing small bits of metal.

We entered a room white with plaster dust. There I met Bethan Jones, who was head of the Red Dwarf make-up department. She was Welsh and as soon as I walked into the room she said, ‘I knew you weren’t really Welsh, I thought you’d be fake Welsh.’

I took great umbrage at this. Fake Welsh, with a name like Llewellyn, how could she? Of course, the truth is that I’m about as Welsh as a croissant, but somewhere in my past there must have been a couple of Taffs. Peter and Bethan Jones discussed my head, Peter pointed at the bridge of my nose with a pen. ‘If we can carve in here quite steeply,’ he said, ‘we’ll get a better shape in the forehead.’

What were they going to do, put my head in a vice and get out a chisel? I wanted to look at the small print in my contract. I could see it clearly in my mind’s eye. Why didn’t I look at this more closely?

Section 4 (a) Subsection F9

Clause 18

The artist shall render his head, face and all areas above the throat to the company for modification, enhancement and radical change. All surgery costs and corrective therapy needed after the production to be paid for by the artist.

I didn’t remember reading that bit. As I sat in ‘the chair’ placed in the middle of the room, I was assured by Peter Wragg that I wasn’t about to have radical surgery.

‘Some people,’ said Bethan Jones, as she stuck a rubber bald cap over my hair, ‘go completely mad when their heads are covered in plaster of Paris. D’you think you’ll be alright?’

I didn’t know how to answer, it was like being told, ‘Some people completely die when they have a steamroller drive over them. D’you think you’ll survive?’

Having never had my head covered in plaster of Paris bandage before, it was difficult to judge. I didn’t think I was claustrophobic, I’m a pretty well-balanced sort of guy, most of the time.

As my body was wrapped in black bin bags, I began to get the distinct impression I wasn’t going to have a lot of choice in the matter. I was going to get covered whether I went mad or not.

‘Here’s a pad of paper and a pen,’ said Peter, handing me the same. ‘This is in case you need something scratching when you’re under. Just write down which bit is itching, we’ll try and scratch it, then put a tick if we’ve got it. You see you won’t be able to speak, hear, see or smell anything while you’re under.’ I gripped the pen and paper as if they were my last hope.

‘We start with the mouth and nose,’ said Peter, who was now mixing a large plastic bowl full of bright yellow stuff that looked a bit like putty. ‘This is alginate, the stuff they make dental moulds out of, it’s quite minty in taste, but it is a bit cold when we first put it on.’ I nodded in the special way I have developed when I don’t understand anything but want it to appear that I do.

‘We cover your nose and mouth first, then you blow through your nose and we make a little hole for you to breathe through. We need it to actually go in your mouth, so can you keep your mouth open very slightly. Okay?’

As I nodded yes, Peter slapped a great big handful of this minty gloop right in my face. It was very cold; it covered my nose, went into my mouth, forced my lips apart, ran over my teeth, settled around my tongue and went sort of rubbery hard. It was like eating minty custard that went solid as you ate it. It was like being covered in semi-solid toothpaste, it was like nothing else I had ever experienced. They covered my eyes next, then my neck, ears, top of my head. Their voices became muffled; all the sound was distorted as I felt something heavy and wet being slopped on top of the minty rubbery goo. I assumed this would be the plaster of Paris bandage. I felt a lot of rubbing and squibbling about, my head started to get heavier. All I could hear was my breathing, all of which was taking place through one nostril, which naturally after a few minutes, started to itch. And I mean itch, like the itch at the centre of the universe. What could I do? It must only have been seconds, but it seemed like ages, my whole consciousness was focused on this itchy nostril. I tried to wipe it from my brain, I tried to think about sex, car crashes, mountain streams in the dappled sunlight. Wide open seascapes, the mountains outside Vancouver. Anything except this damn nostril.

Then I remembered the pen and paper I was holding in my sweaty little hands. I wrote, as best I could seeing that the whole thing was done by touch, N O S T R I L I T C H. I heard muffled voices and movement around me; I couldn’t tell what was going on, until I suddenly felt something poke up my nostril. I found out later it was one of those blue make-up removal things with cotton wool spun on each end. It did the trick. The relief was monumental. In the normal course of events, an itchy nostril is hardly something you comment on. You don’t call a halt to a conversation and say, ‘Hold it! Wait! I’ve got an itchy nostril, everyone stay calm.’ You just rub it, pick it and flick it and be done with it. Not so when your head is encased in seven pounds of plaster of Paris.

My steady regular breathing continued, in, out, in, out. I became super aware that I was an animal, that I had lungs that were two big bags that had to fill with air, then blow it out again. Then I could hear my pulse, thrubub, thrubub. I could almost see my heart, this funny pumpy thing that keeps going, day and night, until I pop my clogs. How does it know? Why doesn’t it just forget to beat, why don’t I just snuff it? I felt my heart rate increase, Thrub thrub thrub, I felt a small rush of adrenaline. Maybe I would die with this bloody thing on my head. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to get it off and I would starve to death slowly. I’d never see anyone again, my girlfriend, my mates, my mum and dad. It was all over. I could see the headlines, ‘Princess Di Has Ladder In Tights Shock’. Let’s face it, who would write about some sad actor who starved to death inside a plaster of Paris head mould in the BBC special effects department in Acton?

I tried to control these maddening daydreams; I tried to think about sex. Great big heaving … pulsating sweating … it didn’t work. It was a big shock. Never before in my life had I been unable to have a kinky sexual fantasy. I’d had them during exams at school, I’d had them when I was failing my driving test, I’d had them when I was having sex! But now, in this little, quiet, private world, where no one would know, because even if the Bishop raised his hat I was totally covered in loose-fitting black plastic, it didn’t matter, I just could not think about knobbing. I couldn’t even manage a soft-core shampoo advert. It was the ideal opportunity to have some deeply kinky and perverted sexual thoughts. Not a sausage. In fact, a sausage would have been about the kinkiest thing I could have thought about.

What a breakthrough though, for the treatment of sex offenders. They get sentenced to ten hours a day with their head encased in plaster of Paris. It just stops all that stuff. Well, it did for me, but maybe it wouldn’t work. I don’t believe there are edges to human sexuality.[8]

I bet there’s some bloke somewhere who is rock hard for plaster of Paris. I bet there’s a magazine you can buy in an Amsterdam bookshop called Kinky Plaster of Paris Monthly. Well, it’s not so daft, I’ve seen a magazine called Enema Digest. When I was doing legitimate research of course.

Actually, I don’t want to go on about plaster of Paris forever, but there were the Chicago Plaster Casters weren’t there. This was a team of young women artists in the late sixties who went around making plaster casts of famous rock stars' … well, what can I call it and not be juvenile, let me think. Stiffies, yes, that’s mature. First they made them go … like they do, and then they covered them with plaster of Paris. Once it had set they filed them with wax and a bit of string and made candles out of them.

Oh, all right, I admit, I tried it; I saw this documentary about mad American sex therapists that had a section about these women. I was young, I was impressionable, I went home and tried it. I had a bit of plaster of Paris left over from building hills for my model railway set. I was halfway through the process, I don’t want to go into details but it seemed to be working, suddenly my mother called to me from downstairs that it was teatime. I quickly tried to remove two and a half pounds of semi-hard plaster from my semi-hard manhood. I had forgotten one vital element. The Chicago Plaster Casters used a plastic sheet with a hole in it to avoid the plaster of Paris getting caught on the model's pubic hair. Okay, okay, it’s gross, I know, but anyway, I didn’t know that.

There is no real way of describing the pain that comes from hanging two and a half pounds of plaster of Paris from three or four pubic hairs, but let’s just agree that it is intense. I was panicking, I knew my mum was going to walk into my bedroom and I was going to suffer some fairly hefty adolescent humiliation. Luckily, I had a pair of nail-scissors on my bedside table and, with a bit of judicious snipping, I managed to remove the offending rock.

I did eventually make a wax mould of my downstairs department thingy. It looked like, well, you know when you clean out the vegetable rack and you find a six-month-old carrot that has dried up and shrivelled. It was sad and took many years to get over.

I was still under the plaster mould in the BBC special effects department in Acton. This state of affairs seemed to go on for hours, my ears were straining for any sound, I couldn’t hear anyone. I imagined Peter Wragg and Bethan Jones and the lads had all gone out into the sunshine, they were sitting on the step, smoking and drinking tea, reading the papers and chatting about football.

I imagined Peter Wragg saying, ‘We could go down the pub if you like, we’ve got to wait a couple of hours for it to go off, not much we can do really.’

Suddenly there was a cracking sound, a deafening creaking wrenching noise, as if the very bowels of the earth were being ripped asunder. I felt my head move, not much, just a judder, and then the pressure on my face was suddenly gone. After a little more creaking there was a huge relief on my neck, the enormous weight of the back half of the mould was lifted away, and I could hear.

‘Tip your head forward, Robert,’ said Peter Wragg. ‘We’ll ease the mask off slowly then, wriggle your face a bit.’

I did as I was told and slowly the mask moved. I could see light again, the minty lump was dragged from my mouth and I emerged back into the real world.

‘That wasn’t too bad, was it?’ said Bethan Jones with her jaunty Welsh accent. Not too bad in comparison to being Hilti-gunned[9]

to the underside of a battle tank on manoeuvres through a bramble patch at top speed, no. That’s what I thought, what I said of course was, ‘No, it was fine.’ I said that because I’m a well-brought-up person, or as Craig would say, ‘A softy middle-class bastard.’

They peeled the bald patch off and I had a wash, rubbing life back into my face. I returned to the casting room to see a plaster cast of my head emerging from the mould. It looked like the head of some sort of plug-ugly alien with bad posture. My neck had collapsed under the weight; my head was shunted forward so far I looked like a hungry giraffe. I couldn’t believe it was me. I had a sideways nose, a double chin and a bumpy head.

There was another warning light on the control panel in the sky, the small print beneath read, ‘It’s not over yet.’ Next I had to stand in between two supports, on which I rested my arms, and have a body cast. This is where the whole torso and upper arm area of the victim is wrapped in plastic cling film, then covered in plaster bandage up to a weight of seven tonnes. It is not an intellectually stressful task; you have to stand up, stay still and shut up. I could do the first two, but the last I have always found impossible. I wittered on like a drain for the whole time, I’ve been told by Australians that I could talk under wet cement. I was moaning and complaining as the plaster overcoat got heavier and heavier and my feet started hurting.

If you’ve never stood absolutely still for a long time, it’s difficult to imagine how something so simple could be so bloody uncomfortable. When you wait for a bus, or stand looking at a painting, as I’m sure you do very often, you are actually flitting about like a bird. Constantly shifting your weight from one foot to the other, scratching your bum and tapping your feet about. When you have to stand still, not move a muscle, it takes about forty seconds before you become uncomfortable, three minutes to be internally whinging and after twenty minutes you can bore anyone to death with your list of complaints.

I’d learned this many years before when a friend talked me into posing in her life-drawing class. I had to stand in funny positions without a stitch on so that a lot of quite normal-looking people could draw my bits. Well, okay, they usually drew the rest of me first, but I was convinced they were really interested in my bits.

After only a few moments what had started out as a very comfortable pose would become agony, and it was always made worse when the teacher said, ‘Only another thirty-five minutes.’ They liked drawing me because I was so thin in those days it was almost like drawing the human skeleton. Their other favourite model at the time was the opposite, Mr Lard Mountain they called him. I never met him, but I saw the drawings. He was big, I mean fat big, but also big big. He was big everywhere. All their drawing corroborated this. It made me very depressed. I was twenty-one and that sort of thing is of prime importance then.[10]

Normally it was quite warm in the life-drawing class, although sometimes, in the winter, it would get a bit chilly, and the old single Polaroid tended to turn into a passport photo. Except one time. Oh I shouldn’t tell you, but what the hell.

I was modelling (that’s what they called it) at the Royal Academy in London. Dead posh, proper art students, really old building, proper teachers. I even got to lie on a bed. They had this amazing bed with things like car jacks under each corner that could lift and tilt the bed into any position. All I had to do was lie on it and they wiggled me around into the position they wanted. It was so warm and comfy, I was very happy. I was being paid to lie still on a comfy bed. I started to nod off. I felt sensual and warm, happy and fulfilled, the room around me disappeared and I entered a gentle, loving place.

After a while I started to sort of wake up because I sensed something had changed. There was a different emphasis going on in my lower groinal area. I opened one eye and glanced down in the downstairs direction. It was, of course, the worst possible thing that could happen. It was bound to happen, it was Sod’s Law. A double Polaroid, right in front of thirty art students. Some of them girls! I thought about dustbins, I knew that’s what you were supposed to do in such situations. The trouble was, dustbins made me think of having filthy kinky sex in a dustbin, which was no good. I tried car engines, oily sex under a car engine, football, muddy sex on a football field. It was hopeless. I was desperate to try and flick a bit of cloth over it, but it was no good.

Eventually, when the teacher called a break in the class, I rolled off the bed and pulled my trousers on pretty damn quick. No one uttered a word about it. I took a cursory glance at some of the students work. They hadn’t drawn it, there was a bit of rubbing out where they had moved it about a bit on the page, but they stayed well within the bounds of flaccidity. I found out later that it was a daily occurrence and no one had even noticed. Then I got depressed because no one had noticed. There’s no pleasing some people, is there?

Years later, back in the BBC special effects department in Acton, Peter Wragg calmly kept applying bandage, smoothing it in and building up odd little ridges which would help when it had set and he’d remove it.

The relief when this great lump of stuff came off was immense, I felt light as a feather, but was again depressed at the sight of this pot-bellied hunchback torso, that in my mind was a lightweight version of Arnold Schwarzenegger. After having my hands moulded, which was the least difficult, and being measured to bits, I was allowed to go. Surprisingly enough, looking back, I still really had no idea what I was letting myself in for.

There have been some notable exceptions to this rule. A noisy drunken party which started at four-thirty in the morning made me a bit depressed once — depressed being a polite middle-class way of saying deeply angry.

Henry.

French.

Red Dwarf Series III.

An award funded by the Perrier water company. First prize is a thousand pounds and all nominees get to do their show in London at the Donmar Warehouse.

Big, loud, gay stand-up comic, wit, raconteur and one-time presenter on That’s Life with Esther Rantzen. Now has a hand in the Brighton Comedy Festival.

Featured in the film Prick up your Ears.

The liberal term for pervy kinkiness.

For those not familiar with a Hilti gun, this is a tool used in the building trade to drive nails into solid concrete or brick with the aid of a small explosive charge.

I’m saying this as if it’s not of prime importance now, which of course it is. It’s massively important and I think of very little else.

Chapter 2

Just around the back from the BBC special effects department in Acton are the BBC rehearsal rooms. You can see them clearly if you drive down the A40, a big yellowish tower block which dominates the surrounding semi-industrial flatlands and cemeteries. As you go in the front door there’s one of those blackboards in the foyer with the white letters that you push in. This tells you what’s going on, who’s on what floor, and which room. Red Dwarf was on the fifth floor with the cast from Blackadder on one side of us and You Rang M’Lord? on the other. Alexei Sayle was down below us, and Jim Davidson was somewhere, I think, or was it Jimmy Tarbuck, and Paul Daniels and his wife. Oh it was marvellous. A thespian village transformed into a tower block. I took the lift to the fifth floor and found my way to our room. There was a little blackboard outside the door, and written in chalk it said Red Dwarf III, director, Ed Bye, producer, Paul Jackson.

I pushed open the big double door and saw that I must have been very late, as there were about twenty people sitting around a big table in the middle of a vast room. I wasn’t intimidated. I’m an actor. I said hello in a high-pitched, nervous voice and tried to find somewhere to sit. I was introduced to so many people, it was hopeless, there was no way I would remember all these people I was going to be working with for the next ten weeks. Some of them I recognised: Bethan Jones from make-up, Peter Wragg from special effects, Rob and Doug, Ed Bye, and there was Hattie Hayridge. I knew her, I’d known her for ages, we did stand-up comedy gigs together.

I shook hands with Chris Barrie. ‘How d’you do, sir?’ he said in a fairly formal manner. I shook hands with Danny John-Jules, ‘Yeah, how’s it hangin’, guy?’ he said with a big grin. I shook hands with Craig Charles, ‘What are you lookin’ at, you middle-class bastard?’ No, I lie, he didn’t say that then, that wasn’t until I’d been there a week. He said something like, ‘Nice to have you on board,’ and he bowed very low.

Hattie looked very glamorous and settled, as if she’d been there for weeks. ‘Hello Hattie,’ I said nervously and tried to sit near her. In the middle of the table was a big pile of scripts, we were at the read-through, the first time each series when Rob and Doug get to hear the cast saying their words.

That first read-through was pretty bad for me. Chris and Craig are such good sight-readers, and Hattie was very good, but I was very bad at that time. Danny on the other hand has a unique style when he first reads a script. He seems to be scanning through different pages to everyone else; sometimes he’s even looking through a different script. Sometimes he’s not even looking at the script, he’s reading about how much Pavarotti earns in a newspaper. It gets to his line and the room falls silent for a moment, Danny looks around with a big grin on his face. He’s happy.

‘Danny, it’s your line, man,’ says Craig.

‘What?’ says Danny.

‘It’s your line, man,’ says Craig.

‘Page thirty-two Dan,’ says Chris.

‘Oh yeah,’ says Danny, finding the page. He clears his throat and says his line, which is: ‘What’s happenin’!’

Everybody laughs a great deal and the reading continues. The first time this happened Hattie and I were out of the picture. We didn’t understand the long history Danny already had with the company. It would appear to the casual observer that Danny had no idea what was going on, he would smile and look around when it was his cue and Craig would do his line for him. Then put him in front of an audience and he is always on cue, always getting the laugh, or, as Danny would say, ‘Kicking comedy booty, guy.’

I read terribly that first day. I suddenly felt completely out of my depth. I was sitting around a table with a group of people who all knew each other well and who had been working in television for years. I had been working as a performer for years, but only with limited experience of TV.

I wasn’t even playing a human; I was playing a mechanoid called Kryten. I didn’t know what he was supposed to be, what he looked like, where he’d come from, why he was there. I didn’t know anything. At that time I’d never seen the episode in the second series where Kryten first appeared. At that time Kryten was played by David Ross who later became Talkie Toaster and who also put in a magnificent performance as the headmaster in Alan Bleasdale’s GBH. I read Kryten in my own voice and what were very funny lines came out about as amusing as dog poo. At the end of a marathon read, six half-hour scripts, all of which took longer than that to read, it was hard for me not to be a little despondent. It seemed like such a mammoth task ahead. All these thousands of words to learn, and I hadn’t written them.

This was the part that was so different for me. I had spent the previous ten years learning lines almost as I had written them. I had written everything I had ever performed except once. A play I was in at the Sheffield Crucible Theatre called The True Story of the Titanic. It was a sort of musical comedy satire thing, equating the sinking of the Titanic with Thatcher’s Britain.

I played about six different characters, had loads of lines to learn which were written by someone else[11]

and I found it very hard. The director would happily verify that I had trouble learning my lines. His name is Stephen Daldry. He was a scruffy git in those days, now he’s gone all posh and directs films in Hollywood. I keep seeing him on telly, being nominated and winning awards for amazing films and plays he’s directed. He dresses very smartly and has nice haircuts. But when he was trying to get me to do a dance piece and say lines at the same time, his abilities in coaxing a performance out of an actor were stretched to the limit. Maybe I helped him though, you know? Maybe after he’d been through this difficult experience with me, he was a stronger, better director. After seeing me trip over and forget my lines eight hundred times in rehearsal, every other actor would be a breeze to work with. To give myself a small break, I never blew it in a performance though. In that respect I’m like Danny: give me an audience and I can remember things my day-to-day brain would find utterly incomprehensible.

The play in Sheffield was performed by what I refer to as ‘proper actors’, these are people who’ve been to drama school and done proper acting training. People who have learned how to absorb lines, learned stagecraft, understand music and dance, can do proper singing. I was in a musical theatre group for five years, I just used to mouth along with the songs most of the time, then it looked like I was singing, but it sounded much better.

The cast of Red Dwarf, however, are not ‘proper actors’ in those terms. As I said, I came out of the Alternative Comedy brigade of the late seventies and early eighties. Craig Charles started life as a performance poet. Chris Barrie I first saw doing impressions in a late-night comedy club. Hattie does devastatingly funny deadpan comedy routines. Danny was in Cats, Starlight Express and loads of other musicals as a dancer. Danny has those proper dancer’s legs; you know, the ones with the massive calves that can spring him eight feet into the air.

That was my problem, before going to the read-through, I had reassured myself that I was working with a group of people who were more like me, not ‘proper actors’ but renegade comics who wouldn’t be able to read scripts well the first time. I was very wrong.

As soon as the read-through was over, everyone got up and started talking to each other. I went to the special BBC tea table, which all those rehearsal rooms have. As I was making myself some tea, Bethan Jones asked me if it would be alright to try my head on, as the first mask was ready. I agreed.

Rob and Doug came up to me and we talked about what Kryten should sound like. I said that I didn’t want him to be English because he was bound to sound like R2D2. Or was it C3PO? Anyway, the humanoid one who said, ‘Oh no, Master Luke!’ all the time. It would be so easy to say, ‘Oh no, Master Dave!’ and end up having a totally unoriginal robot on your hands. Rob smiled and smoked, Doug walked in little circles nodding and saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, no.’

‘What about a walk?’ said Rob. The walk. The moment I’d been dreading. When I first met Rob and Doug, weeks before, they’d been sitting down behind a table. I was showing them my full range of comedy walks, which they seemed to admire.

By the time of the read-through, I knew Doug had a false leg, due to an accident when he was a kid. His walk is obviously affected by this, so my desire to do a comedy wobbly robo-walk was somewhat hampered. I had done a great many comedy walks in my time, in fact, one kind reviewer had once written, ‘…Llewellyn’s funny walks put John Cleese to shame…’ Well, I never like reviews which compare one performer with another, and they certainly didn’t put John Cleese to shame. I mean, let’s face it, had John Cleese been in the audience that night, I don’t think he’d have got up out of his seat after seeing my funny walk and said, ‘That’s it, I’ll never perform again, I feel put to shame!’

My lack of desire to start comedy walking certainly wasn’t Doug’s fault, it’s painfully clear he didn’t give a toss about it. It was all my own inner middle-class guilt-ridden rubbish getting in the way.

The big problem with comedy walks is that they invariably mimic someone who is disabled in some way. It’s a problem with a lot of character comedy; you are often imitating someone who isn’t ‘normal’ in the dull, grey sense of the word. You are being someone who is a bit bonkers, or a tosser, or a sad old git. But comedy walks have a specific danger all of their own.

When on tour with The Joeys, during a ‘get-in’ at a theatre in Swansea, I did my Douglas Bader walk to pass the time and keep up the morale of my co-performers. Douglas Bader was a fighter pilot who lost both his legs in plane crashes but went on to learn to walk again. He had a very specific walk. It’s the only way you can walk if you keep both knees straight and don’t flex your ankles. You have to get all your movement from your lower back and pelvic girdle. A lot of men don’t think they’ve got a pelvic girdle, they think a girdle is a girly thing. But we do have them, which proves that all men are a bit girly anyway.

So there I was, doing my Douglas Bader walk across the stage, my fellow performers and road manager were egging me on, thinking it was all terribly clever and funny, then a charming old man came in at the back of the theatre and stood still for a moment. He called out, ‘Would you like some tea?’ We waved and said we’d love some, then I watched in horror as this man turned with great difficulty and walked out. He did a Douglas Bader walk, he had no legs, well, he had two false legs. He’d been watching me do my ‘funny walk’ probably thinking I was taking the piss. I felt, well, let’s say I flew over the pit of utter shame in a hang-glider with no canvas.

Pulling faces or gurning can be a dangerous occupation as well. Another kind reviewer once said, ‘Llewellyn’s facial gymnastics have to be seen to be believed’. I liked that one, facial gymnastics, nice one. Had that one put on the poster I can tell you. But there is a down side to facial gymnastics as well.

In one Joeys show there was a sketch about the Law Lords. It implied Britain’s top judges were like mummified relics from a bygone age. I played the mummy, which involved funny walks and a great deal of highly energetic facial gymnastics. One night in a theatre in Canterbury I think, we had a brilliant audience, half of which came from a local special school. They were amazing, loving every minute of the show and screaming for more. However, there was one guy in the front row who didn’t have a lot of control of his face and when I walked forward being the judge, I noticed him looking at me. As a three-thousand-year-old mummified judge I was distorting my face in an unnervingly similar way to him. I felt terrible. Then he burst out laughing and pointed at me. I didn’t take much comfort from this at the time, but on reflection, there is no reason on earth why my face shouldn’t have been as funny to him as it was to anyone else.

It’s a difficult area and one I’m useless at; I always seem to blow it by trying to be too careful. In fact, the year Mammon was running in Edinburgh I met a wonderful man called Jag Plah. Jag is an Indian stand-up comic who can only just stand up. He has been disabled from birth. He stumbles onto a stage, which takes some time, and advises the audience to ‘talk amongst themselves’ while he gets to the microphone. He then grabs the mike stand and drops his crutches, he looks at them lying on the floor and says, ‘Look at that, they’re useless without me.’

I learned a great deal from being with Jag, one of the main things being that if you ignore someone’s disability, you’re not being honest with them; you’re pretending there is nothing wrong. He would always confront able-bodied people’s discomfort head on. We once went out to eat in a restaurant in Edinburgh that had a steep flight of steps to the entrance. As we were leaving a young Canadian couple in tartan shirts were waiting to go in. As soon as they realised Jag was on crutches they looked away, I suppose in the belief that they would embarrass him with their stares. I could suddenly see what it must be like, to be studiously ignored by everyone who sees you.

Jag responded by saying, ‘Stand back, crip coming.’ The Canadian couple winced, to hear the term crip coming from someone like Jag obviously jangled their liberal nerves, but to ignore him was to be more offensive than calling him a ‘crip’. When Jag spoke, or walked, it was plainly clear that it was more effort for him than most other people. That was all. In every other respect Jag was a bog-standard, egotistical stand-up comic who leched after women. One difference was that he didn’t drink. He claimed in his comedy routine that if he drank alcohol he felt ‘completely legless’.

I should have been super cool about Doug’s leg but I didn’t know him then, and felt very uncomfortable. I decided to go for broke though and suggested I could base Kryten’s walk on a kid I was at school with. He had muscular dystrophy, a wasting nerve disease, but at the age of fifteen he was still able to walk. He was the hero of our class mainly because he was so funny. Kids can be really horrible about that sort of thing, but for some reason our class had really taken this boy under their wing. If he answered a teacher’s question, he would put his hand up by swinging his shoulders and flicking his arm up, then holding his elbow with the other hand. This style of attracting the teacher’s attention quickly caught on, and soon we were all doing it. I think it had a beneficial influence on the whole class, we were the bad lads of the school, in the problem class, but because putting your hand up to answer a question was such fun, we started to pay more attention. This boy’s walk was also very peculiar. He would flick his legs forward with a twist of his hips, sort of like Douglas Bader with rubber knees. When I perambulated across the floor like this for Rob and Doug, they clearly liked what they saw. Doug walked around in a circle nodding and saying, ‘No, no, yeah, no, yeah.’ Rob smoked another five cigarettes and said, ‘Very funny, Bobby.’

Ed Bye wanted to know what sort of voice I was going to use. I searched my brains for all the daft comic characters I’d done over the years: Toby, the chinless wonder upper-class twit with buck teeth; Sir George Sprout, the gout-ridden old land owner; the boy Tom, ancient rustic know-all; Steve Crèche Ponytail, the massively right-on non-sexist man. None of them fitted the bill.

I tried my Dutch hippie accent, then I did my Scandinavian. It was a character I’d used in my stand-up comedy set, who talked about having sex on a bean bag in a stripped-pine living room with a Janis Joplin poster on the wall. Oh, it was very droll at the time, but it doesn’t work out of context. This accent tickled Ed; it has a daft sing-song quality to it, a charming innocence or stupidity, depending on your viewpoint. As I did the walk and the voice, the general consensus seemed to be settling on Kryten being a Swedish mechanoid. Very clean and tidy, very Swedish, a sort of Volvo robot with side impact bars.

It felt good, I seemed to have cracked it, then Rob and Doug started walking around, standing in a huddle, smoking and talking. I didn’t really notice this, I was busy perfecting my walk, watching myself in the large mirror attached to one wall. Just as the character was starting to work for me Rob walked up and said, ‘The Scandinavian stuff.’

I said, ‘Yeah, it really feels good.’

‘No,’ said Rob, ‘it’s going to drive people insane. That voice really gets to you after a while. What about American?’

‘Yeah, American, no, yeah, yeah,’ said Doug. That was okay, I had spent time in America, it made more sense in some ways, a robot was far more likely to come from America than Sweden. You can see how strongly I held on to my opinions, I don’t swim with the tide, I stick to my beliefs, sometimes, for a bit, as long as everyone likes me.

I did my Californian, my bland Midwest, they were all a bit dull. Then I explained I’d spent time in Vancouver a few years before, having sex with a blonde Canadian woman in funny positions in various natural woodland settings. Not that the sex was important to the accent, although her accent was great. It was a sort of American Swedish. Canadians have a Scandinavian sing-song quality, and West-coast Canadians have a very particular vowel sound. The closest comparison to this accent I can think of is Loyd Grossman, who is actually from Boston, Massachusetts, but who can twist vowels the rest of us didn’t know existed.

I tried the walk again, now with the distorted Canadian/Bostonian accent: ‘Eouo, helleo thar Mustur Dayvid Suur, Iy hayve youuour breakfust, just as yououo orduered it.’

That was it, in some ways, Kryten, as I portray him, was born at that moment. Obviously when I finally had the whole costume on, the walk changed, the arm movements were defined by what I could and couldn’t do in the costume, but the voice is more or less the same.

However, there is no rest for the egotistical, and no sooner was I riding the crest of a comedy wave in the rehearsal room, than Bethan Jones led me into the little side room, sat me on a chair and slicked back my hair. This is the first stage in the make-up procedure; I was having the first test of Kryten’s head.

Next came the bald cap, like a thin bathing cap that is stuck to the skin with spirit gum all around the hairline to hold it in place. Then, the worst bit, the mask, a one-piece moulded balaclava of latex foam, was pulled over my head like a giant split condom. First they glued the rear section on to the back of my head. Then, starting with the forehead, they glued the mask to my face. Glue all over my nose, cheeks, lips, chin, neck and ears. In fact more or less everywhere except my eyelids.

I looked in a mirror and saw a very odd spectacle. The mask was unpainted and looked the same colour as a plaster you find floating in a swimming pool. A sort of dirty grey beige colour. The skin around my eyes looked very dark, so I could still, as it were, see myself under the rubber. Rob, Ed and Doug came in and stood around looking at it. Bethan Jones explained everything about the mask’s difficulties to them.

Rob smiled and smoked, Doug said, ‘Yeah, great, yeah, yeah.’

Ed Bye said, ‘Well chap, what’s it like?’

I don’t know what I said. I think we discussed the theory of irony. I said that it was ironic how when I’d first met them I was worried about being recognised for being a robot, worried about getting typecast. Here I was, so well covered in prosthetic foam even my own mother wouldn’t recognise me.

After about twenty minutes Bethan Jones removed the mask and I was back to normal. Even that early on there was a huge relief that washed over me when the thing finally came off. I washed my face and felt it carefully with my hands. It felt new and different, even after such a short time. I made a mental note of the amount of days I had before the next mask was being applied ready for the first day's filming, which was to take place in Liverpool.

Peter Biddle.

Chapter 3

The beginning of recording the third series of Red Dwarf was a difficult time for me because I was already committed to performing in a new play I had written, to be premiered at the Edinburgh Festival, 1989. The play was called Onan. It was an idea that I had been knocking around for a long time, and it finally came to fruition when I co-wrote it with John McKay.[12]

Onan was the story of two men who set up the first non-sexist, non-racist, right-on pornographic magazine. The magazine was called Onan, named after the biblical figure who spilled his seed on the ground. I discovered you can say ‘spilled his seed’ on radio and television, however, if you say ‘wanker’ people seem to get upset. Funny old world. Anyway, the play dealt with all the thorny issues surrounding the production and consumption of pornography, but it dealt with them in a humorous and witty way. We hoped.

When I wasn’t doing read-throughs and costume fittings for Red Dwarf, I was busy rehearsing Onan in an old school building in Hackney.

John and I both appeared in the play and our first night try-out took place in the Soho Poly Theatre in London. Considering it was a comedy the laughs were few and far between. It felt very leaden and worthy, the big audience were crammed into their seats in this tiny basement theatre. Afterwards John and I were both pretty depressed, we had both had successful shows the previous year in Edinburgh, now we were going up with what felt like a bit of a dog.

Everyone who saw the show in London was very nice about it, ‘It’s fantastic guys, it really says a lot,’ said someone who looked faintly bored.

‘I really laughed,’ said someone else, without cracking a smile. We were also in a bit of trouble because in the normal course of events we’d have had time to jiggle the play around a bit, between the first performance and our arrival in Edinburgh. Now, due to my filming schedule, this wasn’t possible. The day after this glamour-free première, I drove to Liverpool and checked in at the hotel.

I was greeted in the bar by the full complement of Red Dwarf: the sound engineers, the cameramen, the vision mixers, lighting technicians, boom operators, the rest of the cast, Rob and Doug. The whole lot of us took over the corner bar of the hotel. Craig walked in and was greeted at every table he passed. Everyone in Liverpool knew Craig. He implied to me that half the people who knew him wanted to kill him, so I moved myself slightly further away.

We all went out for a meal, which considering there were about eighty people in all, took hours of careful organisation. Craig and Danny went off clubbing. I had to go to bed. This is the story of my life, everyone else goes off clubbing, I go to bed.

The reason I went to bed was made apparent in the dark hours of early morning. My bedside phone went, I answered it, a Liverpudlian woman’s voice said, ‘This is your early morning call, Mr Llewellyn.’ It had started; this was my first day proper on Red Dwarf.

Half an hour later I was sitting in a make-up chair in the temporary BBC Liverpool studios, which were on the site of the Liverpool Garden Festival, which was on the site of the old docks, which were on the site of the older docks, which were on the site of a forest probably. Nothing is permanent on earth, nothing can be conserved, change is the only constant. There we go, that’s the sort of paper-thin philosophy I filled my head with as I sat watching Bethan and Gill put my make-up on.

This first day I was sitting in the make-up chair for something like six hours. They were trying it out, testing different colours and powders, painting the mask once it was stuck on me. I’ll say it just once because it’s boring, but the masks are extremely uncomfortable to wear. It’s hard to describe, and I’ve tried to do it many times. I’ve said things like, it’s like wearing someone else’s old socks over your face all day, with a local anaesthetic, like a dentist gives you, and then sitting in a sauna. It’s also like having mud slapped on your face and then dried so it goes all tight. What it’s really like is having your whole head covered with prosthetic foam rubber; there is no way of knowing without doing it. It is hot, it is uncomfortable, it does make me a bit irritable, and in fact I’m a bit irritable now writing about it. Just leave me alone will you, don’t stand so close. Get off my case. Jesus!

Okay, there, that’s it; I’ll really try not to go on about the mask. It may pop up occasionally, but I’ll try and keep it to a minimum.

It’s that first day; I’ll never forget it as long as I live. The irony warning light was on red alert. Six hours in make-up, I finally stand up and stretch the stretch of the un-dead. I had a hyper-stretch; my buttocks were as numb as a monk’s cassock snake, as they say in Australia.

I went into the costume department and was met by the lanky form of Howard Burden, the genius behind all the Red Dwarf cossies. I have to admit there have been times, maybe as a shard of fibre glass has wormed its way into my anatomy, or my shoulders have ached because of the armour I’m wearing, or when my core body temperature has gone so high I’ve seen Russian helicopters hovering above me ready to pour sand on my head, I have been known to call Howard things other than a genius. But it’s all done with great love and understanding because what you see works very well, and as we troopers in showbiz always say, ‘That’s what’s important’. Actually, that’s bull, what we really say is, ‘I really can’t work in this cossie love, it’s sheer agony!’ On the first day I got zipped, buckled, pop-riveted, velcroed and strapped into my costume. For three or four minutes it’s very comfortable, then I try and sit down and my Plastazote buttocks come flying off. I walked around in it for a while, visited the set where Craig was filming. It was incredible; the remains of a crashed space ship could be seen stranded on top of an iceberg. It was all made of polystyrene and bits of old hardboard, but it looked great. They were filming the inserts for the episode titled Marooned. Craig was stumbling about in the snow being buffeted by a howling blizzard. This blizzard was created by an old Volkswagen car engine on a stand, attached to a gigantic propeller. It can create enough wind to blow you off your feet. It worked. Craig went flying very effectively. He was only too willing to do his own stunts.

‘Hey, Ed, how about I come out of the door and dive out,’ said Craig, wiping the fake snow from his hair, ‘and you know, like, land on me head, that’d look good.’

‘Yes,’ said Ed brightly, ‘and you’d also be dead, which would leave me looking like a right wally.’

‘Hey, Eddy, man,’ said Craig, ‘I can land on me head and no harm done. I’m a Scouser man, you know what I’m saying.’

‘Yes, I know exactly what you’re saying, and you’re completely mad.’

Just as the wind machine was getting ready to blow Craig through the supporting wall of the studio, lunch was called. Another bit of standard Red Dwarf irony. I had spent six and a half hours getting ready, and then I had to sit still for an hour and do nothing while everyone had lunch. I don’t blame people for having lunch. I think it is their most fundamental human right to have lunch. It’s just ironic, or Sod’s Law, that it always seems to happen that I am ready just before lunch. I went into the Portakabin that was my dressing room and sat down and looked in the mirror. The mask was extraordinary, it was impossible to see where the mask stopped and my face began. I looked at myself for a long time.

That moment was the one and only time I was terrified of Kryten. It was the shock of being alone, looking in a mirror and not seeing you looking back. Someone else, some square-headed dork with chiselled features was looking back at me. I looked closer, it was someone else, it wasn’t me there. My heart rate went off the scale, I felt dizzy and nauseous, I felt as if someone had spiked my tea with a harsh hallucinogenic drug. I was, as they say in Australia, ‘off my face’. I looked away from the mirror and tried to compose my thoughts, I really felt like I was going mad. I was very scared. I stood up, I had to get away from the mirror, but the movement of my standing caught my eye in the mirror and I looked back. There he was again, that bloke with no hair and a cuboid head. It was horrible.

I walked out of the Portakabin, through the makeshift dining area and into the car park outside. I walked past people who were working on the show, technicians and office staff, and they all ignored me. They had no idea I’d just had the fright of my life. They couldn’t tell if I was happy or sad, or angry or upset, or scared even. To them, I was the poor sod in the rubber mask. It made me super-aware of how much we can give away with our faces when we think people won’t notice.

We are all, unconsciously most of the time, very good at ‘reading’ people’s faces, we can usually tell at a glance what sort of mood someone we know is in. If you remove that element, people start to cut you off, start to remove you from their mind's eye, take less notice of you. Is this what it is like being disabled or having a terrible facial disfigurement? You wander through a world where you are very aware that you are being cut out of the picture.

When I was about sixteen, I was going around the Museum of Mankind in London, and I saw a man who had a hole in the side of his face the size of an orange. You could see the side of his jaw, his teeth, his tongue. The poor man must have suffered some terrible accident, or had commando surgery for cancer. Whatever it was, the result was very shocking. I was torn, as I’m sure most people are, and I tried not to look at him. I wanted to stare, but I had been taught that staring was rude, so I looked away. I don’t know what to do in a situation like that, whatever your reaction, it’s wrong.

‘Cretin,’ said a voice with a French accent. ‘Do you want a cup of tea, Cretin?’

It was Sylvie the company runner, she was a very small Frenchwoman who could not pronounce the name Kryten, and settled on Cretin, which means the same in French. She looked me in the eye when she asked me if I wanted tea, then she gently reached up and touched my rubber face.

‘It must be very ’ot,’ she said.

I nodded. It was very ’ot. I’d only been in it seven hours and I was parched. It was interesting, however, that some people were not at all intimidated by the mask, and some were so horrified that they looked away. Sylvie’s radio crackled into life, asking her to go into the studio.

She replied, ‘I am making tea for Cretin,’ which meant the whole crew heard her call me Cretin. It was naturally only a matter of time before the rest of the cast were calling me Cretin, especially Danny, who found it peculiarly amusing. Danny’s laugh could easily win the International Full-Bodied Laugh Grand Prix.

I got a cup of tea from Sylvie, and then found I couldn’t drink it. It was like trying to drink after you’ve been to the dentist and your lips are completely numb. I couldn’t feel my own lips, but immediately the tea touched my prosthetic lips, they absorbed the fluid and tasted like I was sucking someone else’s flannel in the bath. Did you ever do that as a kid? Suck your flannel? I did. My mum was always telling me not to, but at least it was my own flannel; I have no idea why I did it. But imagine doing that, thinking it was your flannel and feeling quite happy about it, and then realising it was someone else’s flannel.

Lunch was supplied by location caterers - my favourite form of eating. I will often agree to doing a job if I hear the production is being made on location. It means one of those big trucks will be there with the two men in white who serve amazing food in the middle of nowhere.

Here’s a tip: if you see a film crew near your street try and beg, borrow or steal a windproof jacket, get a peak cap with the name of a TV show or film on the front, and join the queue. The food is free and very nice. If anyone asks who you are, which is very doubtful, tell them you’re from a company with a TV-type name, Telly Techno, Telly Graphic, and you’re on set to talk to Nick. There is always a technician called Nick on every crew. I’ve done this many times around north London. Of course it does help if you know one of the lighting or sound people, but I have managed to get a free lunch from location productions where I didn’t know a soul.

There was a long queue leading up to the step of the location catering truck. I was salivating, I’d missed breakfast, I’d been sitting still for hours, my body was pleading with me for some form of low-level pleasure. Food, anything, an old carrot, just something different to the stifling tightness.

I chose the roast beef with the cauliflower, peas and roast potatoes. I made my way from the truck to the double-decker bus which doubles as a dining room. I sat down and looked at this plate of food. How on earth was I going to get it into my mouth?

I chopped everything up small and tried to get it past my lips without touching them. My prosthetic lips tasted so horrible by now I didn’t want them to spoil my lunch. I soon found that by tipping my head backwards, I could more or less drop food into my open mouth from above. After I had done this a few times, I looked up and saw Craig looking at me sympathetically.

‘You poor sod,’ he said. I did feel pretty miserable, I stopped eating before I finished my plate and stared at what remained sadly.

‘Cretin, they want you in wardrobe,’ said Sylvie. So that was it. I couldn’t really eat. After slipping into my costume (I use the term ‘slipping’ in a comedy way) I had to go to make-up again to be touched up before going on the set.

‘You’ve ruined your lips!’ said Bethan Jones, viewing the damage all that tea and roast beef sauce had done. I was there another thirty minutes being re-glued, repaired and powdered, then finally, I entered the studio to do my first shot for Red Dwarf.

In the story, the Cat (Danny John-Jules) was out searching for Lister and Rimmer on Starbug, which had crash-landed and was marooned on an ice planet. The Cat had harnessed Kryten to a sledge and the scene demanded that I pull this sledge, with Danny and a load of provisions, across a snowy landscape in a blizzard. He had to shout ‘Mush! Mush!’ as if I were a pack of dogs, and lash me with a bull-whip. Danny loved this scene. I was not so keen. For a start, when I was tied up to the sledge, I couldn’t get a grip in all the fake snow. So Peter Wragg tied another rope to the sledge, and somehow managed to lie down on the floor and pull the sledge for me. That would have been cool, but then they brought around the wind machine, the one they’d been blowing Craig around with in the morning. To get a good blizzard effect, they would start up the wind machine and then pour Dreft washing soap flakes into the wind.

Ed arranged the camera and they started the wind machine. As soon as it was up to full blast, which was deafening, they started the blizzard effect. Within seconds, due to intense eye pain, I realised that my eye blink ability was severely restricted. The make-up was so heavy around my eyes that I really couldn’t close them. Super painful shards of Dreft mild and gentle soap powder stung my forced open eyeballs, I grimaced and tried to cover my face, I couldn’t see or hear anything, I finally turned away from the shot and someone killed the wind machine. I looked at Danny through soap vision; he was sitting on the sledge, in a big fur coat. He was smiling from cheek to cheek and saying ‘Mush! Mush!’

‘No, the shot doesn’t work chaps,’ said Ed Bye. Now there’s irony for you. For the next hour or so we tried various different combinations of me pulling the sledge through various mixtures of fake snow. All of these combinations involved Danny sitting on the sledge going ‘Mush! Mush!’ In the final broadcast version of Marooned, none, I repeat none, of these shots were used. I thought that warranted a special irony warning light on the giant heavenly dashboard, what I didn’t see was the upcoming irony klaxon horn, which was warning about the following day.

Now, I have promised not to go on about the mask and the heat and discomfort, and I won’t, but this day continues to hold the record for being the most ironic of all.

We moved to another hotel in Manchester, a very splendid place called the Midland. Not that I noticed its splendour much when I woke up. Five-thirty in the morning in Manchester is not a glamorous time, but what is glamour anyway? A fleeting feeling that leaves no trace. No, this had no glamour, sitting in the back of a taxi that smelt strongly of that special taxi air freshener. The sort that’s in the little cardboard holder that hangs from the rear-view mirror and feels as if it’s peeling a layer of skin off your nostrils.

‘Telly is it?’ said the driver.

‘Yah, actually it’s a series called Red Dwarf, I play a robot,’ I said, trying to sound like an actor.

‘Never heard of it,’ said the driver. He wiggled his way through the back streets of Manchester and dropped me by the side of the BBC’s studios on Oxford Road.

I stumbled into the BBC building and headed for the canteen, I knew how hungry I was going to get so I thought I’d better stoke up. The canteen was shut. (Irony warning light on orange.) I went to the make-up room and sat down. I don’t want to describe the process that next took place for two very good reasons. One, it’s boring, and two, it brings it all back as I write it, and I don’t have my prosthetic counsellors[13]

here to help me.

Suffice it to say, six hours later I was laughing and joshing around in the costume department. I got changed into my costume and was then transported by cab to the Midland Hotel where we were recording in a gym. Irony warning light to darker orange.

In the episode called Body Swap, Lister and Rimmer had done a deal whereby Rimmer was allowed to have a go in Lister’s body for a while. The scene we were recording was meant to show Rimmer exercising Lister’s body by sitting in a jacuzzi, reading a women body-builders magazine and smoking a huge cigar. I entered with a huge selection of food for him to gorge himself on, I was then meant to light a candle with my finger and serve the food.

Okay, by now the irony warning light was on red, but the klaxon hadn’t quite gone off. Had this been a US peacekeeping force as opposed to my irony control, the F-111’s would have been in the air, missiles armed and ready.

I noticed when I first arrived that the crew were all wearing shorts and T-shirts. Of course, this wasn’t a gym. It might be called a gym but really it was a sports and leisure centre. That meant it was a place where fat businessmen went to shower down and sit around sweating for a bit after a heavy night’s drinking and shagging.

‘Morning, Robert.’ It was Peter Wragg standing next to me, holding a glove, a gas bottle and a lot of wires. He started to fit the glove on, run the wires and the gas tube up my sleeve and out behind my head.

‘It’s just an electric spark cigarette lighter,’ said Peter. ‘Bog-standard, we’ll be back here, and on the cue, we’ll fire it up. A flame will come out of the end of your finger, you light the candle and blow the flame on your finger out, then we turn the gas off.’

‘Great, that’s fine, yeah,’ I said, which is liberal speak for, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to die but I don’t want to be rude to this nice man.’

Ed Bye was chirpy and happy as usual, ‘Alright chap?’ he said.

‘Bit hot,’ I said, and then felt guilty for complaining.

‘It’s bloody boiling in here,’ said Ed. ‘You must be roasting alive in there. This won’t take long.’

Irony klaxon horn sounding for the first time, just one blast, but I should have noticed. Craig came in, wearing a pair of swimmers and a dressing gown, looking truly like the Crown Prince of Packet.[14]

‘Hey, Krytie, you’re looking good man,’ he said as he shed his dressing gown and dropped into the pool. Craig was immediately in his element, looking at pictures of highly muscled semi-naked women, smoking a cigar and lounging in a pool.

We went for a take. I had to push a trolley laden with food and not trip up over the wires and tubes strapped to my back. Craig was mouthing his lines; Chris would dub them on later. I had to guess when my cue was by watching his lips. Then I presented the food and went to light the candle.

Peter saw his cue and hit the button. A sharp jolt of pain shot up my arm, I jerked, then there was another.

‘I’m being electrocuted!’ I said, not noticing there was a flame coming out of my finger. I waved this flaming digit around for a moment; it didn’t seem to want to go out. ‘I am going to die,’ I thought, ‘I am going to burst into flames and die. Not while I’m trying to save a family in a burning building, not heroically, but while making a British comedy TV show. How ironic.’

Peter Wragg saved my life by blowing the little flame out. The fact that he saved my life was a mixed blessing I thought, it meant I was still covered from head to foot in rubber and plastic, standing in a sauna in a Manchester hotel, and we hadn’t shot a thing.

‘Don’t worry chaps,’ said Ed Bye, ‘it’s only a rehearsal.’

After they had stripped me down, we worked out that I was sweating so much under my costume that I had shorted out the wires leading to the gas nozzle. We tried the shot six or seven times, each time I got an electric shock, or the gas didn’t light, or I blew my lines because I talked over Craig, or the sound of the jacuzzi was too much.

I eventually went a bit dizzy and was taken to the exit, where it was much cooler. I can remember Paul Jackson being there, the man who’d got me this job. He’d come to see how things were going, ‘How’s it going, Robert?’ he said.

‘It’s fine,’ I lied, ‘I’m just a bit hot.’

I think if people could have seen my face at that time, I would have been made to lie down. It would have looked the colour of a baboon’s arse, but it was Kryten’s face, calm and smooth, kind and sympathetic, in a cuboid, novelty condom sort of way.

The rest of that day is a bit hazy, what we discovered afterwards was that if a human body sweats that much, you not only lose water (I was drinking two big bottles of mineral water a day, and not urinating once), but you also start losing essential salts and mineral things. I don’t know exactly what happens, but what it means is you feel dizzy and tired and a bit sick.

Of course the final irony of ironies was that none of this footage was ever used, the scene was rewritten and done in a studio. This is the sort of irony where you need to learn breathing exercises and chant little Buddhist mantras to yourself, otherwise you go mad.

Bethan turned up the next day with a box of diarrhoea salts that you give little kids in Somalia when they’ve got the runs. Helps rehydrate them. I felt guilty because I thought I was depriving some poor kid in the desert, which is a classic, self-centred, middle-class, guilt-ridden thing to do.

The next three days were spent in various locations around Manchester, filming inserts for Backwards. This included Chris Barrie and I walking backwards through the Piccadilly shopping arcade dressed as a mechanoid and a hologram, and an unimaginable number of people utterly failed to notice us. You can see on the footage they used that most of the busy Tuesday morning shoppers were totally oblivious of the fact that they had just walked past two men, one who looked a bit like Captain Scarlet with an H stuck on his forehead, the other with a square rubber head and a shiny silver body, who was walking backwards. We had to walk backwards, and I didn’t understand this at the time, because when the film was run forwards, we would be walking forwards and all the shoppers would be walking backwards.

After one of these long days, I went back to our hotel, where we’d done the make-up, got cleaned off, had a shower and drove to Edinburgh. That was a mistake because I was utterly exhausted and couldn’t really see, but being a soft, southern bastard, I thought: ‘Manchester’s in the North, so is Scotland, so Edinburgh can’t be far.’

As I drove for hour after sleepy hour along near-deserted A roads across the borders, often driving with my head out of the window to try and keep awake, I realised I was very wrong.

I got to the little flat I’d rented in Edinburgh at about two-thirty in the morning to be greeted with tea and toast from John McKay, my writing partner and co-actor in Onan. He filled me in on the gossip and told me what was happening with our show, which was due to open the following day.

John also wrote the Channel 4 sitcom, My Dead Dad.

Prosthetic counsellors are specially trained psychologists who help actors who have suffered extensive full-face prosthetics in their lives. They first started research in this important area after members of the Planet of the Apes cast went barking mad.

The Prince of Packet is a popular nickname for Mr Charles. This is due to the mildly shocking size of his lower member or tummy banana, otherwise known as packet.

Chapter 4

The run of Onan went extremely well, after a difficult start, when the audience clearly didn’t know if we were doing a comedy or a tragedy. Once we got into our stride, we flew through the season, got rave reviews, had lunch, stood in the bar, laughed like actors, which means throwing your head back and making a lot of noise. We didn’t make any money even though we were sold out from day one, we were packing them in, people were fighting for tickets. I used to go into the box office and hear, ‘Gimme a ticket to Onan yah bastard!’ Punch, thump, crash. ‘Get off, that’s mine you rotten pig.’ Smash, tinkle. ‘Calm down everyone, why don’t you go and see Paul Merton?’

‘'Cos we want to see Onan!’ Thump, kerunch!

Well, it wasn’t quite like that, but it was fun, and I forgot all about rubber masks and time travel. I met Hattie every now and then. She was doing very late-night stand-up comedy in the same room as I was working in, but that was the only contact I had with Red Dwarf.

Then I got a bit of glamour. I mean, it’s sad isn’t it, but every now and then a bit of glamour does wonders. After the final show of Onan, the audience cheered and clapped, we bowed, ran off stage like actors do. I changed, washed my face, ran out of the front door of the Assembly Rooms, got in a taxi, got taken to the airport and flew back to London. As the plane climbed and circled around Edinburgh I could clearly make out the Scott Monument, Newtown, George Street and the Assembly Rooms. I could see the roof of the Assembly Rooms where I had climbed, illegally with a lot of drunk comics, to watch the fireworks display.

Considering I have never lived in the city of Edinburgh, I have spent an enormous amount of time there over the years and I feel attached to the place. I can walk around the streets and look up at windows and remember, ‘Ah, I had sex in that room once.’ Or, ‘Ah, that’s where that party was where Jenny LeCoat fell on my head.’ Or, ‘That’s the pub where I met Jasper Carrot.’ It’s sad really isn’t it, to admit that you have those sort of thoughts as you wander about; they’re very personal thoughts but I thought I’d share them with you.

I sat back in my seat and felt a bit glamorous, and a bit sad. I think glamour and sadness go together very well as an emotional cocktail, like loneliness and self-pity, or love and happiness. I was sad because I was leaving my girlfriend Judy Pascoe and a lot of my friends in Edinburgh, and now as I flew south, it felt like such a sudden parting. I’d barely had time to say goodbye to John McKay, who I’d been working so closely with for the previous three months. Plus I was missing the last day of the festival, where everyone walks around with a hangover and reminisces about what went on during the previous three weeks.

Plus I was missing the big benefit gig, on the last Sunday of the festival. I had been involved in that for the previous four years or so, it was a great show, more like a party for the performers, with the added benefit of a huge audience. In earlier years the benefits were for the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, but then when there were democratic elections in Nicaragua, and the conservative opposition to the Sandinistas had a landslide victory, with a little matter of the aid of millions of US dollars, the glamour went out of the Sandinistas’ rebel cause. So the benefit became one for the Terrence Higgins Trust. Okay, now it’s easy to be critical of benefits and what they do, reviving flagging rock stars' careers, etc., but for all the free publicity it gave to a lot of the performers, it did raise a fair sized wedge of cash.

Anyway, I was missing all that as I sat thirty thousand feet up and tucked into my British Midland chilled chicken roll. The man in the seat in front of me turned around and asked me, ‘Are you the bloke that was doing that play about porn?’

‘Well, it wasn’t about porn, as such,’ I said defensively. ‘It was about a couple of left-wing, right-on, non-sexist men who set up a pornographic magazine.’

‘Yeah, the play about porn, because it’s already been done,’ he said. ‘Look at this.’

He handed me a copy of Forum magazine, ‘That’s really what you were talking about isn’t it.’

I argued with him, I said, ‘What we were trying to say with the play was more about the state of politics in the country as a whole than a direct commentary on the role pornography has to play in society, as a whole, across the board, at this point in time, in any way, shape or form.’

I flicked through the magazine; I’d never actually looked through a Forum before. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no porno virgin. I’d seen it all, I had to do the research for the play, the trouble was I started the research when I was thirteen. But Forum had never interested me, there weren’t enough pictures for a start, I handed the magazine back to the guy and tried to sleep. Of course that was a bit futile as the flight is only forty minutes and we were coming into land.

Red Dwarf rehearsals proper started the following day, in Acton. The first episode we recorded was Marooned, which meant that Hattie, Danny and I had virtually nothing to do. It’s one of my favourite episodes, not just because I’m not in it,[15]

I just think it has some of the funniest lines from the series in it.

Lister: Are you saying I’ve got a big bum?

Rimmer: Big? It’s like two badly parked Volkswagens.

Danny, Hattie and I spent quite a lot of time in the BBC canteen as Chris and Craig learned reams of lines. The BBC canteen is on the top floor of the building and on any given day in here, you can see the stars. Ahem. You can see a few actors who are in a few BBC sitcoms. The actors from You Rang M’Lord? are all dressed as if they are about to go and play golf, which is no doubt what they do. The people from Blackadder all look professionally depressed, which is probably how we all looked too, that being the trendy look for our generation.

During lunch break, Craig and Chris would join us and we devised this thing called a luvvie-ometer, which would sound when we spotted a major league ‘luvvie’ entering the room. Luvviedom is a very specific complaint that it is horrifyingly easy to catch, which is why the Blackadder and Red Dwarf actors appear so morose. A miserable countenance seems to be the best way to counteract luvvieness. A luvvie is always pleased to see everybody, always ‘up’ always ‘exhausted’ (i.e. working a lot) and always has a string of anecdotes a mile long … which have … beautifully timed pauses … and exquisitely timed delivery. They also never have a point or a punchline at the end of their stories. Merely a raised eyebrow and a knowing expression. The end of a long and dull anecdote is when most actors realise they need writers.

I know of very few performers who have not been struck down with Luvviedom at some time, I know I’ve had it, try as I might to avoid it.

‘Hello there, Robert, how are you?’ says a very nice floor manager I worked with a year before.

‘Oh God,’ I say, looking to the heavens, ‘utterly exhausted,’ head shake, ‘really it’s because I’m crap,’ stare at person and nod vigorously, ‘I’m a crap actor, I shouldn’t be allowed in here.’

The nice floor manager knows the score and responds thusly. ‘You’re a very funny actor, I saw your show in Edinburgh, it was excellent.’

‘Oh, that’s very kind, but anyway, no, I’m shagged. Utterly drained, but it’s really nice to see you, how are you … oh, there’s Ben (Elton) I’d better say hi.’ Walk walk walk … ‘Hi Ben.’

‘Do I know you?’ says Ben Elton. ‘Guards, take this man away!’

No, that’s not true, I don’t know many famous people, but I do know Ben Elton. Sort of. Well, can I truly say I know anyone? Do we even know ourselves? Rarely. Anyway, Ben used to do his set before The Joeys in salubrious gigs like Chats Palace in Hackney and the Covent Garden Community Centre. He’s a very nice man, and there’s an end to it. I’m not going to do some big luvvie number about me and Ben going way back, because it’s not true.

During our time at Acton we would rehearse for three days, then have a technical run-through, which is where all the crew would watch, then we’d climb aboard a coach which would drive us to Manchester, we’d check into the Midland Hotel and I’d generally go to bed.[16] Not so the rest of the cast. They would imbibe fermented vegetable products and discuss the issues of the day. On the rare occasions when I didn’t have to get up the following morning at five-thirty, I would sit, with a long glass of mineral water, and join in the hectic banter.

‘What’s happenin’, guy?’ says Danny.

‘Goin’ clubbin’, man,’ says Craig.

‘Kicking,’ says Danny.

‘What are we drinking chaps?’ says Ed Bye.

‘Mine’s a Bud,’ says Chris.

‘I’ll just have a mineral water, with lemon and ice,’ I say.

‘Wimp,’ says Craig and jumps on me for no obvious reason. Suddenly three very smartly dressed black men would enter the hotel bar escorted by four or five drop-dead-beautiful women, and Craig and Danny would go off clubbing, which I assumed had something to do with sex in interesting positions with people of a like mind, which is why they all joined a club, but that could just be me.

There was one memorable occasion when I had already been woken by a rude alarm call, got semi-dressed, stumbled out of bed and into the lift, got out on the ground floor to be met by Craig and Danny who had just come back from clubbing, and seemed to have enjoyed themselves greatly.

Craig and Danny’s energy never ceased to amaze me. If I’d stayed up all night drinking, dancing and doing other repetitive body movements in the close proximity of another person, I would need considerable medical attention for at least a week. This would have to be followed up by a prolonged period of counselling, therapy and the love and understanding of my friends and family.

Craig would sit down on a make-up chair next to me, I’d ask him how he was, he’d take a puff on his cigarette and say, ‘Bit rough, man.’ A bit rough! If I’d done what he’d done I’d be dead.

Our two days in Manchester were pretty intense. The first day in the studio was where we pre-recorded all the complicated technical stuff, the second day was spent rehearsing with the camera and sound crew, and then recording the remainder of the show in front of a live audience.

A live audience. It never occurred to me to be nervous about this. I had spent the previous ten years in front of live audiences virtually every night of the week, but they weren’t live Red Dwarf audiences. As I entered the back of the studio in Manchester on my first live Red Dwarf recording, the buzz from the audience was extraordinary.

Paul Jackson[17]

went out to warm them up, which was a bit like warming up a car which has just driven a hundred miles. This audience was running hot. Paul was very good, he cracked a few rude jokes and we were introduced one by one.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, as Rimmer, Mr Chris Barrie.’ Huge, deafening applause, whistling, whooping.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, as Lister, Mr Craig Charles.’ Stupendous hysterical rapture.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, as the Cat—’ no more could be heard as Danny pirouetted into view.

‘As Holly the computer, please welcome Hattie Hayridge.’ Very interested polite clapping, with the semi-audible audience thought of, ‘Oooh, so that’s what the new Holly looks like.’

‘As Kryten the mechanoid, Mr Robert Llewellyn.’ Polite smattering of semi-supportive clapping. The audience thinking ‘Bloody hell, what does he look like?’

The recording took place, the warm-up man kept the audience from flagging between takes. Every week Craig would walk up to this man, take the microphone from him and say to the audience: ‘You know who this guy is don’t you?’ The man would buckle over in dramatic embarrassment. ‘You know who he is, I’ll tell you, he’s Ronald McDonald. He’s the bloke in that fucking clown outfit.’

Craig would then give the warm-up man the microphone and we’d continue the show. To give him his due, he never took umbrage at the constant ribbing he received from the cast; it became part of the evening’s entertainment.

After the recording I would head straight to make-up, everyone else headed straight for the bar. By the time I was stripped, oiled, pummelled, powdered and cleaned off, I would run to the bar just in time for a quick orange juice before getting into the bus and heading back to London.

The journey back to London was often very rowdy, everyone except Mike Agnew, the floor manager, was high from doing the show. Mike would have worked so absurdly hard for the previous two days, he would flop down on the long back seat of the bus and be completely oblivious of the noise surrounding him. We would have videos of Star Trek playing, Craig would be roaming the coach looking for cigarettes, cans of beer or trouble, Danny would be holding court about how much Pavarotti earned.

‘For just one night, guy,’ he would say, dramatically holding your gaze, then suddenly, ‘Just one night, the geezer has to sing, and he doesn’t get a fee, guy. They don’t give him no fee. They give the man a chequebook and say, write out however much you want Mr Pavarotti sir. I tell you, that man makes serious money.’

‘What you on about, Dan?’ says Craig, who appears from the seat behind.

‘Danny’s just filling us in on the facts behind Pavarotti’s bank balance,’ says Chris, ‘and very interesting it is too, sir.’

‘You’re not still on about Pavarotti, are you, Dan?’

‘I tell you, guy,’ says Dan, now seriously warming to his subject, ‘he doesn’t get paid in money, he gets paid in bullion.’

‘What planet d’you live on, Dan?’ asks Craig, reaching across to get a can of wicked-strength lager.

‘Bullion man, he doesn’t have a wallet, he gets followed around by a Securicor van full of his spending bullion.’

‘I don’t expect all that money makes him happy though, Dan,’ I say.

‘Bollocks, man,’ says Craig. ‘It would make me happy.’

‘He is seriously rich, guy, I’m tellin’ you.’

‘I believe you, Dan,’ says Chris, ‘I’m perfectly prepared to believe the man earns some serious money.’

‘Not as much as you though, Chris,’ says Craig, laughing through his teeth.

‘Well, I’m not prepared to say,’ says Chris.

‘No, but you do earn a lot of money, Chris,’ says Craig. No comment from Chris.

‘You bought that Bentley last year.’

‘A Bentley! Did you really buy a Bentley, Chris, man?’ asks Danny.

‘I’m afraid I did sir,’ says Chris.

‘That is a serious poom poom wagon,’ says Danny.

I am lost now, I have no idea what a poom poom wagon is. Danny finds this very amusing.

‘He don’t know what a poom poom wagon is guy,’ says Danny to Craig.

‘Where have you been, Robert, man, with all your poxy Oxbridge mates? A poom poom wagon is a car that you get a bit of poom poom in,’ said Craig making various gestures with his arms and central torso area which indicated sexual intercourse.

‘Oh, right, with you,’ I say, trying to be hip. Failing miserably.

‘A Bentley, man,’ says Danny. ‘That is serious executive poom poom material.’

The concept of executive poom poom was clearly beyond anything Craig would tolerate. ‘Danny, you really are totally out of order man.’

‘I must say, Dan,’ said Chris jocularly, ‘I have never seen the Bentley in terms of it’s poom poom-ness, but now you mention it, you may well have a point.’

‘I’m tellin’ you, guy, you could get some serious poom poom if you cruise around in that motor, you know what I’m saying. A Bentley.’

Conversations not unlike these, in fact horrifyingly like these, would pass the miles between Manchester and London like syrup of figs help you pass solids. Most of the time the talk would take place around Rob and/or Doug, and it is only now looking back that it becomes clear how one of the interesting developments in Red Dwarf has taken place in the years I have been involved with it.

Slowly but surely we have each either grown like our characters, or our characters have grown something like us. This is not to say that Chris Barrie is a git like Rimmer, far from it, but there are elements of Chris in the character. It’s also, I hasten to add, not to say I am like a mechanoid, with nothing down there except plastic underpants and a trade mark. But I do tend to do a lot of laundry and washing-up at home. Craig and Danny also have many traits of their characters and it is my humble opinion that as Rob and Doug got to know us better, and listened to us talking on the coach, more and more of our own personalities, neuroses and character traits started being incorporated into the script.

At something like three in the morning, the coach would pull up in the car park of the Acton rehearsal rooms. What a place to be at three in the morning. Very low glamour rating. We would fall out of the bus and climb into a veritable fleet of waiting taxis lined up in the road.

I would hit my pillow at about four, still peeling bits of rubber from my chin and neck, but as I slipped into Slumbertown, I would glow with happiness. It was another five days without the mask, and one whole day off.

The following week I arrived as usual at Acton, we read the script through, I was feeling more at home, I had more to do in the episode, and things were generally looking up. Irony warning signal on low. The episode we were recording was called Polymorph, a deadly creature which could turn into anything. It slowly became clear during the course of the day that at some time it was going to turn into a snake.

Donna DiStefano, our long-suffering assistant floor manager, asked me discreetly if I was scared of snakes. I told her I wasn’t, I was a bit scared of really big spiders, but snakes were fine. She nodded and smiled. Why didn’t I realise at the time? Why didn’t I see that the reason Donna smiled that day was because she knew something I didn’t.

The week’s rehearsals went well. Craig and I were enjoying a scene we did together when the Polymorph turned into a pair of boxer shorts, which Craig put on, which then started to shrink, which meant I had to try and pull them off, while still having a vacuum cleaner hose attached to my groinal socket, at which point Rimmer comes in and says, ‘You’ll bonk anything, won’t you, Lister?’

It was a very funny moment, and took my attention from the snake section, for which in rehearsal I used an old scarf.

Off we go to Manchester, on the coach, tra la la. The next day is a long and gruelling time in the studio, shooting all the Polymorph changes, the rabbit which wouldn’t hop, the ball which wouldn’t roll, the shami kebab which wouldn’t wriggle. In the end they all did. The following day we start camera rehearsals and when we get to the snake part, Donna walks in with a long stuffed tube of cotton painted to look a bit like a snake, I say long, it was probably about twelve feet. This was to represent the snake. I laughed, I was getting used to these guys, always joshing about. We rehearsed with this great big long sausage until it was time for me to complete my make-up.

On camera rehearsal days in Manchester, I used to have the unpainted mask stuck on during the day, and have it finished off between the end of rehearsals and when the audience arrived.

As soon as my make-up was finished, Donna took me along the corridor into a small room. I was only wearing a pair of underpants because I got so hot in the mask it was the only way to stay coolish.

In the room was a woman and a large picnic hamper, she opened the lid and I was introduced to Tina. Tina was a sixteen-foot-long, seven-stone python. She grinned at me, as if to say, ‘You don’t half look a prat, with that mask on and virtually nothing else.’

The woman who owned Tina picked her out of the basket. Tina was a snake, i.e. she was supposed to be long and thin. She was long, but her middle section was thicker than my thigh, and she was heavy. They drooped her over my shoulder; it was like giving a shoulder ride to a fourteen-year-old kid. A big fourteen-year-old kid.

I have to say Tina was great to work with, very professional, I felt calm and relaxed. As I handed her back to the owner, I noticed double puncture marks all up the woman’s forearm. I asked about these strange-looking marks.

‘Oh, she will bite, but it’s not poisonous, it does hurt a bit, and you need an anti-tetanus jab, but she’s not dangerous.’ There we go, the old irony warning light has been on all this time and I didn’t even notice.

Once we were in the studio and it came to Tina’s entrance the show was ‘kicking’ as Danny would say. As the owner slowly pulled Tina out of her basket, the audience screamed, people squirmed in their seats as they watched this massive snake uncoil from her basket. She was hooked over my shoulders and I had to hold her head up, look at her face and say, ‘Snake!’

That’s all, it was a very brief shot. That’s comedy. In the event Tina didn’t bite me, although she wouldn’t do exactly as Ed wanted. When I wanted her to lift her head up, I lifted her head, which was about the smallest part of her body. Suddenly I felt this enormous strength as Tina suggested that she didn’t want her head lifted up. She could easily have squeezed around my neck hard enough to pop my head off my shoulders.

Here’s the irony, if you watch a tape of this episode, you’d have to use freeze-frame to even see a shot of me and Tina struggling to the death.

However, the next moment has gone down in Red Dwarf history as one of the best moments. Craig and the shrinking boxer shorts. Okay, so I have toured the world, he said grandly, making people laugh. I have succeeded and failed, I have had them rolling in the aisles. I have had to delay my next line to accommodate the laugh. I’ve done shows where I know the laugh is coming and I’ve milked it. But never, in all those thousands of performances, have I ever experienced a moment like this. My ear was no more than four feet from Craig’s mouth. He was screaming his lines out to me, I was screaming mine back at him. Neither of us could hear a thing. The audience made such a noise, we couldn’t hear ourselves think.

Chris had to wait for ages and ages to say his ‘You’ll bonk anything, Lister’ line. He just stood there looking at us with that face of his. That was enough for the live audience, they went bananas.

The coach ride home that night was electric. Danny was re-enacting the show scene-by-scene for all of us, which was odd considering we’d all been there.

‘They were laughing so much, man, Robby couldn’t hear his cue man. We are talking a major woof man. I mean, that was a prime quality woof, you know what I’m saying.’

Someone else would try and say something, but Danny was still in full flow.

‘Shrinkin’ boxer shorts, man. A classic woof, I’m tellin’ you, that’ll go down in history, guy.’

By the time of the third episode rehearsals I had got into my stride. I had started to remember everyone’s name: John Pomphrey, the lighting man; Rocket, the head cameraman; Ron Tufnell, one of the cameramen who had also worked on The Cornerhouse with me; Mel Bibby, the man who designed the sets and props; Keith Mayes, the sound engineer; Howard Burden, the costume man.

During the technical run-through all these people and more would be standing around going through their scripts as we went through the episode. Ed Bye would stand where the camera was going to be and point at whoever was in the shot. This was a great help to us as we would then know where the camera we were playing to was going to be.

I was getting used to the lunches in the BBC canteen, I was less impressed when I saw a famous person, I was getting blasé. One day, when Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie and all the Blackadder people were involved in a big benefit concert called the Pretty Policeman’s Ball, Ed Asner, the actor who portrayed Lou Grant in the series of the same name, walked past me. I was impressed with him because he was old and American and a proper actor. Jerry Hall walked past me next, I was impressed with her because she’s famous and knows Mick Jagger biblically. Someone else walked past me who I didn’t know and I was still impressed because I am very bad at recognising famous people so it could have been anyone.

The one episode in series three when I had a lot of mates in the cast was Backwards. Tony Hawks and Arthur Smith were both old troopers from the comedy circuit. Well, not that old, about the same age as me. Arthur and I had done one of the most unpleasant gigs of our careers together, in a dungeon down a narrow alley in Edinburgh. It was during the festival, in 1987 I think, and we had both been talked into doing a spot at a youth club. I was trying out material for a new stand-up set, and I’m a cheap show-off, so I was happy to do it. Arthur had a new suit and wanted to try that out. The youth club was very rough, most of the youth were in their twenties, very drunk and looked like the sort of people a crusty would avoid because they looked a bit wild and unwashed.

There was a stage, and on the stage were four students doing some sort of weird piece of theatre. They were being showered by beer mats and spit, but I thought, I’m a professional. I was wearing a suit and tie and the piece involved me doing a striptease down to a super revealing Lycra body suit, which, if I hit it right, could theoretically be very funny.

I went up onto the stage and the booing and hissing was very loud, the beer mats started to fly, and then a beer glass. I took hold of the mic stand and shouted, ‘Thank you very much, and good night.’ It was the shortest show I have ever done. I fled the place before Arthur went on.

About two hours later I turned up at the Assembly Rooms bar and saw Arthur standing in another suit, holding a plastic carrier bag. I asked him what had happened.

‘I was doing quite well, all things considered, they’d stopped throwing glasses and bottles, and I was beginning to get a few laughs, then a bloke walked up to me and poured a pint of piss over my head.’

It became a favourite anecdote of the festival. That’s why I say old trooper, or maybe it should be nutter. How many of us would continue in a line of work after being abused like that by a customer?

Backwards, in which Arthur played the barman, became an immensely complicated episode. The script had worked out all the difficult areas of reverse logic, the only bit which confused us all was the fight sequence, where we had to work out when Craig’s injuries disappeared, and how he would feel slowly worse until he reached the fight, when the pain would be unpunched out of him.

This episode has gone down in Red Dwarf history as being one of the best, but when we were making it, it became harder and harder to understand what was going on.

My biggest problem all the way through series 3 was trying to learn my lines. At home I had started to wear a groove in the kitchen floor, pacing up and down for hours as I tried to get these complicated lines into my head. As I’ve mentioned earlier, learning lines has never come naturally to me, but I can do it. However, I felt inadequate when faced with a long Kryten speech; Rob and Doug’s language is so unique, is so free of cliché that it makes it very hard to learn.

When I have learned other people’s scripts there is usually a turn of phrase or a sentence structure which you recognise and you already have at your disposal. It’s therefore fairly easy to learn as you almost know it already, you only have to memorise it in order.

With Kryten talk, this is never the case. Rob and Doug will never use a hackneyed turn of phrase, they always come up with new ways of saying something. This is one reason I love their scripts when I first read them, and hate their guts as I try and learn them. There were times as the third series wore on where a new and tortuous Kryten line would make us all laugh simply because it was so tortuous.

The standing joke was that Rob and Doug would write me a five-page long explanatory speech, telling the rest of the crew how black holes work, or that time dilation would save us from the horrific fate overhanging us. This speech would be very long and very hard to learn, it would start with the word ‘Listen…’. Most importantly of all, at the end, Danny would smile, show his teeth and say, ‘I was with you until you said listen.’ This would, of course, bring the house down.

In the rehearsal room were two old bunk beds[18]
which stood in for the beds in the officers’ quarters where a lot of the action in series 3 took place. On most mornings I would arrive, script in hand, still trying to do that killer speech on page seven. Donna DiStefano would be going through her props, Ed Bye would be pacing around working out his camera script. Chris Barrie would be on his mobile phone trying to fend off offers of work and see if he could fit in a four o’clock. It has taken me a while to find out what a four o’clock was. I know that during the war the gunners in British and American bombers used to point out enemy fighters to each other using the clock as a common reference. Hence, ‘The hun at five o’clock high chaps, give ’em hell.’ However, Chris Barrie’s four o’clock is a voice-over recording at four o’clock, in the afternoon, hopefully after rehearsals. Not quite so brave and dashing as the World War II gunners reference, but with a charm all of its own.

On the top bunk there would be an inanimate lump, otherwise known as a sleeping Craig Charles; in the lower bunk would be a far more elegant body, stretched out, but likewise, fast asleep. This would be the graceful frame of Danny John-Jules.

Everyone would work quietly, so as not to wake them until rehearsals began at ten o’clock. I have no idea what Danny and Craig did during the night in those days, but it clearly didn’t involve sleep. They made me feel so old, they did in fact call me granddad for a while when we each revealed our ages over lunch. Well, Hattie wouldn’t reveal hers, I politely didn’t ask, being a nice, middle-class, well-brought-up boy. However, such niceties didn’t hold Craig back, who immediately said, ‘Come on Hat, how old are you, man?’

Hattie wasn’t having it, and her age remains a mystery to all of us to this day. When they found out how old I was, they were amazed.

‘I’ll be dead before I’m that age, man,’ said Craig. ‘I’ve peaked already man, I’m twenty-four and I’m burnt out.’

When I gave him a lift home that night he was quite animated. Normally Craig fell asleep as soon as he closed the car door, this time there was no stopping him.

‘It’s amazing how old you are and you’re still going. I’m shagged, man,’ he said, ‘I started in this game when I was sixteen, doin’ poetry and that. I got married real young, I was on telly regularly by the time I was eighteen. I’ve got there too quick, man, now I’m shagged out, I’m burnt out, man, there’s nothing left, I’m a husk. It’s all over for me, man. I’ll never get to your age.’

I was very worried for Craig, I have a weakness when I listen to other people, I always believe what I’m told. The next day I had foolishly expected Craig to be likewise subdued, but he was bouncing about like a spring chicken. Looking back on his speech now, years later, it does seem rather amusing. Craig has immense energy, and an annoyingly good memory. I say annoying for two reasons: one is that he can pick up the script, look at it a couple of times and then lose it, and he knows all his lines, knows all Danny’s lines and knows most of mine. The other thing he has a good memory for is conversations and statements. I could say something one year and then contradict it the next, as I am wont to do, and the only person who remembers what I said before is Craig.

‘That’s not what you said last year,’ he’ll say with a cheeky grin.

‘Isn’t it?’ I’ll say, wracking my brains trying to remember what I might have said.

‘No, on January the twenty-third, you said completely the opposite.’ The annoying thing is he’ll be right.

I have learned though that remembering lines is very much to do with trust. In the episode titled Timeslides, the one where Kryten got to do a bit of air guitar work in the dark room, I had to do a difficult speech, apologising to Rimmer for referring to his mother as an old trout.

‘I compared your mother to an aged blubbery fish…’ and on and on. Try as I might that week, this speech got the better of me. Hattie tried to help me remember it by breaking the speech into a list of first letters. That meant ‘…an aged blubbery fish, a simple minded scaly old piscine…’ became A B F A S M S O P.

It was hopeless. I couldn’t remember a word of it. Nothing seemed to help, I was very downhearted about it and constantly lost my temper when trying to memorise it. If I stumbled in rehearsals I would bark out, ‘Don’t tell me, I know it I know it.’ And then promptly prove that I didn’t know anything.

Come the night of the recording, Mike Agnew, the super hard-working production manager who fell asleep in the back of the bus, had provided an idiot board with this speech written on in capital letters. He tucked it away behind part of the set so the audience wouldn’t see it before the scene, the idea being that he would turn it around just before saying action.

Under the pressure of the moment, no one remembered to turn the card around before we started recording the scene. There’s always nine hundred things going on at once, it’s hardly surprising. The first few exchanges between Kryten and Rimmer went very well. Chris had huge long speeches to do, twice, three times as much as me, and he sailed through them beautifully. As we approached my killer speech, I noticed out of the corner of my eye, Mike Agnew crawling across the floor, desperately trying to reach my cue card. I realised what was going on, but somehow didn’t panic and started the speech with ease. I managed to get through it, not word-perfect, but close enough. It was the first time I’d ever got past the first phrase. Meanwhile, Mike was in an agonising position by my feet, I had to step over him in order to do my exit. The thing is, it’s amazing what an audience can do for a performer when the pressure is on. The more hours I’d spent trying to learn this speech, the less I could remember. The more angry I got, the more hopeless it became. As soon as I relaxed, it was fine. A salutary lesson without doubt.

I’ve often wondered if proper actors have been taught how to learn lines. By proper actors, I mean the ones who went to drama school. I didn’t go to drama school, I barely went to school at all. I was forever running away and skiving off to smoke cigarettes and practice swearing.

I did try to go to drama school once, after I’d been performing for a bit, I thought I’d give it a go. I knew I could get a grant because I’d never been to university. I applied to get into the Central School of Speech and Drama, in St John’s Wood, London. I got a form and an explanatory booklet. I had to learn two bits of Shakespeare and one bit of contemporary. I borrowed the Complete Works of Shakespeare from a friend and found the passages. Bit of Hamlet, bit of Two Gentlemen of Verona. Neither of them made any sense to me at all, although I’d seen both plays and enjoyed them. I asked another friend what contemporary bit of theatre to do, I fancied doing something like a speech from the film Bullet starring Steve McQueen. I was told this wasn’t quite appropriate. In the end we settled on a speech from The Threepenny Opera by Berthold Brecht.

I spent a couple of evenings trying to learn this stuff, then turned up at the school for my interview. I sat in a room full of men who looked just like me. My height, my hair colour, my build. The only difference was they were all quite good at acting. I was eventually shown into a room where three people sat behind a table. They asked me to do my Shakespeare, I nodded calmly, stood up, shook my hands about in an actory sort of way. The three people looked expectant. I stood like a Shakespearean character and said… nothing. I couldn’t remember a thing.

‘Would you like a prompt?’ someone asked. I had no idea what a prompt was, but I nodded seriously.

“What kind of man is this,” said a man who was sitting behind me.

‘Oh yeah, that’s it.’ I said. ‘I remember now, “What kind of man is this” … um … don’t tell me, I’ll get it in a bit.’

Hopeless. They didn’t ask to see my other Shakespeare, but asked for a bit of the contemporary piece. They asked what I was going to do. I couldn’t remember what it was called.

‘It’s a sort of musical by this German bloke. It’s got songs in it, really famous songs.’

‘Kurt Weill?’ said one of the people behind the table helpfully.

‘Could have been,’ I said scratching my head.

‘Bertolt Brecht?’ said another.

‘That’s the fellow,’ I said pointing at them and clicking my fingers. ‘It’s a piece by Bertolt Brecht called Mack something.’

‘Mack the Knife?’

‘You know it don’t you?’ I said smiling.

‘Yes,’ said the man behind the table, ‘but I don’t think you do.’

‘Come and sit down and tell us a bit about yourself, Robert,’ said the woman who was sitting next to him. ‘Why do you want to become an actor?’

‘Oh, I don’t really want to be an actor, I’m just a show-off really, but I can get a grant for three years you see, so I thought I wouldn’t have to work.’

The three people behind the table nodded gravely, but they didn’t give up.

‘Have you had any acting experience?’

‘Not really, not proper acting, I’ve done a lot of comedy and mime stuff. Street entertaining and cabaret.’

‘Have you done any fencing?’

I thought this was a bit of an odd question, I thought they were talking about acting and suddenly he asks about fencing. The thing was I had done fencing.

‘Well yes,’ I said, ‘I did quite a lot of fencing on a farm I used to work on. Mostly wire mesh but some post and rail stuff.’

I was thanked for my time and told to ask the next young hopeful to come in as I left. I thought I’d done pretty well, all things considered. They didn’t offer me a place, strangely enough. If they had I would have gone to college with Jemma Redgrave, not that it would have done me a lot of good.

I have since discovered that proper actors don’t get lessons in how to remember lines, they just get a lot of practice, and like most things, the more you do it, the easier it becomes.

The last episode of series three, The Last Day, we recorded was a favourite of mine, because for one fairly large section I wore an evening suit, which was far more comfortable than the normal Kryten uniform. Also, because it was the last episode of the series, there was a bit of a party atmosphere going around, and there was to be a party after the show.

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 can never really enjoy something I’m in.

I used to love staying in posh hotels, having your own bit of soap and your own bathroom. It’s a telling fact that after you’ve stayed in posh hotels a lot, the thrill wears off. Does this mean that if you were sent out into space, which would be so amazing, after the hundredth trip you’d be bored? I think it’s possible.

Still the producer at this time.

Under one of these beds was written in felt-tip pen, ‘Norman Lovett was here for quite a while.’

Chapter 5

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.

If you don’t know where Shepperton is, it’s the flat bit with the reservoirs you fly over as you come into land at Heathrow Airport. If you’ve never flown into Heathrow airport, that won’t help you, so it’s on the western fringe of London, just inside the M25, quite near the Thames. It’s where J.G. Ballard, the science fiction writer, lived. If you do fly into Heathrow, though, you can quite often see it. I’ve actually managed to make out G stage as we’ve banked overhead.

The studios had a wonderful feel to them. It was easy to imagine them being a hive of activity in the 1950s, when all those war movies and Carry On films were made there. It’s always been a great thrill and privilege to work at Shepperton Studios, it has such an amazing history in British and indeed international cinema. Okay, so big chunks of the Harry Potter Films were shot there, Judge Dredd, Aliens, and Anna Karenina, but what about Thomas the Tank Engine? Yes, even that was made in Shepperton, I saw the set once, it was a railway modeller’s wet dream.

What took place in the eight or nine huge cavernous studios at that time was mostly TV commercials with the occasional series like Red Dwarf and Smith and Jones. The Price is Right and other memorable game shows were made in Shepperton, I believe, but basically it had seen better days.

However, when we were there the first year, we kept seeing all these long-haired men with dirty cloaks on wandering about. It was like being at Glastonbury Festival, great hords of wandering hippies stumbling about. Sometimes in the Shepperton canteen you’d find yourself standing in the queue behind forty heavily armed medieval soldiers. After a while we found out they were involved in a film, Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves which starred Kevin Costner.

Yes I did see Kev. Well okay, I didn’t actually see him, but I was walking along the road in Shepperton and this huge stretch limo rumbled past. It had tinted windows so there was no way of knowing who was in there, but I could feel Kev’s presence. Mike McShane was playing Friar Tuck, I met him one day in the car park and he showed me the set. Up behind one of the studios was an enormous castle, made of polystyrene and paint, scaffold and chipboard. It looked completely real, it was huge, the castle yard was full of old peasants and weird farm animals, cows with big horns, odd-looking sheep and pigs. It was a lot more exciting than being in the studio, but it was November and it was very cold, and filming involves quite astonishing amounts of hanging around doing nothing.

Being at Shepperton meant we spent the best part of seven weeks shut up in the huge studio, sitting in the set, living in the set, and in Craig’s case, occasionally sleeping in the set.

Before we started recording, Ed Bye had asked me if I had any suggestions for a woman to play the part of Camille, the female mechanoid that Kryten had to fall in love with. I wracked my brains for three-quarters of a second, then said, ‘There’s this actress called Judy Pascoe I know vaguely, you could try her, she’s Australian, but she can do a very good mid-Atlantic accent.’

They saw Judy and liked her. She got the job, so after all the moaning and complaining she’d had to listen to from me the year before, she was going to try a mask on herself. She was going to know what it was like to go ‘under rubber’.

Contrary to what some people I have spoken to assume, I did not meet Judy on the set of Red Dwarf, we had met in Edinburgh in 1988 when we appeared at the same theatre, not at the same time, her show immediately followed mine. As I was packing up the props and costumes from another performance of Mammon, Robot Born of Woman, Judy arrived with her pint of beer. That makes her sound even rougher than she really is; the pint was a prop.

It wasn’t, as I feared it might be, a problem working with Judy on an episode of Red Dwarf. She knew Craig from a few years before. He’d made a programme called Craig Goes Mad in Melbourne, about the Melbourne Comedy Festival in Australia. Judy had won the Melbourne Comedy Festival prize that year for her show The Last Great Adventure, and Craig had interviewed her on the programme.

I think problems with couples who work together stem from some form of competitiveness between them, and thankfully we didn’t suffer from that. I mean, sure, Judy was very popular with the cast and crew. They all really liked her and thought she was funny, and patient, and a really nice person. They still ask about her to this day, not that I’m bitter. So what if she only did one episode and people still remember her three or four years later? That’s fine, that’s what being in love is all about. Bitch.

On the pre-record day Judy and I both had to turn up extra early to get made up. As there were now two masks to apply, Fiona and Andrea had their work cut out. They got me done first, I think the argument was, ‘because you’re hardened to it’. Fair enough.

I was in the studio when I first saw Judy in full make-up. It was a very strange experience, seeing someone you know so well disappear behind rubber. You look at them and you can’t recognise them at all, your eye searches madly for some sign. I first saw the back of her head and I didn’t want her to turn around. I didn’t know what it was going to be like to see her face. It’s the eyes, that’s all you have left, I could just about recognise her eyes.

When Judy had come up to Manchester the year before to watch us record the last episode, she had been very shocked when she first saw me in the mask. She didn’t want to look, and when I tried to give her a kiss on the cheek, she screamed. I don’t want to give the impression that Judy is some sort of wimp; she spent five years touring the world in a circus company, climbing up poles and balancing three eggs on a chopstick on her nose. I suppose, however, circus work doesn’t prepare you for seeing your boyfriend with someone else’s face on. Being a stand-up comic and show-off doesn’t prepare you for seeing the woman you love with a square bald head either.

However, it was quite romantic reliving our real-life meeting when encased in rubber and plastic. Judy and I did experience an advanced mutual compatibility on the basis of a primary initial ident, or in human terms, love at first sight, so we related to the story on that level.

During the pre-record day, when no one was looking, around the back of the set, Kryten and Camille attempted to kiss. It wasn’t like kissing through glass, or even kissing through two very thin layers of prosthetic rubber. It was like kissing with a local anaesthetic, through a thick army blanket.

The picture of Kryten and Camille together has become our favourite. My mum and dad had a framed print up on their wall. When my mum showed guests her family snap shots, she would say, ‘This is my eldest son with his wife and children, this is my daughter and her children, and this is my middle son who’s a robot, and that’s his girlfriend.’

During the recording of Camille, I had to hang from a gantry, held up by straps around my lower gentlemen’s parts. Peter Wragg had set it up.

‘It’s like a parachute harness, Robert, don’t worry, it’s very safe,’ he said. ‘Just make sure you’re comfortable before you put your weight on it.’

What he meant by comfortable was if you didn’t get all your bits in the right place it could really catch your breath as you swung free. It felt fine when I was standing on my feet, but as soon as I swung out, I realised I was doing irreparable damage to the family jewels.

I was meant to be hanging from this gantry, being filmed from below, there was no way out, Kryten was doomed. Then came the moment where Camille saves Kryten’s life. As I was hanging and they were setting up the camera to try and find the shot, I was busy complaining away as usual.

‘Ooh, the straps are killing me, I can’t breathe. Oh God, I’m in agony.’ Now, normally you would think that you might get a bit of sympathy from your partner in a situation like this. You might hope she would reach out to you and say, ‘Oh, you are brave, my warrior, you are so tough and manly.’

However, now my partner was covered in rubber and as uncomfortable as me, there was no chance.

‘Oh, stop complaining, y’dag,’ she called from above.

‘That’s right, Jude, you tell him,’ said Craig.

‘And you can shut up, Craig, you’re a double dag mate,’ she snapped breezily. For those not familiar with Australian parlance, a ‘dag’ is the lump of fly-infested sheep excrement which dangles from the wool around a sheep’s rear downstairs section. Craig seemed quite pleased with the term.

Camille was great fun to do though, especially dancing with a four-foot high green blob with an eye on a stalk who talked like my girlfriend.

During the week we were recording White Hole, Ed Bye was preoccupied by the imminent arrival of his second child. Ruby Wax had been to see us during an earlier week, she was heavy with child and Ed was prepared to leave at a moment’s notice to be with Ruby for the delivery.

As the laws of irony would have it, the morning Ed didn’t turn up was the morning of the recording. By the time the cast arrived, the whole day had been hurriedly arranged by fax, phone and courier bike. Paul Jackson, the original producer of the show and by this time a very successful TV executive, was roped in at the last moment. Paul has a reputation in the business for being a man who ‘gets the job done’, he doesn’t like to hang around and work out the philosophy behind the joke.

‘Paul, I er, don’t really know what this line is about,’ says the concerned actor.

‘Bugger what it’s about, do the line, get the laugh and we can all get off home,’ says Paul Jackson. Well, who knows really, but this is a quote often attributed to him.

Paul arrived just after I got to the studio. He said he was very nervous but very pleased to be doing it. The atmosphere in the studio was electric, for some reason the crew were more on their toes than usual. I don’t wish to give the impression that they are a lazy bunch of slobs, far from it. They all work very hard to get the show done on time. But the day Paul Jackson walked onto the floor, you had to watch those guys to believe it.

As we went through the camera rehearsal, what normally might have been a technical problem of some difficulty would be solved in an instant. It seemed to us that men were walking around prepared to die in order to get the shot. We saw men knocking nails into the set with their bare hands, men pulling nails out of the set with their teeth. There was no stopping them.

One person who didn’t quite give Paul ‘the support he was looking for’, was Danny. To say Danny is often late for work is grossly unfair, there were times when he was, but there were times when we all were. Getting held up in traffic was impossible to predict, but the journey from central London to Shepperton was not one you could cut fine.

On this day the irony warning light was flashing in Danny’s control panel. This was the only day ever I can remember Danny being late on a studio day. He walked in and of course got teased to death by Craig.

‘Your balls are on the line, la,’ he said as Danny breezed in.

‘I got held up, guy,’ said Danny.

‘Dan, the big Jacko is in, Ed’s with Ruby, havin’ the baby, la, and you’re late, la.’

‘You’re joshin’ me, man,’ said Dan, looking around for support.

‘I’m afraid Craig speaketh the truth, Danielski,’ said Chris.

‘Jacko is in, today?’ said Danny, incredulously.

‘Yes, but it’ll all be fine,’ I said, trying to make Dan calm down. ‘You’re alright, Dan, he really likes you.’

At that point Paul walked on to the set.

‘Oh, Danny, you’re here, that’s nice of you,’ he said. He then stood so close to Danny that nothing he said could be heard. Danny looked mortified for a moment, then laughed very loudly. Paul clapped his hands. ‘Okay, let’s get on and then we can all go for lunch.’

Considering Paul had about ten minutes to prepare for the show, it all went incredibly smoothly. He did point out that he had Ed’s camera script to work from, which made the whole process much easier. The camera script is a detailed list, explaining the shots for each camera, line by line of the show. It’s far too complicated for me to understand but it looks a bit like this:

MCU KRYTEN ON 4

KRYTEN

Well, sir, I think we have entered a time dilation tunnel of incredible complexity.

HIGH MCU LISTER ON 2

LISTER

Complex, it’s a cinch, I’ll get you through there, no trouble.

WS STARBUG COCKPIT ON 1

RIMMER

I say we listen to the square-headed one, let’s turn back while we can.

CU CAT ON 4

CAT

We ain’t going nowhere, bud. We’re locked out!

MODEL SHOT

It’s as much as I can do to understand the plots, let alone how to make any sense of the camera scripts, so my understanding of the system is limited.

The atmosphere in the control room is always electric, thousands of voices at once, millions of buttons to press and hundreds of tellies to watch. In all the time I’ve been on Red Dwarf I’ve never been able to sit in the control room and watch a bit. I’d love to, I find it very interesting even though I don’t understand it. I just never seem to have the time on Red Dwarf. There’s always someone saying, ‘You’re on now, Robert.’

The two other good-fun-for-me episodes of series 4 were Dimension Jump and DNA, both because I appeared without the Kryten mask. In Dimension Jump I got to play Bongo, Ace Rimmer’s superior. Instead of wearing four pounds of rubber I got a pair of Dennis Healey eyebrows and a bit of face powder. Not only that, I got to proposition the great Ace Rimmer himself. Unfortunately Ace wasn’t interested, and he didn’t realise my bread was buttered that side.

In DNA I was out of the mask for much longer. This was the episode where Kryten gets transmogrified into a human being. For one episode. Just one episode. Not that I hate Kryten the mechanoid, don’t get me wrong, but when he got zapped by the DNA machine, well, I thought my ship had come in.

This shows just how confused you can become and under what delusions you can operate when you have your brains boiled weekly. This proves that actors can be, and often are, deeply sad individuals.

I thought that as we recorded DNA as the last episode, it meant that Kryten was going to be human in the next series. At last Rob Grant and Doug Naylor had dug deep into their hearts and found a scrap of humanity there. They had decided to stop torturing the man in the rubber mask and let him be free, just a bit of powder and hair gel.

Looking back, I can imagine just what happened. Rob and Doug were in their office late one night, the screen of their Apple Mac three-million-gigabyte computer casting an eerie grey glow over them.

‘I know how we can really, really get him.’

‘Yeah, yeah, how?’

‘Okay, last episode we record, we’ll come up with some way of turning him into a human.’

‘So he doesn’t have to wear the mask, yeah, yeah. Got it, got it.’

‘And he’ll think we’ve changed him into a human forever.’

‘Yeah, yeah. But, come the first episode of the next series–’

‘He’s back in the mask.’

‘Yeah, but better, with no explanation!’

‘Yeah, no bloody explanation of any sort whatsoever.’

‘That’ll really screw him up.’

‘Yeah, the bastard.’

‘The smug middle-class git.’

This also shows how paranoid you get when you have your brains boiled weekly. However, this is how it happened. DNA was the last episode to be recorded of series 4 and I was happy as a pig in poo. The last week, with great mirth, we rehearsed the double Polaroid scene. We had a great time, it was just like normal, only everyone was a bit happier because we were approaching the end of another gruelling series.

On the pre-record day, I was in at the crack of dawn with Fiona and Andrea dabbing away with their glue brushes, but I was in good spirits.

‘Oh, you are happy today, Roberto,’ said Andrea.

‘Much happiness is mine,’ I said.

‘And what are you doing after the series?’ she asked as she wiped a gobbet of glue from my nostril.

‘Going to Australia on holiday with my girlfriend,’ I said.

‘That’s right, going to Australia,’ said Andrea.

‘You are a lucky boy,’ said Fiona.

‘He’s a very lucky boy,’ said Andrea. ‘Isn’t he a lucky boy, Craig?’

‘He’s a middle-class bastard, I know that,’ said Craig as he sipped his coffee.

‘Now, Craigy, that’s not a very nice thing to say,’ said Andrea.

‘It’s true though,’ said Craig.

‘Yes, it is true,’ said Andrea.

As you may have gathered, Andrea and Fiona tended to treat us like children. They spoke to us in loud, clear voices, somewhat like primary school teachers talking to their pupils. Andrea would get hold of your arm, shake it, and say, ‘I want you back here for a make-up check after lunch, alright?’ She’d shout the message right in your face. Now, I’m no psychologist, but I think she spoke to us like that because when we were in the make-up room, we may have behaved like children. In fact, there are probably some people who think when we were in the everyday world we behaved like children. I don’t think it’s true though. I think Craig, Danny and I can, when it suits us, behave like children. Chris on the other hand is deeply mature and would never behave like a child. Unless he was impersonating someone, which he does a great deal, in which case he is just like a child. Chris can impersonate Andrea very well, she is originally from Newcastle and it’s an accent I can’t hope to mimic. Not so Mister Barrie.

‘Good mornin’, Andy,’ he’d say as he sat down in the make-up chair. ‘How are you today?’

Everyone else is laughing except Andrea. She doesn’t seem to notice his perfect reproduction of her every vowel.

‘What’s so funny?’ she asks indignantly.

‘I don’t know, Andy, what’s so funny?’ says Chris in a lilting sing-song Geordie.

‘Oh, you’re awful you are,’ says Andrea, and proceeds to try and break Chris’s neck as she sticks his hologramatic H on his forehead. Chris’s H is one of the daily rituals of Red Dwarf, it’s made of thin plastic stuff which goes wibbly-wobbly when you look at it from different angles. It’s a bit like that stuff they make postcards out of in Spain, the ones with angels who flap their wings, or a Jesus who winks at you.

The H is applied to Chris’s forehead with double-sided tape, special trick Sellotape stuff which all costume and make-up people carry with them at all times. It’s also called toupee tape as you can stick your wig down with it.

Chris has to sit in his chair and hold his head straight as Andrea braces herself behind him. They then fight for about a minute as they argue about it being straight or not, and finally they stick it. Andrea pulls with all her might from behind, Chris leans forward with all his might from the front. At the end of a series Chris’s neck is like Mike Tyson’s, virtually thicker than his head. He strains every fibre in his neck just to stop his head being pulled off. When it’s finally applied they both congratulate each other on a job well done.

‘An H of extreme beauty,’ says Chris. ‘An H stuck on with such aplomb, Ms Pennell, that it has to be seen to be believed.’

Chris then leaves the make-up room and has a bacon roll and a cup of tea or something. I assume he does that, I don’t know, I’m still in the make-up chair being glued, prodded, padded and painted. It’s not that I envy Chris his ten-minute make-up time, we all have our own weight to carry, but it always seems so short to me.

The fun part of that last day was recording the conversation between Kryten’s three spare heads. I say fun, it was very uncomfortable but the characters were great to do.

There had been times the year before when I had done a silly bow-legged walk, and put on a ridiculous Hovis advert-style Yorkshire accent in front of the audience between takes. I usually said something like, ‘Oooh, I’ve just kacked me pants. By heck that’s good, Robo kack, that’s kack wi’ nowt tekken out.’ It was obscene and cheap, I know, but cheap is my middle name and it got a laugh.

Rob, Doug and I had discussed this before the making of the series, I said I wanted to play Kryten’s dad, an old-fashioned no-nonsense Yorkshire robot who thinks Kryten’s full of new-fangled ideas. The Grant Naylor genius machine got hold of that hack, cheap idea and turned it into a row of spare heads in a cupboard. One of which had galloping droid rot.

To get the scene to work I had to stand in a semi-crouched position and stuff my head through a hole. The front half of the shelf was then slotted into place, it was a bit like being in a set of medieval stocks.

It was as big a surprise for me to see the finished thing as anyone else. The wonders of modern TV technology, there were the three heads in a row, and spare head three grumbling away on the end.

After the last pre-record day I waited until I received the much longed-for phrase, ‘Robert is clear.’ All this means is I can rip the front of the mask off and run for the make-up room. Every day I wear the mask, I can always be found hanging around the floor manager toward the end of the shoot. He or she is going to be the first person to know if I can leave.

The director is in the scanner, which sounds like a Red Dwarf prop but is actually a huge truck which is parked outside the studio. In the truck is a vast wall of TV screens, each showing a slightly different view of the same scene. The director, at this time Ed Bye, sits in there and somehow manages to make sense of the forty voices and twenty pictures he’s looking at. On top of all this is the voice of the floor manager asking him, ‘Um, Ed, Robert wants to know if he’s clear.’ Then the floor manager looks at me with that face, that wonderful smile which means only one thing. ‘You’re cleared, Robert.’

I ran through the studio, ‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ I shout as I barge past technicians, camera men with cups of tea, production accountants with clipboards and mobile phones. Everyone’s face is a blur. All I can think about is getting the mask off.

I had learned by the second series that if I had been in the mask a long time, the glue around the nose and upper lip has become very loose, if not unstuck all together. If I grab the nose and pull it, it just rips off. This immediately allows me to breath more easily, it allows me to scratch my nose and feel my face come back to life again. This sort of behaviour isn’t really encouraged by the make-up department. As I have already explained, the glue is incredibly strong, it is quite possible to tear your skin apart by pulling at the rubber if it hasn’t more or less come away already. I have done this to the side of my nose once and it’s very painful.

Andrea and Fiona set on my head with a vengeance, Andrea reminding me that it was the last one, that I was a free man, that I had done another series of Red Dwarf.

The make-up removal is a much faster but still quite complex procedure. Andrea gives me two cotton wool make-up removal pads soaked in warm water which I hold on my eyes. This helps remove the eye make-up and protects my eyes from the prosthetic removal oil. Then they cut the top of my head open with scissors, rip the rubber bald cap open and let out the heat. At this point I have to be wrapped up warm, because the sudden change in body temperature makes me feel very cold. I always start to shiver at this point. It’s an incredible feeling because after ten or twelve hours with your head encased in rubber, you do get used to it. This sudden change gives me goose pimples all over. Actually, if I’m honest, it’s quite kinky.

Then they start sploshing prosthetic removal oil between the mask and my face, and working from the forehead down, they slowly and painstakingly remove it. They always finish under the chin and as the last bit of sad old wrinkled Kryten drops to the floor, the liberation is complete.

I glance up into the mirror and see the sad return of my own face, which at this stage looks like a three-day-old used tea bag. All I have to do then is wash and scrub and pick for a few days as I constantly find bits of rubber mask stuck to the back of my neck, or behind my ear, or somewhere. It really does take a long time to get rid of any trace.

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.

I’d done many other exciting, entertaining and educational things as well. I didn’t sit at home all year and then go to a skin allergist for an afternoon. I just wanted to make that clear.

The bike sheds were in full view of the headmaster’s office in my school.

Chapter 6

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!

In August I flew to Edinburgh to perform at the Assembly Rooms, I was doing my comedy lecture The Reconstructed Heart for two weeks. It was great to be back, I’d missed being there the year before, it was only minutes after getting off the plane I was in the Assembly Rooms bar, swapping humorous anecdotes and laughing loudly. I was only there an hour and I had a bad case of Edinburgh neck, craning every which way trying to see who was there, doing what, with whom.

The show went very well in Edinburgh, it wasn’t too tense, i.e. I didn’t have to remember too many lines. Well, it was a lecture, I had a nice lectern in front of me with all my lines on. I gave up trying to remember a speech that lasts an hour and ten minutes. It made life so much easier to have a quick glance every now and then. Proper actors would not approve, but stuff them. Each day I tried new bits which I’d write in the evening, scribble onto the script and present the next day. This was a good way of trying out new jokes, some of which worked well and some of which died phenomenal deaths. I developed a question and answer session at the end of the show, which really took off in Edinburgh and which I used in the televised version.

Back in London, I did a special performance of the lecture at The Hackney Empire, a double bill with Cynthia Payne. Remember her? She was the Streatham Madam who was jailed for running a house of ill-repute which was full of judges and police chiefs, MPs and civil servants. She was an interesting woman who did her own show about her life, on which the films Wish You Were Here and Personal Services were loosely based.

I also spent a day driving a taxi with Dawn French in the back. I was a cabby in an episode of Murder Most Horrid. Dawn and I talked about setting up a special school where young men could be trained to be better lovers. She wanted to be headmistress. While all this was going on, Red Dwarf 5 was brewing on the horizon. Was there going to be another series? Would I do it? Would any of us do it? The mystery and prevarication had become a yearly tradition.

I was also busy preparing The Reconstructed Heart for TV: meeting actors to play the study group, spending hours in front of a huge computer monitor, helping redesign all the comedy graphs and charts.

Suddenly everything seemed to be happening at once. While I was rehearsing the lecture (I had to learn the damn thing now, of course) we did the first read-through of Red Dwarf V.

The read-through is often the first time we all meet up again. Sitting around a huge table with a huge pile of scripts in the middle. There’s Chris Barrie with his mobile phone. Craig is wearing a groovy new jacket and Danny has a sweatshirt with the letters K.M.B.B.A.[24]

emblazoned across the front. Hattie was wearing one of her stunning big red frocks, I was in sad old cycling trousers and a ripped T-shirt.

‘You look like a tramp, man,’ said Craig as he gave me a hug.

‘I know, I’m really sorry, it doesn’t matter how hard I try, I’ll never be smart.’

‘Middle-class bastard,’ said Craig.

The reading went well, even I was reading better. Practice helps I suppose, all I was doing at the time was learning lines and saying them over and over. If you do that enough your brain goes to putty but your mouth and tongue get a He-Man workout.

After the read-through, Rob and Doug took me into their small annexe office for ‘a quick word’. I thought, oh no, this is it, they have realised I’m crap and they’re giving me the Spanish archer.[25]

Tony Slattery has said he’s happy to wear the mask and he won’t complain.

‘Bobby,’ said Rob, ‘we’ve just heard from Universal Television in Los Angeles that we are going to be making a pilot of Red Dwarf in January, and they want you to play Kryten.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Wow.’

I don’t think I said anything else at that point. I was so surprised at the whole notion. Doug explained that they were re-casting the rest of the actors with Americans, but the producers in America really liked my performance and wanted me in it. My mood went from grim foreboding to swollen-headedness faster than a limp penis raises its purple helmet in a dirty book shop.

Rob and Doug asked me to keep the whole thing quiet as nothing was worked out and they didn’t want to talk about it with the rest of the cast. I walked out of that office feeling fairly confused. Was this really going to happen? Was I really going to go to America and be in an American version of Red Dwarf? For the first time, I think I actually became aware of Irony Control. I could almost see the big red light flashing, the men with the clipboards recording readings. Men with headphones flicking switches and giving concerned glances to the officer in control.

‘We have a very high irony reading on subject Llewellyn, sir. He could blow.’

How come it could be possible for me to get an opportunity like this, only the opportunity meant I had to wear a rubber mask for even longer? I had to leave all those speculative thoughts to one side and get on with the job in hand. My comedy lecture.

We recorded The Reconstructed Heart at the Greenwood Theatre in London. It’s where the Jonathan Ross show comes from. The Greenwood Theatre is part of Guy’s Hospital, and when you arrive there you wonder, ‘Why did a hospital build a theatre, surely that’s a bit odd?’ I asked someone who worked there and this is the explanation, verbatim.

‘Someone died and left a lot of money to Guy’s Hospital saying it was to build a theatre. An operating theatre or a theatre theatre, no one knew. They argued about it for years and eventually decided on a theatre theatre.’

Now forgive me, but I think that’s a bit weird. If I left money to a hospital, I think I would have wanted them to build something useful for a hospital. Like an operating theatre. If I left money to a theatre, I wouldn’t expect them to build a car park.

My mum and sister and brother and all my friends came along to the recording, along with about five hundred other people. It was very hard work,[26]

but I was quite proud of it.

On 21 October, at six-thirty in the morning, 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, having a new mask stuck on.

I had a strange feeling of déjà vu. It wasn’t that funny, we were using exactly the same location as the year before. I did have a new make-up woman though, Nina Gan was working with Andrea on my head.

‘You be nice to Nina, Robert,’ said Andrea as soon as I had sat down.

‘I’m nice to everyone,’ I said.

‘Yes, but you do moan a lot, Nina doesn’t want to hear you going on and on. Just try and shut up, that’s what I mean by nice.’

The first thing I had to do on the first day was a huge long complicated speech, while standing in a smelly, dripping, freezing cold lower level of a leaking old water pumping station. I had only had time to glance at this speech before the first day of recording. I was utterly unprepared.

The new director that year was Juliet May. I didn’t know her, she didn’t know me, I could tell this by the fact that she said, very kindly and innocently, ‘Just have a quick look at this script then we’ll shoot it.’

Any proper actor would have been able to oblige, but Juliet didn’t know she was dealing with the human sieve brain. Information can leave my brain like shit off a shovel. Luckily Kerry Waddell, who was assistant floor manager the year before, and floor manager on series 5, knew me well. She started writing my speech down on a big sheet of card and held it up near the camera. There is a technical term for this sort of acting. It’s called cheating, and I am quite good at it. We got the shot done eventually and the sequence became part of Back to Reality.[27]

We also shot other complicated sequences which were never used, as usual the old irony warning klaxon was honking away unnoticed as Craig, Danny and I stood ankle-deep in stinking oily water, doing a scene which never saw the light of a flickering screen.

One sequence that was used, though, was the chase and explosion scene from The Inquisitor. John Docherty as the Inquisitor was chasing us through the endless walkways of Red Dwarf, firing his lethal Time Gauntlet.

Peter Wragg was on the case, he was carrying his trusty switch box and a reel of cable.

‘We’re going to have a fairly substantial explosion here, Robert,’ he told me, pointing to a contraption on the floor. ‘This is the scene where you and Craig are being chased by the Inquisitor, and he blasts the other Lister.’

‘I’m glad you understand the script, Peter,’ I said.

‘I don’t,’ said Peter, ‘all I know is they want a fucking big explosion, so that’s what they’re getting.’

Craig and I, chained together at the ankle and wrist for added ease of movement, had to run along a narrow gangway, duck behind a big pipe, wait for a massive explosion and then run through the smoke, pick up the alternative Lister’s severed hand, which I couldn’t see, and run away.

It’s so easy to explain, so easy to watch, so incredibly difficult to film. Everything always goes wrong. The explosion doesn’t explode, the chains holding our ankles together trip us up, or break, or both. Remember I was chained to Mister Craig Charles, head prop breaker of the northern hemisphere. Even then, when all the technical stuff happened, the explosion blows us off our feet, which it did, the chains don’t break, we don’t trip, you have to add to that the desire for me to remember a line.

Somehow, after a long, hard day, we managed to get the whole thing ‘in the can’. I was cleared and ran to the make-up truck.

‘Where are we tomorrow, Andrea?’ I asked holding the soaking cotton pads over my eyes.

‘Back here I’m afraid.’

‘What is it with Rob and Doug, man?’ said Craig who was seated beside me. ‘What is it with this bloody pumping station, have they got shares in it or something? Every year we come to the bloody pumping station and freeze our butts.’

‘They’re doing the shot where Lister has hung the Inquisitor by a rope over the edge of a huge chasm,’ said Andrea, completely ignoring Craig’s complaints. ‘They’re filming way up in the roof, it’s really dangerous, Craig, you’ll like that.’

Andrea was right of course, she knows us all well. Craig’s face lit up. There was danger in the air, he was going to be two hundred feet up above a concrete and steel floor, with no safety harness.

‘Hey, great, I do all me own stunts, man.’

By nine o’clock the next morning, there we were, right up in the roof of this huge old building. A stuntman, dressed in the Inquisitor’s costume, was dangling from a rope at least a hundred feet above the floor. Just looking up at him from ground level made me dizzy. Then I was told I had to go up there as well, to shoot the final sequence.

I said to Craig, ‘I don’t do all my own stunts,’ to which he replied, ‘Middle-class wimp, stop moaning and get up there.’ I always turn to Craig for emotional support in times of stress.

I have never suffered badly from vertigo. I’ve been up the Empire State building and the World Trade Centre in New York, fine, no problem. I’ve been in a helicopter that hovered over Tower Bridge in London, exhilarating. I’ve looked over the edge of all sorts of cliffs and towers, easy. The only place where I have really gone dizzy and felt sick is half-way up that damn pumping station in west London.

I assume it was the mask that restricted my peripheral vision, but as I climbed the last steel ladder up onto a wobbly moving crane I was shaking like a leaf. It did seem very high up, even though we were inside. How the stuntman hung from a rope up here I’ll never know.

Then there was The Night Shoot. I had heard about the night shoot for a while. One of the pre-recording days was going to be a pre-recording night. We would start work as it got dark and work right through. Being night owls, Danny and Craig were happy to be up all night, Chris and I however were less thrilled. I like to get to bed at about ten-thirty with a good book, a mug of cocoa and a healthy erection. Chris can’t be bothered with the book and the cocoa.

At about nine-thirty at night I arrived on the back lot at Shepperton, a small scrubby area of trees and man-made lakes, which were once ornamental gardens belonging to the house. I wandered around, able to see because of the twenty arc lights that John Pomphrey had set around the grounds. Chris was recording the fight sequence for Terraform, where his Self-Confidence and Self-Respect, dressed as Musketeers, fight off the hordes of Self-Loathing, cloaked creatures with red eyes. It all looked amazing, smoke blowing through the woods, coloured lights shining up into the trees. I had a cup of tea with the lads, the technical crew who were standing around the tea table. It was great, this is what filming is all about I thought, being warm and comfortable, but being outside, somewhere weird, at night. I asked the guys what the building behind us was. It was an old broken-down greenhouse, overgrown with ivy.

‘It’s not real, Robert, it’s a set,’ said Chris Squelch, the man who lifted cameras about and drove the huge control truck. ‘For a movie called The Crying Game.’

If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know what the greenhouse looks like, it’s where Stephen Rea holds the British soldier (played by Forest Whitaker) hostage at the beginning of the film. When I saw the movie a year or so later, the early part of the film didn’t really work for me because I knew the greenhouse wasn’t in Ireland, it was on a scrubby bit of old garden in Middlesex, and it wasn’t a real greenhouse. It was made of balsa wood and polystyrene. The other reason I didn’t really like the beginning part of that film is because Forest Whitaker is an American actor, who is, let’s face it, a little on the tubby side. He was supposed to be a British soldier from Tottenham, it was one of those awful bits of casting which British film-makers do every now and then to try and guarantee a film will work in America. It’s so stupid, there must be at least twenty-five or thirty really good black British actors who actually look like soldiers who would have done the part much more successfully. Luckily, it didn’t ruin what I thought was a brilliant film.

Anyway, I couldn’t hang around on the set having fun looking at fake greenhouses. This was Red Dwarf, I had to head for the make-up van.

The make-up van was warm and inviting, Andrea was in fine fettle. ‘Good evening, Robert,’ she said as I pulled open the door, ‘happy to be wearing the mask all night, in the cold, splashing about in freezing water?’

‘That’s comedy,’ I said and took my seat.

Two and a half hours later, I returned to the set in full Kryten. We recorded a lot of sequences for Terraform that night, most of the events are lost under a film of exhaustion (luvvvie-ometer warning buzzer) but at about three-thirty in the morning we had to get into a punt on the lake and paddle through sheets of flame bubbling out of the water.

That’s just the sort of thing that happens on Red Dwarf. You’ll suddenly realise that you’re covered in rubber and plastic, sitting in a leaking punt on a lake, with Craig Charles and Danny John-Jules, both of whom are in high spirits, and you can’t swim.

‘You can’t swim! You really are a wimp aren’t you, man?’ said Craig, giving me a friendly hug.

‘I’ve tried to learn,’ I said hopelessly. ‘But it’s true, I can’t swim.’

‘Come on, Dan, let’s chuck him in, that’ll teach him,’ said Craig, jostling me toward the lake.

‘Yeah, guy, that’s a really good idea,’ said Danny without paying much attention. Peter Wragg appeared dressed in a skin-diver’s suit. He was joined by Chris Squelch from the camera crew, who is also a very experienced skin-diver. They sank into the muddy freezing water and held the punt steady as the Boys from the Dwarf stumbled aboard.

‘Now listen everybody,’ said Peter Wragg, over the side of the boat. ‘All around the lake we’ve got submerged butane gas bottles. The gas bubbles up and is ignited by a fire lighter. They’re quite safe, but don’t go too near them.’

‘Okay Wraggy, man,’ said Craig.

We started paddling out into the lake, and immediately, somehow, Craig was steering straight for a twenty-foot high sheet of flame.

‘You heard what the man said,’ Danny hissed as the flames started to lick the front of the boat. Danny was sitting at the front and was obviously feeling the heat. We could hear the shouts from Rob, Doug and Juliet from the bank, but their cries of warning fell on deaf ears. Craig was looking for a light for his cigarette and there, in front of him, was the biggest light he’d ever seen. That lake looked like a Kuwaiti oil field, flickering sheets of yellow flame tonguing the velvet night. As the boat floated serenely past the roaring pillar of flame, Craig popped a cigarette in his mouth and leaned over. He leaned over a long way. The boat was at its maximum tilt. I knew I was going to die. I was going to drown in a lake in Shepperton while making a British comedy programme. I was going to die because Craig Charles wanted a light. Then he sat back and exhaled a plume of smoke.

‘Paddle on, dudes,’ he said to me and Danny, who by now were both useless with laughter and fatigue. We eventually started paddling, around in circles. We were hopeless at making that boat go straight. It seemed naturally attracted to the flames.

‘We’re heading for the flames again, guy,’ wailed Dan from the front.

‘Go to the left, Dan,’ I said from the middle.

‘Get it together guys,’ said Craig from the back, he was now laying sprawled out in the soaking rear section.

‘Try and paddle toward the camera light,’ shouted Rob Grant from the bank. This caused more hoots of laughter, we were so tired and dizzy, paddling through a lake that seemed to be on fire, and we had to aim for a tiny red light on a camera three hundred feet away.

Somehow Juliet and the crew managed to get some usable shots out of this sequence, but I don’t know how. We were all out of control with hysterical laughter for most of the time we were in the boat. I completely forgot that I couldn’t swim. I was having a great time paddling around this lake, occasionally seeing Peter Wragg’s worried face as he swam through the murk keeping an eye on us.

I think we had a day off after that night shoot. It was certainly getting light as I fell in the back of the Red Dwarf company car and was whisked back into London before the morning rush.

The following week we started rehearsals proper and we got to know our new director, Juliet May. I suppose she had her work cut out, handling the Boys from the Dwarf, but she did so very well. This isn’t to say we were being overly sexist, there have been accusations in the past that we are a very sexist group of men and I dispute that. We are a fairly honest group, and if someone has airs and graces they seem to bite the dust fairly quickly, but we all got on well with Juliet.

The first scene on the first day was set in the cockpit of Starbug. We sat in our positions with our scripts, Craig took hold of the newly devised Starbug steering column and it came away in his hand.

‘I hardly touched it!’ he said with offended innocence.

‘That lasted a long time, guy,’ said Danny flatly. For some reason this became the motto of series 5. Whenever something didn’t quite work, we’d all say, ‘That lasted a long time, guy.’

As usual, the schedule was gruelling, the make-up horrendous and the scripts were killers to learn. Those issues apart, the big difference for me during this series was my frequent visits to Rob and Doug’s office after work. They would tell me excitedly how everything was going in Los Angeles.

‘Looks like it’s all going ahead, Bobby,’ said Rob. ‘There’s this bloke called Linwood Boomer who’s producing it. He’s supposed to have written a script, and as soon as we get it, we’ll let you see a copy.’

The notion of being in Los Angeles was so far removed, I couldn’t really picture it. I had been there on two occasions before, once on holiday and once trying to sell scripts. I’d had a great time on both occasions, but I couldn’t see myself living there. This was mainly due to the fact that I still had three episodes of Red Dwarf to learn and perform. Los Angeles was a long way off.

On the daily journey between Islington, where I was living at the time, and Shepperton, I would listen to a tape of my lines on the car stereo. I would record it the night before, impersonating Craig, Chris, Danny and Hattie and then leave a blank space for where my line was meant to be. Many are the times I’ve been driving around Shepherds Bush, or around the Hammersmith roundabout, mouthing Kryten’s lines, and I’ve suddenly seen a bus driver or a cabby looking at me as if I’m some sort of nut. I seem to have an involuntary head twitch when I do Kryten’s speeches, which I imagine looks quite odd.

‘See that bloke in front?’ says a cab driver. ‘Look at him, he’s havin’ a fit. Bloody nutter shouldn’t be allowed on the road. I’ll tell you who I had in here once. That coloured geezer,[28]

the scouse one, Craig Charles, that’s the one. Fuck me he was funny. I tell you who I had in here once as well, some bloke who said he was the actor inside Kryten in that Red whatsit space thing, the series, what’s it called, red summat. I tell you what, he didn’t look nuffin’ like him. Lying toe rag. Oh yeah, I get all sorts in here.’

I pull to a halt in the Shepperton car park, next to Chris Barrie. ‘Good morning, Chrisethony,’

‘Good morning-ony, Bobethonython. And how are we this morning-ithon?’

‘Very deeply well, Mister Barrothion sir, and theyself?’

‘Deep wellness is mine,’ said Chris.

There have been times when Chris and I are speaking when we both lose track of what we’re talking about and we just scream noises at each other along corridors.

‘Bobethoooooooonithonithonython,’ screams Chris.

‘Aaahahahahhhahhahthon,’ I reply, twitching out of control. I forget now how this odd mode of speech emerged.

‘Has anyone ever told you, you’re cracked?’ says Craig as he fiddles with a bazookoid gun. A toggle switch goes flying and lands with a clatter behind him. We all look at each other, waiting to see who’s going to say something first, then in unison we all bellow, ‘That lasted a long time, guy!’

The time when we are at our most unruly, the time when the four of us, who are, at a glance, four fully grown adult males, become utter schoolchildren, is when we are in the Starbug cockpit during rehearsals. Somehow it’s a bit like being in the classroom. Craig and Danny have been forced to sit in front because they are the bad boys. Chris and I, the swots of the class, are allowed to sit behind, but we are also often in trouble with teacher. The conversation in Starbug can be quite mind-numbing, a mixture of Danny’s showbiz facts, ‘Prince is a seriously rich geezer, guy.’

My liberal wishy-washyness. ‘Oh, I quite like Prince actually.’

Craig’s piercing insights; ‘You like Prince Robert man?’ says Craig. ‘So you like black culture do you?’

‘Oh yes,’ I reply, ‘Actually, I think I must have been black in a former life. Probably some sort of African Prince I would think.’

Danny explodes with laughs, possibly at something I’ve said, possibly at some memory of a Richard Prior line from a video he saw the night before.

‘Prince of Tossers,’ says Craig who, bored with the liberal, turns on the school prefect. ‘Chris man, how many cars have you got now?’

‘Ah, let me see,’ says Chris, sitting back comfortably and looking up into the roof. ‘Well, there’s the Bentley, the E-type…’

‘The E-type!’ screams Danny. ‘That is a serious poom poom wagon, man.’

‘It certainly is, Danielski,’ says Chris, ‘Then I have the 1934 London taxi.’

‘That’s handy,’ says Craig cheekily.

‘It’s a classic vehicle, Craig,’ says Chris. ‘Then there’s the Range Rover, that’s just a run about, then there’s the other Bentley.’

‘The other Bentley!’ screams Danny who laughs richly. ‘Imagine saying that, man. This is my Bentley, and this … is my other Bentley. That has serious poom poom potential, guy.’

Poom poom, executive poom poom, woofer, major woofer, bankable woofer. These are all terms I was, by now, au fait with. I would understand when someone said, ‘That gag on page seven, bag it and bin it, guy, it’s a ready-made cheque which I will pay into my already swollen National Woofminster Bank account.’

That means, roughly translated: the joke on page seven is very funny, so funny in fact that I know I will get a laugh, it will be simple to achieve a laugh, and I will store that laugh in an imaginary laughter bank, to call on in future when I do a joke which goes down the pan.

It’s odd how certain words or phrases from the script can conjure up a whole experience or memory as well. For me, the word ‘strawberry’ will never be the same again. I always remember trying to learn the replicator speech from Demons and Angels. I did learn it, but that was only the half of it.

Somehow, this scene was a real pig to do, and when we originally shot it, in front of an audience, something went wrong and we had to do the whole thing again at a later date.

I had to use tongs to pick up strawberries, place them on the replicator and press a load of buttons. We would then get a good strawberry and a bad strawberry, as we would later get a good Red Dwarf and a bad one.

For some reason talking and holding tongs and remembering all the moves pushed me to the limit. I seemed to be forever picking up strawberries and moving them about. Craig seemed to be forever watching me with great interest, then eating the bad strawberry, which was full of maggots.

‘Hey, I’ll eat me own maggots, man!’ It was all a bit gross. I think Demons and Angels was another inspired bit of writing on the boys’ behalf, but it was the hardest of the series for all of us.

When we were playing the low, or bad version of ourselves, we all got different costumes and make-up. Chris was in a kinky stockings-and-suspenders, whip-me fantasy, something he felt very at home in. Craig was dressed as a disgusting diseased pirate cowboy and Dan had grown monster sabre teeth. I, as irony control dictated, had an even hotter costume than normal.

My costume of series 3, 4 and 5 was fairly respectably boiling, but my low Kryten suit succeeded in raising the human body temperature to previously unrecorded highs. I have never sweated so much, not in a Turkish bath, a sauna or the Australian outback. The low Kryten was very easy to play, however, he was a bad-tempered old git, which is exactly what I was inside.

Alternatively the highs, or good version of the Red Dwarf crew, were very comfortable to play. We wore loose-fitting golden robes and we moved about gracefully. Portraying the untimely and unkind death of high Kryten was one of the few times I suffered any discomfort at the hands of the great and good Peter Wragg.

‘We’re going to wire you up with some body impacts,’ said Peter during a busy day's recording. ‘Danny’s got blood bags, but as you’re a robot, you’ve got sparks.’

‘Right, Peter,’ I said, ‘I’m with you, and uh, how big are these sparks?’

Peter gestured a sort of fair-sized spark that wasn’t too big, but bigger than a very small spark.

‘It’s quite a spark, you’ll feel it, but it won’t hurt you.’

‘Fine, fine,’ I said, nodding in a butch, confident way. Peter and the special effects team wired me up, we started the scene. When Danny’s blood bag body hits went off, the camera crew, sound crew and special effects team were all covered in blood. This was Terminator 2 meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There was blood everywhere. Danny of course, being the trooper he is, gave good death. Then my body hits went off. Big sparks, shooting five, maybe six feet out in front of me. Bop, bop, bop, on the chest area, bop, bop, on the stomach, and the one on the leg. Bop! Sudden pain, the one on the leg was attached to my long golden robe, somehow it had come loose and was facing sideways instead of front ways. The spark hit my thigh, just below the family downstairs water works department of the lower, front-mounted groinal socket tummy banana.

It wasn’t that bad, but as usual Peter Wragg was on the case. He takes his explosions and body hits very seriously.

‘Yes, the spark went off sideways and hit your leg, Robert,’ he said, examining the microscopic burn on my thigh. ‘But it looked very good.’

Next, due to the fact that he was wearing hippie sandals, Danny got his toe burned by a fizzing atomic grenade, which the high Cat and Kryten took to be a beautiful glowing orb. Kaboom.

Then we had to shoot a sequence where the normal Lister was on the run in a storeroom, trying to escape the low Red Dwarf crew. He stood next to a big case, which the low Kryten was to come out of, manic and violent.

Inside the case, the special effects team had marked out two punch holes where I should aim my fists. I couldn’t see Craig, but the idea was I would punch through the holes, strangle him a bit, throw him down then burst through myself, do a bit of comedy twitching and storm off.

Take one, I punch through the wall with all my might. I was wearing huge motorbike gloves with studs on them. I hit something hard and solid. It hurt like hell. It was the back of Craig’s head, he went flying forwards into some barrels and whacked his forehead.

‘Hey, I’m okay, man,’ said Craig, rubbing both sides of his head at once. This time the crew joined in, ‘He does all his own stunts.’

My hand was still hurting as we went for take two, this time the whole wall came out and I more or less fell on Craig. That time we both did our own stunts. Third take, I did hit Craig on the back of the head, but I managed to strangle him as well, and by this time Craig was so bashed about he wasn’t too bothered.

At the end of that day we were all a mass of bruises and minor burns, except Chris. Actually, I think he secretly wanted to get on his motorbike and ride home in his kinky low Rimmer outfit. But maybe that’s just me projecting.

As the weeks wore on, the prospect of going to Los Angeles and recording a pilot version of Red Dwarf for NBC Television seemed to become more and more likely. On quite a few occasions I would meet up with Rob and Doug and find out what was going on. They gave me a copy of the script they’d received from America. I read it, it seemed very good, very like the Red Dwarf I knew already. It seemed very close in its structure and gags to the very first show made in Britain. It was on different-shaped paper though and it had the legend ‘by Linwood Boomer’ on the cover. I had a vision of Linwood Boomer, a short, tubby, fast-talking man with thick glasses. It was such a great name. However, right up to the recording of the last episode, nothing was that clear. Then, I got a phone call from my agent. Universal Television had made an offer. Shit, I thought, these guys are serious.

The final episode we recorded, Back to Reality, was one of the most enjoyable for me. For a start we got to work with Timothy Spall, a long-time hero of mine. Not only that, but I got to wear loads of different costumes, including the legendary Jake Bullet from Cybernautics.

I had to work opposite Dwayne Dibbley who is the funniest and saddest person anyone has ever had to look at. When Danny puts Dwayne’s teeth in, I check my watch and give myself ten minutes clear. Dwayne makes me laugh out of control until I can’t breathe. It was very hard for even Kryten to keep a straight face when Dwayne claimed to be the Duke of Dork.

‘They can swivel on this mid digit until they squeal like pigs on a honeymoon.’ One of my favourite lines. The human brain, a massively complex system of neural networks, nerve clusters and grey squidgy stuff. An amazing ability to think, remember, record and create. When I am in Red Dwarf I have to remember a large number of lines. I get angry at home when I can’t remember them. My brain revolts against the deluge of information I am trying to force into it. Then a line like that comes along ‘And if those pen pushers at City Hall don’t like it, they can swivel on this mid digit until they squeal like pigs on a honeymoon.’

I only had to read that line once and I knew it. I never forgot it. I can still remember it now. What mechanism takes place in the human brain which allows a joke to stay in there, and an explanation for time dilation to go in one eye and out of the other, never to leave so much as a skid mark on its way through the toilet pan of my mind?

I’ll never know, but it’s certainly one reason why comedy actors love jokes. They’re much easier to remember. Although I have to admit I am terrible at remembering traditional jokes, I’ve never been able to do them. I start out well, but then it all falls to bits.

‘This bloke walks into a pub, oh no, no he doesn’t, he’s already in the pub, or is it a café? Look, never mind that, there’s a man in some form of public environment, could be an office, let me think, oh no, then the punchline won’t work.’

I can go on like that for hours, then I forget the punchline, or I give it out too early. There was a moment in series 5 where Rob and Doug used my rather odd line-learning technique in the show. It was during the final sequence of The Inquisitor, when Craig and I had frozen John Docherty, who was playing the Inquisitor, and I was having to remember what I do next, a confusing condition only experienced when time dilation is an issue.

When we were rehearsing, and I was on the edge of actually knowing my lines, the floor manager followed us around with a script. When I stumbled I would say very fast, ‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me, I know it, I know it.’ Then I would go quiet for a moment as my brain’s memory banks sorted through a load of old rubbish, then I would say, ‘What’s the line?’

In the scene, I ask Craig what I say next, then before he gets a chance to answer I say, ‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me, I know it, I know it.’

I think it’s safe to say, however, that this is the only time I’ve had a direct influence on a Red Dwarf script.

Come the pre-recording day for Back to Reality Timothy Spall had a problem. He walked into the make-up room, smelt the rubber mask, apologised, and left. He came back a while later and explained that the year before he’d done a Christmas film with Dawn French, I think, where he played a pig. I’d never seen it but he told me he had to wear a full-face prosthetic mask day after day for three weeks. He found it very difficult to wear, in fact he hated it, and had vowed never to wear one again, no matter what. He was the only person I’ve worked with who truly understood what it was like. Everyone who sees me in it is sympathetic, but Tim Spall knew what it was all about.

The final recording was great fun. We’d had to pre-record quite a bit, so there wasn’t so much to do when the audience were in. This is great for us as we finish early, not so much fun for the live audience who don’t get to see a great deal.

There was a party that night, but it wasn’t like the normal end-of-run parties, wrap parties they’re called in the trade. I can’t say wrap party though, it doesn’t sound right coming from my mouth.

‘Are you going to the wrap party, Craig?’ I just couldn’t do it, I’m not hip enough.

The reason the party was a bit of a flop was that we all knew we had to be up at the crack of dawn the next day. We hadn’t actually finished. We had one more tough day in the studio Pick-ups, it was called. Picking up all the bits we’d failed to get during the seven previous weeks. This isn’t surprising as Red Dwarf is a fiendishly difficult show to make. I have had this fact underlined after working on other shows, which are so simple and easy in comparison.

That last day in the studio was a real killer. It seemed all the hardest parts of the series had to be done again, and some bits we’d never done had to be made for the first time. The studio was hot, I was hotter, and the day seemed to go on and on. Everyone was tired and towards the last shot of the last take of the last day I reached my last corpuscle of patience. We were all standing in the Starbug cockpit waiting to make an entrance into the rear section. We seemed to be waiting for ages, the normal hectic banter between us had fallen to the odd phrase of encouragement.

‘You’ll be okay, man, one scene to go.’

‘Let’s hold it together, guys.’

Suddenly I shouted, ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, let’s get on with it!’

Of course, with hindsight, it’s clear how little this helps the situation. Every member of the crew was working hard, tired as they were, and were equally desperate to get the job done. But my eyes were really painful. They were tired before I had come into the studio, then to have to get up so early and have that much eye-irritating glue stuck so near your eyes can only be experienced to be understood. I don’t recommend it to anyone. As regards knowing what wearing prosthetics is like, George Orwell was right. Ignorance is strength.

We got the last shot done. We were cleared. Everyone clapped and whooped, we’d done it, we’d made series 5. The studio turned into a luvvie circus, everyone hugging and back-patting and congratulating everyone else. Then Craig had an idea, he got Rocket, the head camera man, to line a camera up onto my face, then Craig got hold of my Kryten nose and started to pull, very slowly. Everyone was watching the monitors, Kryten’s nose stretched and stretched, his whole face became a pink cone growing out of mine. I had been so hot most of the glue on my face was completely gone, the mask stayed there out of force of habit.

Eventually the rubber gave way with a thwack and Kryten’s face was removed. I’m embarrassed about what happened next because I’m a man and men aren’t supposed to, it proves I’m a sissy and a wet wimp and a complete and utter luvvie. I burst into tears. Craig put his arms around me and lead me out of the studio. In the corridor Chris gave me a big hug, as did Dan, and all I could do was blub.

In my dressing room, Craig kept his arm around me until the sobbing subsided and turned into laughter. The worst thing was, I knew why I was crying and I couldn’t tell anyone. At that moment it felt like I had just been through a war with those three men, they had stuck by me, hour after hour, through all the smoke and explosions and screaming and laughs, the bad tempers, the hours of waiting and learning lines and standing in the queue in the canteen. All that time I knew that for some reason I had been chosen to go to America and make Red Dwarf there, and I hadn’t told them. I felt like I’d cheated them, I felt like a heel.

This is the interesting dilemma with middle-class guilt-ridden liberals like me. You can’t be a guilt-ridden member of the bourgeoisie unless you’ve got something other people haven’t got. Then you can feel guilty about it and think that all people should have what you’ve got. You think that, you believe that, but you don’t give what you’ve got away, that’s too difficult. That can only be done by very few middle-class people. Like Gandhi.

So I was feeling guilty about going to America to be in the US Red Dwarf, but I didn’t say, ‘No, I won’t do it unless the others do it.’ It was a very difficult decision to make, and as Craig put his arm around me in the dressing room of Shepperton Studios on 8 December, it was a decision I was still far from making.

It’s far more popular now.

In fact the final title is The Reconstructed Heart: How To Spot The Difference Between A Normal Man And One Who Does The Housework, Is Great In Bed And Doesn’t Get All Iffy When You Mention Words Like Love And Commitment.

Notice how, whatever I do, there always seems to be a rubber content somewhere.

Kiss My Big Black Ass.

El Bow.

Now there’s a luvvie statement for you. ‘Acting is bloody hard work.’ See I, an Actor by Nigel Planer.

One of my favourite episodes of all time. Damn clever stuff.

This is how many cab drivers have referred to Craig over the years. I have only been in one cab once who hasn’t had Craig as a fare, and he was a novice driver.

Chapter 7

Qantas flight QF47 rumbled along the runway, air brakes up, wing flaps down, and no doubt a lot of switch flicking going on in the cockpit. I was in the rear section, asleep. I was sitting alone, next to the window, I lifted the blind and was blinded, the light is so harsh and bright in Queensland.

I’d made it somehow. Only two days before I’d been weeping pitifully in the arms of Craig, now I was lifting my bag from beneath my feet.

‘This is Wanda saying we hope you had a pleasant flight and that you’ll fly with Qantas again in the near future. Please remain in your seats until the Captain has switched off the seat belt sign.’

When the planners designed Brisbane airport they made one small mistake: they put the runway in one field and the airport building in another. Once the plane has landed it has to go along the ground for about a mile and a half, but it’s a pleasant trip. You see all sorts of seabirds and bushes and funny-looking trucks driven by men in shorts with long socks.

I got through customs with no problem, I was sure I was going to be arrested because the year before I’d been given a speeding ticket at Kangaroo Creek, New South Wales – yes, it really was called that – and I’d forgotten to pay it.

Judy met me in the airport and we drove to her favourite air-conditioned Italian coffee house in Brisbane. We had both been busy all year, she was getting ready to go to Ethiopia to make a film for Channel 4, I was going to America, forever. That’s how it seemed. We both felt our time together in Australia was precious. It might be the last time we were together for ages.

After two days, the phone started going.

‘Hi, Robert, this is Mark Ivener,’ said a voice so beautifully controlled it was hard to believe it wasn’t computer-generated. Mark Ivener sounded like Hal the computer in 2001 A Space Odyssey. No matter what was going on, he would always talk in the same lilting, soothing West-Coast accent.

‘I’m the attorney dealing with your work permit, do you have a moment to talk?’

A moment, I had all day. I had an attorney, I couldn’t believe it. I could picture him in his LA Law-type office: the handmade suit, the Lamborghini in the underground garage, the huge house with the walk-around kitchen and the beautiful wife who did charity work. We’d all seen this man portrayed a thousand times in a thousand movies and TV shows. Mark Ivener, attorney, played by Kevin Costner. He gets the foreign actor the work permit, but then the actor moves into his life, his wife, his nightmares. Visiting Performer starring Kevin Costner, Michelle Pfeiffer and introducing, as the deranged mad man, Robert Llewellyn…

‘Getting you a work permit in the time allotted is going to prove to be quite difficult,’ he explained ‘You will have to send me as much information about yourself as you possibly can.’

I was sitting in a suburban house outside Brisbane, twelve thousand miles from my flat. All I had with me was my little computer, a pair of shorts and some broken dark glasses. He wasn’t kidding about it being difficult, but I don’t know if he understood how difficult. Many Americans’ grasp of geography outside their own borders is hazy at best, and sometimes astonishingly inaccurate. For all I knew Mark Ivener thought that as people spoke English in Australia it must be near England, or he may have thought I was Australian, or he may have thought I was an idiot.

With copious use of the phone I managed to get friends in London to go to my flat, find my cuttings file, which was a joke, it wasn’t a file, it was a box full of old bits of newspapers and magazines. They then had to send these, by expensive courier, to Los Angeles as soon as possible.

Then the phone started to ring again. It was Linwood Boomer.

‘Hi, Robert, this is Linwood speaking, listen, Rob and Doug tell me you’re still not sure about doing the pilot. I’d like to hear why you’re having this problem, Robert, maybe we can work something out.’

‘Yes, that’d be good,’ I said. I explained, ‘It’s kind of a heavy commitment.’ I was referring to a section in the contract which dealt with how long I was under the control of Universal Television. Basically it was six years. They wanted me to sign something that would mean I may have to live and work in Los Angeles for six years!

‘Six years seems like a long time to me,’ I said. ‘You know, in England we sign a contract for six weeks and we think we’re going to miss a better gig.’

‘Sure, sure, I understand,’ said Linwood. ‘But, you know, that part is a deal breaker.’

That was the term, deal breaker. That meant you could negotiate everything else, you could get a bigger limo, you could get a different make-up artist,[29]

you could get more money, that was easy. But sign for shorter than six years? No way.

‘When people buy you in Hollywood, they buy you, Robert,’ said Linwood, jokingly. I thought, that’s the sort of humour that scares the shit out of me.

‘I’ll think about it and get back to you,’ I said, and Linwood impressed on me the fact that getting back to him very soon would be very beneficial for the project, the people behind the project and quite a sizeable proportion of the population of Southern California.

I had been worrying about the six-year part of this deal ever since my agent first informed me, a few weeks earlier. I had spent a couple of hours on the phone to Nigel Planer, who I’d been working with earlier in the year. He was the only person I knew who’d been through the same thing. The Young Ones was taken over the Atlantic in the mid-eighties, and Nigel was the only member of the British cast to go. He had experienced a fairly hideous time, worried sick that he was going to have to stay there for six years with a group of people he hated, who managed to make The Young Ones into a sort of grubby Benny Hill show. He was hugely relieved when the pilot was a flop and he was released from his contract. I took it as a salutary warning. It was not an easy thing to decide.

I’d been through a similar experience on a lower level many years before, when I was still working with the comedy group, The Joeys. A BBC director had seen a show we were doing and asked me to go along to read for a part he was casting. I had no experience at that time, I had no agent, I didn’t know the first thing about the BBC. I went along and met the writer, a charming man called Howard Schuman, who wrote Rock Follies back in the early seventies.

They wanted me to play quite a large role, looking back I suppose it was the lead, in a new BBC drama set in a pirate TV station. To cut a long story short, I eventually said no. It was interrupting the work I loved with The Joeys, and it was upsetting the group dynamics within the company. That’s another way of saying we were dealing with professional jealousy in a mature and giving way. In fact, more importantly, I got the impression that the people behind the play just naturally assumed I’d jump at the part, like all actors would. Saying no was very hard. I felt physically sick afterwards, and I regret not working with Howard Schuman because I think he’s good, but I was always glad I said no.

Now I was faced with the same decision, only on a bigger scale. Mind you, as I kept reminding myself, what a decision to have to make. Do I go to Los Angeles and get paid quite stupendous amounts of money doing a job I already do in England, live in a fab house in the hills, drive a Ford Mustang convertible to work every day, or do I go back to the rain and cold of recession-hit Britain?

Or, alternatively, do I work in Los Angeles, get mugged, get shot, go to an analyst, get ripped off, become a gym junkie, use steroids, pump up and turn into a sad sub Jean-Claude Van Damme and die of a heart attack while wearing a rubber head at the age of forty, or go and live on a farm in Gloucestershire with a couple of pigs and a dog and live 'till I’m ninety-seven.

In Brisbane, Judy and I went Christmas shopping at the Toowong mall. Judy comes from a big Catholic family who, although not approving of our non-married, living-together-in-carnal-sin-type relationship, are very friendly and accommodating. This was to be my first Christmas in Australia, Christmas lunch was to be under the house and out in the yard, not on the beach, but I wasn’t complaining.

Judy’s departure to Ethiopia was looming, I was still sweating buckets trying to decide what to do. We went to a seafront motel in Yamba for a week. Yamba is a very quiet coastal town about four hundred miles south of Brisbane, in northern New South Wales. Judy’s brother and wife were there on holiday.

We spent three days lounging around on the beach, going for walks along the riverbank, watching pelicans and dolphins. It was so new and clean and tidy, our hire car was quiet and modern and clean, the sea was clean, the shops were clean, it was just like Home and Away.

Then, on the morning of the fourth day, at about five-thirty in the morning to be exact, the phone rang. The voice of the motel proprietor came on, ‘Call for you from Los Angeles,’ he said in his Home and Away-type accent.

‘Hi, Robert, this is Linwood, how’s it going?’ the super-clear voice on the phone asked. For a moment I thought, ‘My God, he’s come to Australia to get me, he’s in Yamba with a gun!’

‘Okay, Linwood,’ I said, trying to wake up. ‘I suppose you want me to tell you my decision.’

‘Sure, Robert. That would be real good.’

I told Linwood how I was worried about living in Los Angeles, about being apart from Judy and my friends.

‘I don’t think you understand, Robert,’ Linwood explained patiently, ‘You are going to be very rich. If this series takes off, you more or less write your own ticket. You can pay for your friends to come visit, you can buy Judy a house in the hills to keep her happy. This is Hollywood, Robert. Stuff happens here.’

‘Yeah, but six years,’ I said feebly.

‘Six years nothing. Do you know how much Ted Danson gets in Cheers?’

‘Yes, but I’m never going to be Ted Danson,’ I said.

‘That’s not the point, this is just to give you some idea of what you could get if the show is a hit. Ted Danson gets over one million dollars an episode. He does thirty-six shows a year. Robert, you are looking at the prospect of earning some serious money here. Not only that,’ he continued with barely a breath, ‘I know you’re really going to get on with the team we’ve got here. Some really great actors, really nice people who I know you’re going to bond with. What it all adds up to, Robert, is being paid a heck of a lot of money for having a great time. Really, you should do it.’

‘I have to ask the woman I love,’ I said, surprising myself at the expression. The woman I love rolled over in bed, looked at her watch and said, ‘Oh sign the fucking contract so I can get some sleep.’

‘I’ll do it,’ I said to Linwood.

‘You won’t regret it. I’ll get my people onto it straight away. We’re gonna fly you here first class, you’ll get a limo at the airport, you won’t know what’s hit you. It’s gonna be great, Robert, believe me.’

I was, I have to say, starting to believe him. I went out on our Home and Away sun porch, breathed the salty air deeply and felt tingly all over. The sun was just coming up over the Pacific. I watched a dolphin surface behind a fishing boat that was chugging slowly into harbour, the air was still cool and fresh, but with that special sea tang. It was drop-dead beautiful as I stared out to sea. It was across this ocean that I was going to go and change my life, become an American TV star, wear a rubber mask until I was forty-one, earn hundreds of thousands of dollars. Be rich.

Later that day Judy and I walked along the ten-mile beach which stretches south from Yamba. The sun was beating down but the wind kept us cool. I stood with my feet in the Pacific and said the word ‘rich’ over and over again. I had never been rich, I had earned money, sometimes more than the national average, but for the vast majority of my adult life I had lived on virtually nothing. Subsistence living. Now, suddenly, in my mid-thirties, I was going to be earning a huge amount of money, I was going to be living in a foreign country and everything I was used to was going to disappear.

I knew what real rich people were like, people with old money, seriously rich people don’t appear in TV sitcoms, they don’t appear at all. They live in old houses in the Home Counties and shoot pheasants. Seriously rich people earn millions of pounds a year doing nothing, because they’ve got billions of pounds in the bank. I struggled to get my potential richness in perspective.

Christmas in Brisbane was a family affair, all Judy’s brothers and their wives and children, friends and relatives (rellies) sat under the house, out of the blazing sun. We had a surprisingly traditional English Christmas dinner, only cold, with salad. We had Christmas pudding and mince pies and there was loads of washing-up to do.

On New Year’s Eve I flew to Melbourne and Judy flew to London to meet up with her film crew before flying to Ethiopia. I spent New Year’s Eve with hundreds of Judy’s friends in a warehouse party in Melbourne. She spent it in a plane waiting on the tarmac at Singapore airport.

I spent ten days in Melbourne waiting for my work permit to come through. It rained every day. I heard on the radio one morning, ‘This is the wettest ten-day period in January since records began back in 1850.’

My suntan peeled off, it was like going back to London. In fact Melbourne is very like London, it’s like Streatham to be accurate, presumably built at about the same time. The one thing Melbourne has over Streatham is trams, old green rattling things, that can take you all over the city for about fifty pence. They’re brilliant and remind all English people who visit just what a good idea they are and how stupid we were to allow the car manufacturers to destroy them.

On 8 January I caught the number 35 tram down the St Kilda road, got off outside the American consulate building and picked up my passport. I turned the page and saw what had taken such a struggle to get. An H1 visa, allowing me to work in the United States for a period of six months from 10 January.

On my last night I went out for a Vietnamese meal with all the friends I had made in Melbourne. Early the following morning my mate Wayne took me out to the airport in his battered Honda. It was a great way to start a journey to immense, undreamed-of wealth. Sitting on the ripped seat of a rust-bucket car with my bag stuffed on top of the kiddie seat in the back.

I got to the airport about an hour before the flight. I had a first-class ticket waiting for me. You don’t have to hang around when you’re on first class. I didn’t know how rich people lived, but I was prepared to learn.

A nicely dressed young man carried my one small bag to the plane with me. I only had to carry my ticket. I was shown to a huge leather seat up in the nose bit. It was like an armchair. I sat down and was offered champagne. I don’t normally drink, but this was too much, how could I refuse? Before I’d got over the bubble effect of the champagne, the plane started to move. This is the life, I thought, get on the plane, plane flies. No hanging around watching people try and stuff too much luggage into the overhead compartment.

I also discovered why they put the first-class compartment up at the front of the plane. It’s about ten times smoother than the back, where I normally have to sit. You can barely feel the plane moving. Then I discovered my toiletries bag. You may be able to tell from this that I love flying, which I do, but this was the best. A little leather toiletries bag (I’ve still got it) was full of the best gentlemen’s bits and bobs on offer: aftershave, face cream, mouthwash, toothpaste, toothbrush, not a little fold-up one, a posh proper toothbrush. Nice pongy soap, a little flannel, a plastic thing for getting fluff off your clothes. I was in heaven.

Then they bought the food. Oh boy. I mean, I love airline food when it’s on a little tray with little plastic pots and salt in a paper tube. But the first-class food, I couldn’t believe it. Dead posh and really nice, what’s more, I could help myself to the trolley. This is my big problem with being in posh places. Being served by people makes me uncomfortable. I like serving people, or doing things myself. Really, when I was sitting in the first-class compartment it was as if Kryten was there, dithering and offering to wash-up.

There were only two people in the first-class compartment, me, and an orthodontist from Beverly Hills who had been visiting his daughter in Sydney. He told me I had ‘potentially good teeth’, but that if I went to see him, he could give me star-quality teeth. I said I didn’t like perfect white teeth, I thought they looked fake. He said he would hand-sculpt my teeth so they would look naturally perfect.

The orthodontist and I had three members of the cabin crew to look after us, so they weren’t exactly stretched. The nice thing about Australians is they didn’t give me a second look, they were quite happy to let this scruffy oik help himself to the Beouf de la La-De-Da avec les veg et tous les trimmings. I had the time of my life, but as I normally don’t drink, I was soon flat on my back, grinning and dribbling slightly, sleeping in my super-comfortable, great big, lift-your-feet-up leather chair. I was so happy I’d said yes to Linwood Boomer. I could see him in my dreams, waiting by a big door with the word ‘Hollywood’ written on it. He was always about to open it in the dream and let me see what was there, but he never quite did.

The plane landed in Los Angeles two and a half hours before it had taken off in Melbourne. I started the journey at twelve-thirty in the afternoon in Melbourne, I arrived in Los Angeles at ten-thirty in the morning of the same day, but I’d been flying for eighteen hours. I stood in the immigration queue scratching my head, with that special expression which only happens to people when their internal body clock has completely blown a fuse. No amount of watch-gazing or mental mathematics can alleviate the hollow burned-out feeling you get after a long-haul flight. I love that feeling, it’s better than taking drugs. I was completely out of it as I handed the official my passport. He looked at my work permit, looked at me, looked at my work permit again, smiled slightly and said, ‘Welcome to the USA, sir.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘You’re welcome,’ he said, and I knew I’d arrived. As I walked out into the main concourse there were three hundred limousine drivers standing behind the barrier, each of them with a card bearing someone’s name. I scanned the cards, none of which looked anything like Llewellyn. I was prepared for something akin to Llewellyn, like Lew Allyn, or Lew Ellen. My name has been spelt many different ways over the years, but there was nothing. A huge black policewoman with a massive gun was standing with them, she looked at me and registered my anxiety. She didn’t offer to help, just let her hand brush the butt of her gun as she adjusted the belt.

I kept going past the throng of people waiting for passengers to emerge and sat on a seat in the waiting area. The shock of America is always pretty intense I find, it operates on a higher level than any other country I know. Anything can happen in America. You can make it. If it seems hopeless in Europe, or Africa, when you arrive in America you know immediately it is possible. That’s why so many people want to go there. They’ve heard this is what it’s like, and it’s true. People go to America and they do make it. They become wealthy beyond the dreams of kings. I’m sure if you did a statistical analysis you’d find out it was very few of them. Most people are poor as usual but the atmosphere is utterly infectious. Even the limousine drivers are happy to be working, happy to serve you and look like they’re about to make it big, somewhere.

‘Mr Llewellyn?’ asked a deep male voice.

I looked up into the suntanned face with perfect teeth and a carved sculpture of super shiny hair on top.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Hi, I’m John, I’m your driver at this time. Would you like to follow me?’

I stood up to discover although John had a wonderful deep smooth American voice, he was a little on the short side. Still, he wasn’t letting that hold him back.

He picked up my bag and started making his way through the crowd. I was on my guard, I’ve been around, this looked like the oldest trick in the book: read the label on my luggage, ask me to follow him, then pull a gun on me in the car park, put me in the trunk of the limo, drive out to a desert ranch full of psychopathic killers, nail me to the floor and gang rape me to death over a period of three weeks.

John walked to a huge, and I mean huge, joke of a car. It looked six cars long, an absurd long black thing with about fifteen windows down the side. It was the cliché, it was the stupid stretch limo which is so embarrassing now, so out-of-date. Let’s face it, a stretch limo is now, and always will be, a tosser’s car.

John popped the trunk,[30]

put my bag in and opened the door for me. I was sleep-starved and feeling so weird that I couldn’t help giggling a bit. I almost expected to see Michael Douglas sitting in the back, having a blow job and buying Rio Tinto Zinc like it was going out of style. He’d be wearing a five-thousand-dollar suit, with his hair slicked back, he’d be Gordon Gekko.

‘Robert, I want you to find out everything you can about Universal Television while you’re there, I want to buy them out, I want to suck them dry, chew the fat out of the mother fuckers. I want to own their goddamn balls!’

‘Yes, Mr Gekko, sir.’

The limo was empty, huge and lonely-looking.

‘Can I sit up in the front with you?’ I asked rather sheepishly.

‘Sure, Bob,’ said John. No English person could call you Bob that quickly. I slipped into the spacious front seat, John started the huge car up and we hissed along the concrete roads. John had lived in LA for twenty years, originally he was from somewhere like Wilmington, Alabama. He seemed to have done everything, worked everywhere and of course, driven everyone.

‘I had Ellen Barkin in here yesterday,’ he said as we pulled out of the airport onto a huge five-lane freeway. ‘She’s a very, very beautiful lady, and very charming.’

‘Is that right. Yeah, I’ve always had a soft spot for Ellen,’ I said, settling into the huge comfy seat and slipping on my dark glasses.

‘Of course, one of the perks of this job, Bob, is that I get to find out where everyone lives,’ he said. ‘I could take you to Ellen’s house, introduce you maybe.’

‘Oh yeah?’ I said, suddenly panicking again. He had to be a serial killer, he knew where the stars lived, he kept a little black notebook next to a knife with a jagged edge. I would be the only person who could save Ellen. I’d run to her house, a police helicopter shining a light on me from above. I’d fight John to the death. I’d be injured, she’d visit me in the hospital, the doctor would say I might pull through, Ellen would cry, we’d kiss. Aaaargh!

Within minutes of being in Los Angeles I had slipped into movieland. Everywhere I looked seemed so familiar, and although I’d been there on two previous occasions, this familiarity wasn’t from past experience. It was from the movies, the thousands of films we’ve all seen, filmed on the streets of Los Angeles. Tall palm trees, wide roads, absurdly stretched limousines. Big pick-up trucks with massive tyres, convertible Rolls-Royces with the roof down, bust-up old Buick station wagons full of migrant workers wearing blue nylon peak caps.

We drove over South Central LA at speed. It doesn’t look like much, row after row of red-roofed houses, the odd palm tree, and every few miles a massive building with no windows which is an air-conditioned shopping mall. In the far distance the gleaming, glittering towers of downtown LA.

It is a frightening town, it is a depressing town, it is a town of the most cruel contrast between wealth and poverty, but it is exciting. However jaded and old-world and European I try to be, I can’t help my pulse rate increasing when I’m there. I felt so vibrant and alive, maybe it was due to the fact I’d been through a time warp, but I have very clear memories of the first few hours of each trip to LA.

By now John had found out all about me.

‘So what’s this series you’re making?’ he asked.

‘It’s not a series, it’s only a pilot, it’s called
Red Dwarf.’

‘Red Dwarf.’

‘Yes that’s right.’

‘Red Dwarf.’

‘Yes, it’s about a space ship.’

‘So it’s not about dwarves?’

‘No, it’s set on a space ship, three million-light years from earth, going the wrong way.’

‘Red Dwarf.’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’

This was a very American phenomenon. There was something about the title that a lot of Americans couldn’t quite latch onto. They are terribly verbally right-on there, and using a term like dwarf makes them flinch. It’s a bit like us using the term spazzo, or poof. It’s just not done. If an American actor said to you, ‘I appear in this show called Red Spazzo,’ you’d blanche a bit, wouldn’t you? I would.

‘Red Dwarf.’ John was still stuck on this.

‘That’s it,’ I said.

‘Actually, Bob, looking at you, you are perfect for a project I’m working on.’

This was it, I thought, he was a psychopath, his project was my grizzly murder.

‘It’s a movie about a pool service operative. He goes to all the stars homes and cleans their pools, and he has sex with all these women. I thought about casting him as French, but I think English would be brilliant. The project is with Ted Rinvalklatz, you know, who did Bunny Killers last year. May I send your agent a script?’

‘Sure,’ I said, I gave him my agent’s card. We drove through Hollywood, across the hills and into The Valley. This was the home of Universal Studios, where you can do the Universal studio tour and see Miami Vice shoot-outs and Jaws comes to try and eat you.

We drove up a steep, tree-lined drive and pulled up in front of the Universal Sheraton hotel. Immediately there were smartly dressed men opening doors and trunks and palms as I carried my own, very small bag, into reception. I bid John farewell, he told me to expect his script at any time. I’m still waiting for it.

I checked in and got in the lift with a huge man in a suit and a very small blonde woman. The woman was Dolly Parton, she smiled at me. I didn’t know what to do, I was tripping with exhaustion.

‘Oh, hi,’ I said. ‘It’s great to meet you.’ Dolly smiled again, the door opened on the twelfth floor and I fell out.

My room overlooked a six-lane freeway and a swimming pool fringed with lanky palms. I sat down and calmed down. The January sun was hot through the window, I had to try and stay awake until night time or the jet lag would last weeks, and I was due to start work two days later.

I picked up the phone and dialled a long number that Judy had faxed to me from Ethiopia.

‘Hello…’

‘Can I speak to Judy…’

‘Hello…’

‘Hi, can I speak to Judy Pas…’

‘Hello.’

‘Yes, can I…’

‘Hello…’

This went on for about three or four minutes until I could hear the phone being thrown down, then I’d wait a bit longer and suddenly there was Judy on the line. She was in Africa, she was having the time of her life, she was okay.

If by any chance you win the pools, or your premium bond comes up, and you get depressed because money doesn’t bring you happiness, and you want to get rid of your money - if you feel like that, here is a very good way of getting rid of quite stupendous amounts very quickly: fly to Los Angeles, first class, Qantas, via Melbourne, that’ll use up a fair bit I should think. Then check in to the Universal Sheraton hotel, call the Hotel Gohar, Gondar, Ethiopia and ask to speak to Len. There won’t be anybody there called Len, but they’ll go and have a look for you anyway. As they look, you will be paying top dollar to listen down a phone line to the sound of Africa. Judy was okay, I was relieved. I fell asleep for what felt like a week.

The following day I met Andrea, she was with her boyfriend who was going around the world with her on a much-longed-for holiday. We met up in the lobby and drove into the valley to a special effects company who were making the new Kryten mask and costume.

The company was situated in a large industrial complex, the sort of place Mel Gibson finds a heroin factory and shoots lots of stuntmen in.

The special effects boys were great, so like their English cousins, enthusiastic and fast-talking, living in a world of in-jokes and technical explanation.

‘We are going to be doing everything in our power to make sure you are really, incredibly comfortable, Robert,’ said the man with the beard. ‘So first we need to do a full body cast.’

In an effort to make me incredibly comfortable, I had to stand and be covered in plaster of Paris bandages again. The glamour of first-class travel and luxury hotel suits was suddenly knocked into focus. I was here to work, I was here to wear rubber, and there was no way of getting around that.

As I stood still I started to take in the surroundings. This was the company who made Spock’s ears, phasers which could be set to stun, the little flip-top box that Captain Kirk asked Scotty to beam him up with. They made the weird wrap-around glasses for the black guy in the new Star Trek, which I hadn’t seen. They made guns and space ships and all manner of weird bits and pieces for dozens of movies.

A man who looked like he was in Easy Rider entered the workshop, he was going to make my new mask. I got very involved in the discussions as to how it should work, how much of my face should be exposed and if I could keep my own nose.

The battle of the mask was to continue for many days, but the man who made my mask, who I only met once, was a real genius, and a fast genius.

When Andrea and I got back to the hotel that evening Rob and Doug had turned up delirious with jet lag. They had been working flat out on editing the British series so they were tired before they set out. They sat in the lobby of the hotel, drank large schooners of lager and grinned at everybody.

‘It’s amazing … I think,’ said Rob.

‘Yeah, no, yeah,’ said Doug.

On Monday morning, the cast and crew of Red Dwarf gathered inside the vast studio of Stage 43, Universal City studios. The space was twice the size of Shepperton, which is big enough. The sight that made us gasp was the set, an exact replica of the British set, in every detail. The floor plan was the same, the fittings, everything, it was absolutely remarkable.

A man of at least six foot eight walked up to me, he looked like an ex-basketball player. He was an ex-basketball player, and the stage manager. He shook my hand firmly and introduced himself as Elvin Ivory. I followed his huge long strides outside into the weak morning sun.

‘I’m going to show you your parking space, Robert,’ he said as if I was an unruly kid at kindergarten. We walked across a huge car park and he stood in an empty space in the middle.

‘This is your parking space. If anyone else parks here, you come and tell me, and I will personally kick their ass. And if you park any place else, I will kick your ass. You understand?’

‘Yeah, sure,’ I said trying to sound local and cool. ‘There’s only one problem.’

‘What’s that?’ snapped Elvin.

‘I don’t have a car.’

Elvin was silent for a moment, the chewed his lips, then he said, ‘Robert, I don’t give a damn if you have a car or not, this is your space and if any other mother parks his car here, I want you to tell me. You understand?’

‘I understand, Elvin,’ I said.

I followed Elvin back to the studio; as we walked down the canyon between the huge buildings he pointed to a smaller building, which looked like a block of flats. ‘That’s your dressing room over there. It’s got your name on the door, “Robert Llewellyn”.’ Elvin clearly didn’t leave anything to chance, he was to continue to remind me of my name at regular intervals.

In the studio more and more people were gathering, men in suits mingled with scruffy-looking arty types, I was making myself a tea trying to work out who was who in the cast. At that point I had only met Hinton Battle, the actor who was to play the Cat. His similarities to Danny were amazing, he was an actor and dancer, he’d been in dozens of Broadway shows, he’d won awards, worked with Diana Ross, all that kind of thing.

A thin man shook my hand, ‘Hi, Robert, I’m Chris Eigman.’ He had one of those sharp, funny, what I take to be New York intellectual accents. Chris, I discovered, is from Colorado, and he was playing Rimmer. I immediately warmed to him, he looked like an alternative Rimmer, good casting I thought to myself. I recognised him from a film called Metropolitan I’d seen a couple of years earlier, about posh kids in New York, in which he was very funny.

‘Hi, Robert, welcome to Hollywood, I’m Linwood,’ said Linwood Boomer. He wasn’t short, or fat, he didn’t wear glasses, he was a handsome, athletic-looking Californian. He shook my hand vigorously, I stared into his unusually bright blue eyes and wondered if his name really, really was Linwood Boomer. I always had a suspicion his name was Pete Jones or something, but a daft Hollywood agent had told him a name like Linwood would get him more gigs.

Linwood used to be in an American series called Little House on the Prairie, where he played a blind boy. His eyes are so bright blue it was easy to see how he got the part, you can never quite believe he is looking at you.

‘Meet Craig Bierko, he’s playing Lister,’ said Linwood as he guided me towards a tall, handsome man who I’d taken to be the director or a writer or someone like that. Certainly not Lister.

‘Hi, Bob,’ he said. ‘Great to work with you, I’ve watched all the Red Dwarf series, I think you do an incredible job.’

So this was Lister, a tall, handsome, white man. When I had discussed this with Rob and Doug one evening in their office in Shepperton, they had been under the impression that Lister was going to be a short, tubby Hispanic actor. That seemed to fit the bill, but clearly the Americans had worried that portraying a Hispanic man as a dirty, lazy but very humane slob would create a negative reaction in the Hispanic community, or something. In some ways it’s the same Hollywood paranoia behind the fear that ‘middle America’ wouldn’t understand British humour, or a Liverpudlian accent. It’s rubbish; if you can understand someone from Mississippi, you can understand anything. The reason American television channels don’t show British comedy programmes is because they don’t want to. They make their own, and they make a fortune out of it. Why give money to anyone else? They’d be stupid to do otherwise, all that is clear is that it has nothing to do with accents.

In the car park earlier, I had walked past a very glamorous woman with a lot of hair. Big hair as I discovered it was called. She smiled at me and I felt flattered that someone so good-looking would even notice me. Suddenly she was standing in front of me shaking my hand.

‘Hello, Robert, I’m Jane Leeves,’ she said in a husky English accent, ‘I’m Holly.’

Jane had lived in Los Angeles for ten years, she was appearing as a regular character in Murphy Brown, a sitcom which gained international notoriety when the lead character, played by Candice Bergen, criticised the Vice President, Dan Quayle, during the run-up to the election.

My head was spinning with all this new information and names I had to try and remember. The three other members of the cast were Lorraine Toussaint who played Captain Tao, Elizabeth Morehead who played Kochanski and Michael Heintzman who played Officer Munson.

Naturally, I managed to get the whole thing utterly confused. The cast stood in a small circle and I said everyone’s name and pointed to them.

‘Hinton, Jane, Craig, Chris.’ I got Craig and Chris the wrong way around. I was so confused about the fact that they had the same names as their English counterparts my brain had gone on short time and I had decided that the coincidence was too great, it must be Rimmer played by Craig, and Lister played by Chris.

‘I’m Chris, that’s Craig,’ said Chris Eigman patiently, he patted me on the back. ‘You’re confused aren’t you, Robert? But you’re working in Hollywood now though, it’s important you remember everyone’s name, I’ll be testing you from time to time.’

People started to sit down around a long table in front of the set. Most people seemed to know where to sit, I couldn’t work it out so I hovered about looking around for help. Elvin noticed this and pointed to a canvas directors chair with my name emblazoned on the back in red appliqué.

‘Robert Llewellyn,’ he said as he tapped the chair. I couldn’t believe it, I had my own chair with my own name on the back, like in Hollywood. I was in Hollywood. I sat down but kept turning around to look at my name, I showed Rob and Doug who were sitting down the other end of the table. They stood up and showed me theirs, they had their own chairs too. The only difference being theirs stood a good five inches higher than mine. There was already a hierarchy, the actors get the low chairs with their names on, the writers and producers and directors all have higher chairs with footrests.

‘Good morning everybody, and welcome to Stage 42, Universal Studios, where we are going to make a pilot episode of Red Dwarf,’ said Linwood in his soft, undulating tones. ‘We are all going to have a great time here, this is a fantastic script, it comes from a great series which is a real big hit in Great Britain, we’ve got a fantastic cast, you guys.’ He looked along the side of the table where we were sitting. ‘Craig Bierko, Chris Eigman, Robert Llewellyn, Jane Leeves.’ There was a huge round of applause from everyone, Rob and Doug joined in slightly later but with no less enthusiasm.

Linwood continued, ‘A great director, Jeff Field,’ he looked at a quiet-looking man with a beard who nodded and smiled. He got another round of applause, not quite so big as ours. ‘And a great crew.’ About fifteen assorted people whooped and clapped vigorously, I joined in politely, they got the least of the claps.

‘Well, alright!’ said Linwood, rising to the occasion. ‘I know we’re all going to bond real good, and really have a great time, because if we have a great time, we’ll produce a great product. And that’s why we’re here people, to produce a good television, Red Dwarf.’ Even Linwood said Red Dwarf a bit like John the limo driver. ‘Okay, so let’s read the script, then, we’ll have a talk, get to know each other, and have lunch.’

My smile was fixed to my face, I told myself quietly, ‘These people are clearly mad, they all clap each other but we haven’t done anything yet. Stay calm, you’re only here for three weeks, you haven’t actually signed your contract yet, breath into the anxiety.’ I glanced to my right to see Craig Bierko looking healthily depressed. ‘Maybe they’re not all mad,’ I hoped as I picked up my script.

As we read, the banks of men in suits sitting in the audience seating laughed very supportively during the funny parts. The director laughed convincingly, but automatically, at every potentially amusing moment. We had to wait every now and then for Linwood Boomer’s long, languorous, ‘Ahaha ha ha.’

For the first time in my Red Dwarf experience, though, I was the old-timer. I knew my character backwards, everyone else was struggling with theirs. As soon as we’d finished reading through the script, the cast gathered around the craft services table.

Craft services is catering to you and me. At the BBC this might sometimes stretch to a coffee machine and a pile of plastic cups, sometimes even one packet of biscuits. In Hollywood there was always a huge table freshly stocked with regular coffee, decaf coffee, fifteen different sorts of tea, herbal and regular, Danish pastries, doughnuts, a massive bowl full of candy bars, bowls of fruit like they have in adverts, chewing gum, bubble gum, lollies, mints, muffins which are like small Christmas cakes, and a fridge full of every sort of soft drink, fruit juice, cola and mineral water you could imagine. The table sagged under its heavy burden, and as soon as we’d demolished one pile of food, it was mysteriously replaced by someone from craft services.

‘So what d’you think of the script Robert?’ asked Hinton. I was just about to speak when I realised the whole cast were standing around waiting to hear what I had to say.

‘Oh, ur, it’s ur, yeah, it’s good.’

` ‘C’mon, it’s crap isn’t it?’ said Craig Bierko.

‘Well, it has room for some more gags,’ I said politely.

‘Like about ten square miles,’ said Chris Eigman. ‘C’mon people, let’s face it, we’ve got a turkey on our hands.’

‘Oh no,’ I interjected, ‘it’ll be okay, look, the boys are here.’ I pointed to Rob and Doug who were talking to Linwood Boomer and Jeff Field, the director.

‘Is that Rob and Doug?’ asked Hinton. I nodded. ‘Which is which?’

‘Rob is the one wearing the weird cowboy boots who’s smoking and talking quite a lot. He’s sort of harsh and cruel on the outside, but actually I think there’s a very caring person trapped inside somewhere. Doug is the one with the limp who is talking less, but listening very carefully. He’s more caring and considerate at first glance, but I have the suspicion he is an absolute rock on the inside.’

It was like a scene from a thirties backstage movie. The cast were all grouped around to hear what I was saying. I was almost expecting Mickey Rooney to walk in at any moment and say, ‘C’mon guys, let’s do the show here!’

We had lunch together in a huge canteen, miles away on the other side of the lot. To get there we had to walk through the public part of the studio complex, the Universal Studio tour section. It was like working backstage in a theme park because that is essentially where we were. Every ten minutes or so a tractor pulling five hundred people in open-topped trailers would rumble past the studio door and we would hear snippets of studio history.

‘On the left is the studio where in 1953, Clint Eastwood made his first appearance in…’

The canteen was not full of movie stars, but every now and then someone would walk past who I recognised from some sitcom or other which had been shown in England. Of course, being proper actors, my fellow cast members knew who everyone was, what they were in now, what they had been in, what they were hoping to be in, how much they got paid, which agency they were in and which team they batted for.[31]

We spent the afternoon blocking out each scene in the most relaxed and happy manner. The whole set-up was so calm; as actors our every whim was catered for, there was absolutely no pressure on us to do anything. Jeff Field, the director, came up to me at one point as I was trying to learn the first couple of speeches I had to do.

‘Robert, maybe we could go through this opening scene at some point, you know.’

‘Sure, sure, sure,’ I said as I jumped up, my normal reaction from three series of Red Dwarf in England.

‘No no, there’s no rush, you come over when you’re ready,’ said Jeff. I was slowly learning that all the hierarchies I was used to did not apply in America.

On the set of a British TV programme the director is the boss and everyone works around them. In America, it’s the producer, who is often one of the writers as well. Linwood Boomer was that man, Jeff was just the director and seemed to be more or less at our beck and call. The actors seemed to be the ones in charge. When we’d been over the show once, Linwood showed up and we all went through it again for him.

He looked like a worried man when it was over, he looked yet more worried after Chris Eigman and Craig Bierko both had a little word with him, quite rightly because they thought both their characters were being short-changed. I kept quiet because from where I was standing, Kryten had all the best lines, the best gags and the best routines. The other unexpected bonus was that I knew most of my lines already because I’d learned most of them before. This was the odd thing about the script, although it did have Linwood Boomer’s name on the cover, I recognised a lot of the lines from the first episode of the British version.

I’m not saying that Linwood should have written a completely new show, he wasn’t claiming to have done that either. It was an adaptation of the original script but as seems to happen so often, it lost some of its original sparkle.

The first week was spent very calmly going through the script, blocking out each scene, eating Danish pastries and drinking coffee. At one point, when I was making an entrance into the sleeping quarters, Jeff Field asked me why I kept ducking as I walked in through the door.

‘Don’t get me wrong, Robert,’ he reassured me, ‘I like it, it’s cute, but why do you do it?’

I explained that I had to or I would knock my head on the top of the door-frame. Jeff and I stood under the entrance, the top of the door was a good six inches above my head. I had been in the set about three days before I realised it was about half as big again as the British set. It looked exactly the same, but it was bigger. This tends to be the rule across America, everything is bigger, but you still behave as if you’re in cramped old Europe and duck your head. It was a metaphor for the whole experience for me. I was in a country where everything was bigger and different, but I still behaved the same. It was going to take me a long time to adapt.

In the evenings, after rehearsals, Hinton and I would generally go to the 24-hour gym which was just down the road, have a big work out and then go to a diner and stuff our faces with high-fat food laced with colourings, flavourings and E-numbers.

Hinton was great, born and bred on an army camp in Kansas, his father a middle-ranking military man. Hinton didn’t hear the word ‘nigger’ until he went to Washington when his dad was posted there. He was called one by a black man on the street.

We discussed the possibility of the series going ahead, and what we would do.

‘I’m happy to live on the Coast,’[32]

said Hinton, ‘I’ve been in New York too long.’

‘I don’t know if I’m happy about it or not,’ I said.

‘Hey, man,’ said Hinton, ‘get in touch with your feelings.’

I tried to. I said, ‘Well, I don’t like London that much, but it’s a bit scary here. It feels like this is the filter where all the mad people get stuck. People get shot for bumping into another car at the traffic lights.’

‘Listen, Robert, we don’t all have guns, I’ve never had one, it’s not that crazy here.’ I tried to believe him, I tried to feel at home in this weird world. Hinton told me how he had lived in New York for twenty years and the worst thing that ever happened to him was being hit by a speeding bicycle.

‘I’ll tell you what, Hinton,’ I said having one of my ideas. ‘I’ve always wanted to drive right across America, how about, if the series goes ahead, I meet you in New York, we buy some heap of shit big old car, and we drive across together.’

‘Whoa,’ said Hinton laughing deeply in that special way only black men can. ‘Okay, like, I know I said not everyone is crazy and carries a gun, but I meant like, in New York and LA. If you and I drove into some towns in the Midwest, we’d be in deep shit. In one place if I was driving the police would think I had kidnapped you, so they’d shoot me. If the police didn’t shoot me, some honky redneck would shoot you for being a nigger lover. Then in another town, if you were driving, the police would think I was kidnapping you, so they’d shoot me. If the police didn’t shoot me, some honky redneck would shoot you for being a nigger lover. If we come back here baby, we fly!’

On the Friday night of the first week, all the men from the cast went out for a meal together at a branch of the California Pizza Kitchen. We had designer pizzas all round. I had a smoked chicken, pine kernel and spinach pizza with Gruyère cheese and ham, sun-dried tomatoes, sliced dill cucumbers and mayonnaise on top. I think that’s what it was, it didn’t really look like a pizza, it looked like something you’d make for yourself late at night when you were stoned and had an attack of the munchies.

Within five minutes of meeting these men I knew all about them, who they lived with, who they loved, who they hoped to love. They were incredibly open about their private lives incredibly quickly. There are ups and downs to this of course, the negative side being the man who stands next to you in the queue for the plane will be telling you how his mother was shot dead in Toledo, Ohio by a masked bank raider, how his wife left him for her lesbian psychoanalyst, how his child has stabbed his teacher in a dispute over pornography in the classroom, and all this before you hand your boarding pass in.

On the other hand, you could say that the American attitude is normal and the English are a bunch of sad, repressed tossers who would rather be run over by a tractor than express a genuine emotion. I leave you to decide.

On Saturday morning, I stood in the foyer of the hotel with Andrea and her boyfriend Mickey. I had hired a car and we were going out shopping. That’s what a lot of Californians do in their leisure time, they have stickers like ‘Born to Shop’ on the backs of their cars. I am very bad at shopping, but I was prepared to give it a try.

We had originally expected to go with Rob and Doug, who were desperate to go out and see Los Angeles, having never been there before. They had either been asleep in the hotel or on the set since the day we arrived. I knew things were not happy with the production, but I wasn’t sure how unhappy. Rob and Doug were locked up in the big black tower[33]

for the weekend, working with what sounded like three hundred comedy scriptwriters on the scripts. That sounds close enough to hell for me.

Andrea grabbed my arm and pointed out of the doors. A huge black truck/station wagon/tank, which would make a Range Rover look like a toy, rumbled into the car park. I had hired this car through the studio; I said to the hire company that I wanted one of those jeepy sort of things, so you’re high up and can see over things.

It was a Ford Bronco something-or-other, a monster, but a luxury monster. We sat in the car park for ten minutes playing with all the switches, whizzing the seats up and down, the roof open and closed, playing with the stereo, which could burst our ears, the air conditioning which could freeze our genitals. It was great.

We rumbled around town all day, sitting up high just as I wanted, but feeling slightly stupid to be going shopping in a car which could easily drive over a mountain.

In the afternoon we visited a make-up superstore where Andrea was in heaven. Hundreds and thousands of jars of weird make-up, prosthetic remover, wigs, glue, false beards, all kinds of fake blood and eyeballs. We met a man who worked there who’d made the masks for Warren Beatty’s film Dick Tracy. The workshop at the back of the store had an extraordinary collection of rubber bits and pieces used in films, this place seemed to supply everyone in Hollywood, including the foam which made Kryten’s head.

Come the second week of rehearsals and it was clear that a lot of shit had hit a lot of fans while I’d been rumbling around in my monster jeep.

Rob and Doug had been banned from the set for overstepping the mark. They were present as ‘advisers’ to the producers, but they were naturally worried that the show was going to get screwed up. I assumed they had tried to influence things too much and had trodden on some frayed egos.

The script had changed dramatically, and not, I have to say, that much for the better. We spent another day eating doughnuts and Danish pastries, drinking coffee and wandering through the scenes in a half-hearted sort of way. We had a long break at one point. I found out later that this was because Rob and Doug had words with Linwood. I don’t know what those words were exactly, but I don’t think they were the sort you’d go to a church to hear.

Early the next morning a script was slipped under the door of my hotel room. I opened it, read it quickly and started laughing. It was funny and I knew why. The Comedy Boot Boys had got tooled up and were cruising the mean streets looking for trouble. They were attempting a coup, spreading propaganda amongst the masses. It was thrilling. I met up with Hinton in the foyer.

‘This is good shit,’ he said, waving his copy of the script. ‘Who did this?’

‘The Comedy Police,’ I said ‘Let’s go watch the shit come down.’

As soon as we got to the studio it was clear everyone else had received a script too. The mood was much better.

‘I like this one,’ said Craig Bierko holding the script aloft. ‘This one is funny!’

The cast were asked to vote, can you believe it, on which script we preferred. It was a landslide for Rob and Doug, the Comedy Police had won the day. We all started to try and learn our lines for the first time. We’d been piddling about for ten days then suddenly, with what was virtually a completely new script, we only had two days rehearsal left. We worked hard all of a sudden, which was a bit of a shock, but the show came together remarkably quickly. I really enjoyed working with the cast and felt more and more happy about doing a series with them, even if I secretly hoped it would only be for one year.

During the second day of rehearsal on the new script, Elvin came up to me and said very loudly. ‘Robert Llewellyn, phone call.’ I found the phone hanging on a wall in a dark corner of the cavernous studio.

‘Hello.’

‘Hi, darl, it’s me, in Ethiopia. You’re not going to have plastic surgery are you?’

‘Sorry?’

‘You’re not going to have a facelift and have muscle implants in your legs are you?’

‘I don’t think so, darl,’ I said, ‘why are you worried about it?’

Judy explained that a famous American actress had just flown in from Los Angeles and she looked a lot younger than she did in a TV series she’d made twenty years ago. Judy was worried that if we lived in Hollywood I’d get all sucked in by this and have face lifts and hair transplants. I tried to assure her I wouldn’t, that the people I was working with were really natural and I was bonding with them. This worried her more, she didn’t think I’d ever bonded with anyone before, she was convinced I’d been sucked into Hollywood. She asked me if I’d been jogging, I said I hadn’t, but I was thinking about going. This really upset her and she started crying. Elvin called me from across the studio.

‘Robert Llewellyn on set please.’

It’s very difficult to be supportive to your partner at a time like that. I couldn’t imagine where she was, so far away and in such a strange place. Judy knew LA better than I did, she’d worked there a lot in the past as a circus performer and acrobat. I had never been to Africa, let alone Ethiopia, my mind was a blank when I tried to imagine what she was going through.

I said goodbye and rejoined the cast. I told them about my disturbing phone call and was showered with sympathy and support. I’ve never been accepted into such warm, embracing, bonding love, so quickly, anywhere on earth before. English actors can be a bit gushy or luvvie as I’ve said, but we don’t have a patch on the Yanks. The women were virtually weeping as I told them how much I missed Judy. The men embraced me, telling me that knowing me, especially in my troubled time, was really important to them.

I was touched, I was bonding, but mainly with the men. I didn’t do any of the bonding with women that can get you into trouble with your long-term, live-in, regular partner. The women in the cast were great, I really liked them, as sisters. Lorraine, who played Captain Tao, was a lovely woman, she hadn’t had sex for a year. I didn’t know what to say. Elizabeth Morehead, who played Kochanski, had sex every night, I still didn’t know what to say. Michael Heintzman, who played Officer Munson, could vaguely remember having sex in the seventies, but he didn’t think it was up to much. By this time in the rehearsals we all seemed to know everything about each other. This is the upside to luvviedom, I never felt lonely in Los Angeles and I knew from previous experience it could be a very lonely town.

Just to balance out the whole, ‘California is full of natural people who relate to each other on a meaningful level’ notion, I need to relate the story of the Zeppelin invasion. The twenty-five women who came in to the studio on the day before the pre-record were unbelievable.

In the American pilot there was a sequence where Lister showed Kryten a hologrammatic device that hides the fact that his bed is a mess and contains an illicit cat.[34]

The hologrammatic images shown were his bed all neat and tidy like Rimmer’s, and another where a semi-naked beautiful blonde woman lay in a languorous pose on his bed.

We arrived for rehearsal to find the studio crawling with women who had what seemed to be large, tightly stuffed pieces of Ikea furniture attached to their chests. I was completely dumbstruck, all the women auditioning for this part had undergone breast implant surgery of mind-boggling proportions. They wore super skintight bright yellow T-shirts, but they didn’t look real. They looked like Barbie dolls. They all had big hair, which is a thing English women don’t have. American women seem to be able to grow their hair bigger, huge piles of fluff that is real but doesn’t look it. Interestingly enough, the woman who finally got the gig of lying on Lister’s bed and having her picture taken was the only one present who didn’t look like she had implants.

Here I am spouting off about implants and I don’t know the first thing about it, but all I know is very few parts of the human anatomy have ninety-degree angles in them unless there are bones present. That’s how unrealistic these breasts were, vertical down the chest, ninety-degree angle forward, vague breast-style shape, ninety-degree bend down, super-flat aerobic stomach.

I asked the male members of the cast if they found a woman with massive, pumped-up breasts sexy. They all denied that they did. I have since met all their girlfriends and I can state that they were being honest. Not a silicon implant amongst them. I still don’t really understand why these women did this to themselves, but then there are a lot of things that men do to themselves I don’t understand, there’s even a few things I do to myself, so there you go.

Suddenly on the pre-record day it was like work again. I was up at the crack of dawn, Andrea and I moaning and complaining, it was like the good old days. On went the mask and the new Kryten smiled right across his big square head. It was so comfortable, no rubber around my mouth or nostrils, there was no glue close to my eyes. The man who made the American mask is a god of prosthetics, a living legend of mechano-human comfort.

With the mask on, and after receiving suitable, fantastics and ooohs and that is incredibles from the director and cast, I headed for the costume department.

The men who had covered me in plaster bandage and measured my every organ had come up trumps. A Kryten costume of splendid comfort, durability, flexibility and damn fine looks. I could sit in it, walk in it, turn in it, I could almost look sexy in it.[35]

I was a happy robot as I stomped onto the set. I marched up to Rob and Doug. I wanted them to see what I had been on about all those years. This was just how I always wanted Kryten to be.

‘Guys,’ I said, ‘what d’you think?’

Doug started to walk around me, staring at the wonderful detail and splendid cut of my chest piece, the snug fit of the Lycra body suit, the gentle curves of the neck ribbing.

‘Yeah, no, yeah, no, it’s yeah, no,’ said Doug, nodding and raising his eyebrows.

‘It looks pony, Bobby,’ said Rob after a while. I was heartbroken. Pony was the worst Rob Grant criticism, if something looked pony, that was it.

‘I think it looks great,’ I said in a pathetically defensive way.

‘No, the costume’s okay, the mask looks pony,’ said Rob. ‘It’s pony, Bobby.’

‘Yeah, no, yeah. Pony,’ said Doug.

‘Pony, Bobby,’ said Rob.

‘Is it comfortable though?’ asked Doug.

‘It’s never going to be comfortable,’ I whined, ‘but it’s bloody amazing in comparison with the old one.’

‘You look greaeaeaeaeat,’ said Linwood who joined us.

‘Pony,’ said Rob, lighting a cigarette. I knew the bone of contention between us would continue.[36]

The crew were great, about three hundred more of them than there were in England, and they earn more money, they drive bigger cars, they eat more, they laugh more, their bottoms were considerably larger but other than that they were very similar. The director was calm and reassuring, Linwood was happy and loving and well-bonded and secure-looking. Rob and Doug, who were back on the set in a big way, were looking the same as ever. Dishevelled, shagged-out and totally focused on the job.

As the cast gathered to make an entrance before a scene, I was assing about doing silly walks and voices as I normally do.

In a similar situation in the English series, Craig Charles could quite likely be trying to set fire to the set with his Zippo lighter just before we go on. Chris could be telling me about his straight-8, 3.5 litre E-type engine, introduced in the early sixties. Danny could be showing us some dance steps from the musical Les Misérables, or doing a ‘drag run’ and laughing very loudly. Someone shouts ‘Action!’ and we go on.

Not so with the American cast. As I did a comedy walk up the corridor and tried to copulate with part of the set, Craig and Chris asked me if I wouldn’t mind stopping.

‘I’m sorry, Robert, but I really have to focus a moment here,’ said Chris. ‘Would you please stop fucking the sliding door?’

‘Sorry, sorry,’ I said. I felt awful, I would hate to be thrown by another actor in a situation like that. I was so used to the atmosphere in the old Red Dwarf, I had completely lost my manners.

We finished at something like six in the evening. Andrea cleaned off the mask and I showered in my dressing room, receiving the standard amount of static electric shocks. Los Angeles is basically built on a desert, and I suppose it’s something to do with the air and the temperature and the nylon carpet, but everything I touched sent such a bolt of static through me my hair stood on end.

I met up with Hinton and we went to the movies in my big rumbling jeep. I admit now that I saw Freejack, a movie with Mick Jagger in it. It is quite an embarrassing thing to have to admit that you paid money to go and see a film like Freejack. Mick Jagger. What an actor. That’s all I can say.

What I do remember clearly, though, was the cinema was in an area I wasn’t familiar with. I only noticed as I bought the tickets and joined Hinton, who had purchased a large bucketful of popcorn. I was more or less the only white person there. There was no clear sign of hostility, but I definitely sensed some underlying tension.

After the movie I asked Hinton if he noticed or if it was me being paranoid. He told me about the King trial and I remembered seeing the video of the four policemen beating up the black guy at night. It was shown every night on the TV as the newsman said, ‘The Rodney King trial continues today, defence claim that Rodney King was a drunken, drug running, cop-killing bum, more on that later, plus how Kim Basinger didn’t get an invite to the big party, but now, sport.’

It was a new fear for me, I had always been in environments where black people were in a minority and suffering from white racism. At school we had one black girl in our class called Udine Taylor. She was great, everyone liked her, even the racist skinheads. When we had class discussions about racism, a common statement I remember hearing was, ‘I hate coons, sir’, to which the teacher would respond, ‘But what about Udine?’ The skinhead would look around at Udine who sat there passively, ‘Oh, no, she’s different, sir, it’s the other coons I hate.’

Being in that cinema where I was supremely conscious of the colour of my skin, I realised something I suppose I had always known but had never had to face before. Udine Taylor had her work cut out for her at our school, she was tough, she didn’t let the ignorant gits grind her down, not on the outside at least.

Driving through the wide, quiet streets of South Central LA that night was a peaceful and relaxing thing to do. The footage I watched later on TV, where I recognised many locations, was all the more chilling. It was obviously going to happen, the authorities knew it was going to happen. Basically, my favourite conspiracy theory about the LA riots, which I heard from many people, was that they were positively encouraged by the City and State authorities. They let the problem ‘burn itself out’. Most of the people who were killed were black gang members, and the City didn’t care about them. It only got bad when places like the Beverly Center shopping mall was set on fire.

The following day in the studio, racial harmony blossomed. Elvin Ivory turned up driving his Thursday Porsche, a green one. He has one for each day of the week, each of them especially adapted to take his amazing six-foot ten-inch frame.

‘Good morning, Robert Llewellyn,’ he said with a big grin as he strode past me. We had a script meeting, yet more changes, but none very major, and then we camera blocked the show, which was going to be recorded in front of the audience.

They recorded two versions of the show that day, one in the afternoon without an audience, one in the evening with. I had to put my make-up on during the lunch break ready for the full, recorded dress run in the afternoon.

The show went very well, we all knew what we were doing and we did it well. I had a lie down in my big dressing room, which for some reason always had a Rolls-Royce parked outside. I don’t know whose it was. Maybe it was for me. Maybe they just forgot to tell me about it, maybe it’s still waiting there for me to pick up? No.

I entered the studio with the rest of the cast and we hid behind the set. The atmosphere was transformed. There was an audience of about five hundred, most of whom had seen the British series. We were introduced one by one, and I have to say, and it’s not often this happens, and I’m normally humble, and I’ve never hungered for stardom, but I have to say they went ape shit when I walked onto the set. I have never received such a welcome from an audience. It was incredible.

During that evening, I can safely say it was one of the top two or three Red Dwarf recordings I have been involved in from an audience response point of view. They absolutely loved it, they laughed at everything and they roared laughing at Kryten. I have never enjoyed making an episode of Red Dwarf more. I wasn’t hot, I wasn’t too uncomfortable and I had loads of gags and no big speeches explaining triplicators and time dilation.

At the end, the men in suits from NBC television, the broadcasters who were due to buy the show, and the men in suits from Universal who were due to make the show, all came up to meet me. I have never shaken so many hands in one evening, in costume. People queued up to have their picture taken with me. I stood next to a very rich man in a suit and pulled a face into a camera. He shook my hand and said, ‘You are going to be a major star here, Robert. Fantastic performance.’

I thanked him and saw Rob and Doug looking at me. ‘Bobby,’ said Rob as he hugged me, ‘well done, we’ve done it man, it’s fantastic.’ Doug gave me a big hug, ‘Yeah, yeah, great, yeah,’ he said. ‘Hey, are you the popular one tonight or what?’

Elvin Ivory walked up to me and embraced me, my head came up to his tummy button. ‘Robert Llewellyn, you were great, that was a really funny performance. Listen, the boss of NBC was in tonight, he loved it. I’m telling you, I’ve been in this business a long time. I’m telling you, this show is going to run, and you, Robert Llewellyn, are going to be a star.’

I thanked him, I thanked everyone. I was well brought up. I’m polite. Andrea came up to me and told me I had been clear for ten minutes and how come I hadn’t run screaming into my dressing room. She couldn’t believe what was going on, the whole studio was full of people embracing each other, patting each other on the back. Elvin was passing around peak caps with ‘I rode the Red Dwarf’ embossed on the front. Champagne bottles popped open, Linwood gave me a plastic cup full. ‘Robert, what can I say?’ he said. ‘You were really amazing. I can’t tell you how proud I am to have worked with you. This show is going to run, I can feel it, man. And you were so good, so funny, you’ve worked so hard. It’s incredible, man, did you hear that audience, they loved it, man. Hey, are you pleased I talked you into it?’

I told him I was very pleased, I drank my champagne and hugged the cast. We all kept hugging and kissing and drinking champagne for what seemed like ages. I eventually stumbled somewhat groggily back to my dressing room with Andrea. She peeled the mask off very quickly. There was a constant flow of people coming into the room: the cast, the director, Rob and Doug, Linwood. I was sitting in my Calvin Klein briefs with a rubber head on, looking like ET. No one minded. It was party time.

We all retired to the lobby of the hotel, waiters brought more and more champagne, Linwood and Rob and Doug seemed to have made up. Jeff Field was inviting me over to his house to ride his polo ponies. He came to England regularly to play polo, sometimes with Prince Charles. Jeff had been directing a series called Night Court for years. He was a seriously rich individual. He had that seriously rich way of sitting and talking.

Doug got up to go to the men’s room at one point, and as he moved away you could just make out the squeak of his false leg. Linwood leaned over to Rob Grant and said in a sort of stage whisper which all of us could hear, ‘If the series goes ahead, we really should buy Doug a new leg.’

Rob’s face was a picture of embarrassment and anger, everyone sat around feeling pretty awkward, Linwood seemed utterly oblivious to this.

Getting to bed took me ages, there were so many people to say goodbye to, so many people to promise to keep in touch with. It took me about an hour.

I collapsed with exhaustion at about three in the morning and crawled to bed, but not before we had all swapped numbers and addresses. Rob and Doug had to get up at eight and fly back to London to complete series 5 in England.

I was woken at nine the following morning when my phone rang.

‘Hi, Robert, this is Harvey Greenstein, I saw you last night in Red Dwarf. You were fantastic, I’m just ringing, really informally, to see if you have representation here.’

He was an agent, he was after my ass.

‘I’ve got an agent in London,’ I said trying to speak through the dead vermin on my tongue. Being a very light drinker, I only have to sniff alcohol and I have the mother of all hangovers the following morning.

‘Sure, but you need someone to look out for you over here. Why don’t we meet up for lunch and talk it over, in a completely informal way? Let’s go to Musso and Franks.’

No sooner had I scribbled down some information about when and where I’d meet this guy, the phone rang again.

‘Hi, Robert, I was given your number by Mona, my name’s Richard Williams, I saw you last night in Red Dwarf and I thought you were…’

After the third call, I asked reception to take messages and let me sleep. It was no good. My mind was racing with what was happening to me. As I was in the shower, I realised that I was potentially very hot property for an agent. I was an actor out on a limb with a ready-made income. They didn’t have to do anything except increase my income, rake off their ten per cent and go out to lunch with me occasionally.

At the reception there were eight messages and five faxes waiting for me. I felt like a very important person all of a sudden. I needed to spend some time on my own to remind myself that I wasn’t important at all. I am old enough to remember that I only feel important and special if people tell me I am. As soon as I’m alone, I remember the truth.

I threw my small bag into the vast cavern of my rumbling jeep and drove down the road ten miles or so to my favourite diner. It was crowded and busy and no one recognised me or told me I was great. I had a huge gut-busting breakfast with ten cups of coffee. I read all my faxes and messages, many of which were from London, where The Reconstructed Heart was receiving a lot of attention. I had to get back there to promote it. I had written articles for the Guardian, The Times and the Daily Mail. I filled in a questionnaire from City Limits magazine and sat back to think. However much I tried to remember that I wasn’t important, and things were really just normal, I was being swept along with the thought that I was going to be rich and famous and live in America.

I handed the parking attendant my ticket outside the diner, he delivered my huge rumbler to the kerb, and I drove over the hill into Hollywood. I had a lunch appointment at Musso and Franks, an old-fashioned restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard. I was meeting Harvey Greenstein, the agent who had woken me up.

‘Robert,’ said Harvey, ‘it’s great to meet you, sit down, sit down.’ Harvey was waiting for me at a table near the door, we moved to a small cubicle at the back.

‘Whaddaya want?’ said a very old, tight-skinned waiter. I’m not sure if the waiters at Musso and Franks have the reputation for being very rude, but if they don’t, I’m starting one. They are also very funny.

‘We’ll have water, and a menu already,’ said Harvey Greenstein, not phased at all. He turned back to me eagerly. ‘This is great, Robert, you are such a talented actor, you’re a star in England, right?’

‘Well, no, to be honest I don’t think I could claim that.’

‘Stop being so modest already. If you’re not, it’s their loss, because you are going to be massive here, the white Eddie Murphy, you are so funny, with your walks and your voices. Listen,’ he said conspiratorially, ‘you will make so much money here with that kind of talent.’

‘Well, I don’t know, I mean it was only a pilot.’

‘But what a pilot. Oi oi. It’ll run, believe me. Tell me, what are you making on the show?’

I wasn’t sure what to say, I still felt the natural British reticence when it came to talking about money. I didn’t want to tell this man. He started throwing around ballpark figures, I eventually nodded when he came down as low as mine.

‘Oi, what are you doing, charity work?’ he said happily. ‘You know what Ted Danson gets?’

I told him I knew it was a million an episode.

‘That’s for one transmission, he gets 80 per cent for a repeat, Robert. I can guarantee that for the first year I will get you between fifty and seventy-five thousand dollars an ep. Okay, so this year that’s six eps in a mid-season replacement, so you’re looking at three hundred to four and a half hundred thousand dollars. That’s just to start, then, next year, thirty-six episodes, we go in gentle, a hundred thou an ep, raising to a hundred fifty in summer. Now you’re looking at about three and a half million a year.’ He paused and stared into my eyes, presumably looking for signs of delight. He could sense my misgivings. ‘Pre-tax of course, I’m talking gross, but even after every deduction there is, you’re walking away with two million bucks in your pocket. It’s big money, Robert, and you just fell right in it. How did you do it, I’ll tell you, with talent, that’s what sells in this town.’

After lunch I left Harvey Greenstein on the pavement, waving at me furiously as I gunned my rumbler back over the hill. I was staying with Jane Leeves, in her apartment in Studio City. Her apartment has a spare room, we did not do anything kinky. I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until the following day.

I went with Jane to see her agent, who also told me I was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but at least he was a little more legitimate sounding. He worked in a big black tower on Sunset Boulevard in a company called CAA. This was a huge agency that looked after thousands of actors.

‘So, you want to live in LA,’ he said cheerfully.

‘Um, not really,’ I said, ‘but if I have to I will.’

‘You have to, Robert, because that show is going to run.’

‘Right,’ I said.

‘If you ever want to talk about representation, you know where I am, give me a call. I guess you’ve been chased a bit huh?’ I nodded. ‘Don’t worry about it, you’ll do good. You are hot property now, Robert. This always happens when there’s a new talent in town. This town is talent-hungry and you’ve got buckets to sell.’

On the way out to a restaurant that evening, Jane told me her agent never bullshitted, he was a straight down the line guy.

We met up with the rest of the cast in some really chi chi place, the name and location of which I can’t remember. But the food was brilliant, the waiters were dead trendy and it cost a fortune. Jane and I arrived together and it was pretty clear everyone thought we had become an item. It was not so, Jane and I are good friends and that’s it. Okay?

I was getting more and more calls from London, it was clear I had to get back. The following day I caught a plane to New York, first-class American Airlines, all paid for, by the way. I would have flown super bucket-shop economy, bring your own packed lunch. The food wasn’t quite as good as Qantas, but there was plenty of it, and masses of room.

New York was snow-bound and bitterly cold. I stayed with old friends for two nights in their lovely house in upstate New York, spent a day with Chris Eigman in Manhattan; saw Boris Yeltsin arrive by helicopter at the Battery (by chance that is, I hadn’t arranged it with Boris) and had a great meal at La Indochine restaurant with Chris. This is the place where drop-dead beautiful people queue to get a job as waitpersons because they are supposed to get spotted for movie parts. They were all drop-dead gorgeous, but I didn’t think any of them were going to get a gig to be honest.

Chris woke me at the crack of doom the following morning with a cup of English tea. He had very kindly booked me a taxi to get me to the airport. The man driving the taxi was a Serb. He hated America, he wanted to go back to his own country but he couldn’t afford it. I felt lucky and gave him a big tip. As he drove away it struck me that he might be from Brooklyn and love America, he might just hate British liberals.

I flew back to London first class, ahh. It was so luxurious and proper, so rich-feeling and special-making. I got on the Tube at Heathrow and headed for my small flat in Islington. The specialness and richness and glamour started to feel like old party clothes. I was back to normal, back to London; my pushbike, the rain, the homeless people, the telephone bills, the dust, the shopping that needed doing. Judy was still in Ethiopia. There was no one at my flat. It was warm, but hollow. There was a big pile of mail for me. None of the letters were from Hollywood. There was no contract, there was no demand for me to get on the next flight out there and start shooting the series.

Likewise my answer machine, many messages, none from Universal Television, none from some agent saying, ‘Bob, they want you to take Mel Gibson’s part in Lethal Weapon 3.’ Nothing. I made a cup of English tea and sat in silence, back to normal. It was alright really. I wasn’t sad, I was just waiting to calm down again.

The irony light in the giant control room in the sky had been going on in my section for a long time; however, every now and then, when there is some heavy irony going down somewhere on earth, you get a break. There was no irony going through my mainframe as I sat in my kitchen. I was in an irony-free zone. It was only a temporary glitch, but while it lasted, it was very, very peaceful.

Universal Television presented NBC with the pilot later that year. It has its faults, but for a pilot I’d say it was pretty damned good. Linwood Boomer was fired, as were Chris Eigman and Hinton Battle. They recast both parts, with the Cat played by a woman. They never reshot the pilot, but they did shoot a short trailer for it, which I wasn’t involved in. Rob and Doug went back to Los Angeles for about six weeks, trying to hustle up support for the project.

By mid-June, Doug rang me up to say NBC had decided to drop the whole thing. The Fox Network picked it up. Nothing happened. All the agents who blessed my head with praise singularly failed to keep in touch as they promised. Strange that, isn’t it? Red Dwarf VI was now in the can, there was talk of a movie and another series. The only thing I’ve learned through all of this is, in show business, don’t believe it until it’s happening, and even then, stay sceptical.

I had insisted on Andrea Pennell being my make-up woman in America. I thought the Americans would say no way and cite some Union regulation, but it was no problem.

Oh yes, I know all the expressions. It means open the boot.

An Australian expression referring to a person’s sexual orientation. ‘Don’t fuss with him, mate, he bats for the other team’ was a snippet of conversation I heard between two women in Melbourne once.

The Coast, as in West Coast, is what hip, groovy Americans like Hinton call California. I didn’t know this at the time and got confused. I mean, New York is also on the coast on the other side.

The Big Black Tower is the headquarters building of Universal Television. It stands at one corner of the studio lot and is big, and black.

The cat of which The Cat is an ancestor.

I still couldn’t pee in it. I had to be unbolted, unVelcroed and unpeeled to get out of the damn thing.

I have to say, now that I have seen the mask on the screen, the English one looks better. Damn. The American one looks like a bloke with rubber stuck to his head. There’s no way round it.

Part II

Chapter 8

In February 1993 I walked around a small rented flat in Shepperton High Street.

‘Yes, it’s okay,’ I said to the nice lady who was showing me around. ‘I’d like to move in next week.’

Once again, I’d been lucky enough to spend most of the British winter in Australia so I was tanned, trim and terrific, though I say so myself. The reason I was renting a small apartment in an outer London suburb? It was within walking distance of Shepperton Studios where we were about to start recording the sixth series of Red Dwarf. In previous series I’d made the daily slog from north-east London where I’d lived to far west London to get to Shepperton. By the time we did series 6, my living arrangements had changed dramatically and I wanted to avoid having to drive many miles every day.

The main reason my living arrangements had changed so much was because when Judy and I got back from our trips to the USA and Ethiopia the year before, we finally bought a house.

I say house, I’m making it sound glamorous, it was pretty much an oversized shed in a field outside a small village in Gloucestershire. It would be easy to assume that because my parents and grandparents came from this area it was my idea to live there. However, Judy had found the place when she was touring around the Cotswolds with an Australian friend. A few weeks later she got the details of a tiny terraced cottage in a village called Oddington, which we thought, ah so amusingly, was appropriate for us as we were both a bit odd.

One cold winter’s day, we drove out of London to see it. We never actually found that house, but instead stumbled on another one we both loved. Judy had stated that she wanted to live in a wooden house on a hill that wasn’t joined to any other houses. I said she was thinking of Australia and we didn’t have any wooden houses on hills in England, and more or less all houses were joined together in rows.

We went to a dusty old estate agents office in Stow on the Wold where a lovely old lady leafed through a book of house brochures. One of the houses caught my eye, but the lady told us we wouldn’t want that one. I had to insist she let me see it again. We took the details and went to see it for real.

What we found that day was a wooden house, on a hill, that wasn’t joined to any other houses. It was almost spooky.

We could just about afford to put a deposit down and, after a massive load of hassle, managed to get a mortgage. I was immediately dumped into paroxysms of anxiety, I’d never bought anything more expensive than a third-hand car before. I’d never borrowed any money from anyone, it really didn’t feel good to me. Suddenly I was in massive debt, just when I’d started to earn some money for the first time.

Judy had a flat she rented in Islington, so we kept that and used the house in Gloucestershire to work in and find a bit of peace and quiet. The one thing that almost put us off buying it was the nearby village school.

‘I don’t want to listen to kids shouting in the playground all day,’ I said, a man in his mid-thirties, with low kinder-tolerance. Oh my, how that would change.

So we settled in and did gardening and went for walks, had supper in the late summer sunshine. It was all very tweedly and bucolic.

It was while I was knee-deep in brambles one summer’s afternoon that I got a call from Rob Grant and Doug Naylor. They rang to inform me that the US Red Dwarf pilot had not been picked up, and they were now preparing to write series 6 of Red Dwarf to be shot the following year in the UK.

Most of 1992 was taken up with performing my solo show, The Reconstructed Heart, with the catchy, humorous strapline of ‘The Male Response to Feminism, 1970 to 1990’.

I did the show many times at various regional theatres, but most importantly for me, since the TV version had been broadcast, a publisher got in touch and suggested I write a book based on the comedy lecture. This was going to be my first actual book, a proper book from a proper publisher called Simon and Schuster that would actually be for sale in proper bookshops.

Writing it was pure joy for me. I knew the show backwards and had worked up the gags over hundreds of performances. I came up with a lot of new material that I tried out on different nights, so effectively writing the book was an exercise in collation.

When it was done I did a lot of PR for the book. I did quite a few interviews with journalists and one of them gave me a little taste of the very ugly side of the British press. A man called Tim O’Neil took me out for lunch at Simpsons in the Strand. I’d heard of this place, it’s an ultra-traditional old English dining room where a gentleman has to wear a jacket and tie.

I’m a scruff, I’m an artist, I don’t do jackets and ties. If I went there now at least I own a proper suit and I could scrub up for the occasion, but back in 1992 I didn’t own a suit and the only tie I had was a fluorescent pink one I’d worn on stage.

When I arrived I was informed that I couldn’t enter without a jacket and tie, but the maitre d’ was very happy to lend me the full kit. I was then furnished with a jacket that would be a close fit on a thirteen year old, and a tie that was so short it could do nothing but look like a joke. Thus attired, I joined Mr O’Neil in the grand old dining room and proceeded to have a lunch of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, piles of sprouts, roast potatoes, thick dark gravy and all the trimmings.

Mr O’Neil, it transpired, worked for the News of the World, which came as a bit of a surprise to me. I had very clearly specified when I’d talked to the PR people from the publishers that I didn’t want to do any interviews with the tabloids. I didn’t want anything to do with the celeb gossip columns or the red carpet brigade. I had gone to this lunch expecting to meet a freelance journalist who wrote for The Times and the Telegraph, but Mr O’Neil informed me they were ill and he’d stepped in.

I’m a nicely brought up sort of chap, it would have been rude to storm out in a huff, so I ate my lunch and listened. Yes, I listened while Mr O’Neil did a non-stop monologue about footballers I’d never heard of, page three girls I’d never seen, soap stars I wasn’t interested in, events in night clubs I would never frequent. He did this for about an hour. I didn’t say a word but I did notice he kept filling my glass with red wine as he spoke.

As I may already have intimated, I am a light drinker, especially during the day. Craig Charles would classify me as a tragic lightweight middle-class loser. Even Chris Barrie, normally a very polite gentleman, is not impressed when I have half a shandy, ‘Ruining a perfectly decent ale there, Mister Bobbington.’

So after my third glass of red wine, even with a big English roast lunch, I was half-cut.

Mr O’Neil suddenly stopped talking and started asking questions, he started with my book, which he clearly hadn’t read, asked me why I was interested in relationships between men and women, asked me what direct experience I’d had in the field.

Before I could stop my half-pissed gobshite mouth running away with me, I’d told him about my previous girlfriend Sonia. She was a fiery French–Italian woman of prodigious intellect and a healthy hurricane of complex, often contradictory emotions. Sonia tore my once reserved English male countenance to shreds. Once you’ve lost your inhibitions and verbal taboo restrictions it’s very hard to get them back. Living with Sonia for five years had changed me enormously, parting from Sonia had been very stressful. We had fought on many occasions during our tempestuous love affair, and it’s true she did once throw a fairly large amount of crockery at me. She didn’t do this out of the blue. There is no question that I would have been behaving like any other white Englishman in his late twenties: incredibly immature and selfish, stupid, cruel and endlessly annoying.

That’s what Mr O’Neil was interested in, not the years I’d spent working on the show, the careful jokes I’d created, the insightful observations I’d made about the way a man’s mind works. He wanted pointless gossip and tittle-tattle, and like a fool I was giving it to him.

When I got home after this prolonged lunch, I fell asleep for a couple of hours and woke in the early evening full of dread. What was that unpleasant little man going to write?

For the rest of that year I worked on a series called Murder Most Horrid with Dawn French. I’d first met her and Jennifer Saunders at a comedy gig in a workingmen’s club in Tottenham, north London before the Comic Strip launched them to national fame. They were brilliant, very funny and clearly already in another league. In Murder Most Horrid I played a taxi driver. Dawn got in the back of the cab and we had a few words of dialogue and then we had to do a lot of drive-by shots with Dawn looking anxiously out of the rear windows.

While this was going on, we were gassing on about boys, sex, men, sex, women, sex and, well sex. Dawn told me she wanted to start up a special school for young men where she would obviously be headmistress, and the only subject on the curriculum would be sex, lovemaking technique and physical fitness. I thought this would be a very good idea and I wished I’d attended when I was seventeen. She offered me a role as art master, which I gladly accepted.

During yet another drive-by, Dawn told me not to turn around and head back, but to carry on as there was a really good cake shop about two miles down the road we were on, which was somewhere near Pinewood Studios. I laughed, I thought this was a Dawn French joke, she always wanted cake, that was her shtick, but she was serious. She leaned through into the driver’s compartment and turned off the walkie-talkie we had been using to stay in touch with the film crew.

‘It won’t take too long,’ she said. ‘I’ll just pop out and get a few cakes, they won’t even notice.’

So we did, I drove into a little town, pulled up outside a cake shop; Dawn rushed in and came out two minutes later with a big box full of cakes, sticky buns and other baked delights.

‘Better now, back to work,’ she said.

I also worked on a series called Boon, starring Michael Elphick and Neil Morrissey. I played an antique dealer and I can remember almost nothing about it. I can only now reflect that this kind of television is now very rarely produced. It was all very relaxed, the facilities were lavish, the actors, who’d been doing the series for many years by this time, were bored and seemed quite lazy to me. After making three series of Red Dwarf, any other TV work seemed like a walk in the park.

I can only recall these events from my diary of the time, but I was obviously very busy. I worked on a series with Rory Bremner and appeared in a few sketches with Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones. I was also a regular on a radio series called Loose Ends which was then hosted by a wonderful old-school homosexual called Ned Sherrin who referred to me as an ‘amateur intellectual’ which, although it was probably meant as a gentle put-down, was a tag I became very fond of.

Much later in the year, must have been during the summer when no footballer had been caught in a three-in-a-bed romp, and Princess Di hadn’t appeared at a garden party with a ladder in her tights, the News of the World ran a story with the headline ‘Kryten’s Afraid of Flying Saucers, but not the UFO kind’.

It didn’t mention my book, made only passing reference to Red Dwarf and focused on my fights with an ex-girlfriend which had taken place eight years before. I read it and cursed myself. It was so pointless, I had been so stupid. The following day, Sonia rang me. She was working in the south of France, and so I’d stupidly thought at least she wouldn’t see it. This was before online newspapers, Facebook, Twitter, email, all the ways someone would find out now. However, friends of hers in London had rung her and read it out over the phone. I apologised, but of course Sonia was upset – who wouldn’t be? She came across as a nightmare harridan. I promised I would never do it again and Sonia, amazing woman that she is, forgave me.

By the autumn, Judy and I were spending half our time in our little house in the Cotswolds and half in London, we were both writing and talking about books and plays and films, our lives filled with ideas, notions and daft never-to-see-the-light-of-day projects.

In November, we flew to Australia where we planned to spend the next three months. However, simple plumbing cut my stay somewhat short.

One beautiful early evening, as we watched the sunset over the Pacific Ocean, I received a phone call from my mother. She informed me in quite jolly tones that she’d just been to our little house and found icicles inside the kitchen. It took me a while to understand what she was on about. I was sitting in a beach house in thirty-degree heat; I couldn’t quite picture the kitchen of our house on the other side of the world. She informed me, ‘All the pipes have burst, darling, the water’s flooding everywhere, everything you own is ruined. It’s very cold here at the moment.’

‘Thanks, Mum,’ I said.

So that was it, I’d been in Australia for three weeks and the next day I left Judy and flew home. I was thinking to myself how this whole house ownership thing was a right pain. I started formulating political theories about the curse of home ownership, how it was a conspiracy to keep the masses oppressed, how the fear of homelessness and the trap of the mortgage was all part of a master plan. Then I fell asleep.

To go from hot, sun-soaked beach to cold, dark, flooded, semi-destroyed Cotswold house with no electricity is not a swollen sack of joy. To sleep in a slightly damp bed in front of a log fire with candles while the wind howls outside … actually I remember that part being quite cosy.

So, builders arrived and we gutted the house, replaced the plumbing, windows, doors, the lot. Then we were in really serious debt.

The other interesting event, which I recorded in my diaries at the time, was in January 1993 I first connected my laptop to the internet. Well, to be fair, I connected it to CompuServe, a kind of walled garden service that is very hard to describe to anyone under forty. To explain in it great detail, it was utter rubbish.

Somehow, series 6 of Red Dwarf came around far too soon. I was just starting to get somewhere with my other half-baked, half-finished, half-understood projects when it was suddenly upon me.

On 8 February 1993 the cast, producers, writers and director gathered together in a little hut next to C stage in Shepperton Studios and read-through the first three scripts. Deep joy, they were very funny.

There were changes though; instead of Ed Bye directing, this series was to be directed by Andy De Emmony, a charming and enthusiastic overgrown teenager. He wasn’t a teenager, he just had that lovely bubbly enthusiasm that top teenagers have, unflagging energy and commitment.

We also didn’t have anyone playing Holly, well, to put it simply, we didn’t even have Red Dwarf! No Holly, no Red Dwarf, what was this, a sitcom set in a suburban house with French windows?

Thankfully not. Psirens, a classic episode, was to be the first we would record, but before we got in the studio in front of the audience, we would spend ten days shooting exterior scenes in various locations around London.

For a reason that now utterly eludes me, we decided that Andy De Emmony was South African. He isn’t, by the way, but we kept talking to him using our range of thick, South African accents. If you adopt a vaguely South African accent and say ‘Andy De Emmony’ it sort of sounds right. He tolerated this confusion without malice and very soon proved himself to be a fantastic replacement for Ed Bye.

One of the locations which became legendary in the small, inward-looking circle of the Red Dwarf cast was the large, derelict Bankside power station on the South Bank of the River Thames. We arrived there very early in the morning and had a quick wander around. Inside a truly enormous hall where massive lumps of rusting electricity turbines, pipes, piles of twisted metal resembling the remnants of Leningrad during World War II. It was the most extraordinary and filthy old dump, dark, damp and fairly stinky.

You can visit the building now, although it looks rather different and smells a lot better. It’s called the Tate Modern art gallery. You still get a fairly good impression of the scale of the place when you go in the main entrance; it’s bloody enormous.

We filmed several scenes from Psirens in the building, using a grubby old caravan plonked in the middle of the cavernous generator room as our base. Playing Professor Mamet was a woman I’d had a bit of a crush on since I was a kid. Jenny Agutter looked stunning as Professor Mamet, she was Kryten’s creator and although his mind was synthetic and unseducible by the evil genetically engineered insecty things, as soon as the Psiren took the form of Professor Mamet, Kryten was doomed.

The scene required Kryten to get into the garbage compactor and crush himself into a cube. I remember reading the script and thinking it was very funny. The whole idea was that I would squat down with a box on top of me and do a slow, shuffly walk, Kryten’s flattened head sticking out of the front of the box.

I tried it in the studio and although it wasn’t easy, it was clearly very funny. However, as is often the way in the crazy world of showbiz, the smooth studio floor and the trainers I was wearing in rehearsal were not quite the same as the metal rungs of a raised walkway and Kryten’s massive robo-boots. If you were trying to design a flooring and footwear system to ensure minimum slippage, maximum grip, the combination present under my feet that day would be pretty close to global number one.

So we shot all manner of scenes in the rusting works of the old Bankside power station, it was cold, damp and miserable, just how Kryten loves it. The rest of the cast were freezing, I was comfortably balmy.

‘Ahh, smug-mode, sirs, the very low temperatures in this vast wreck of a building are just perfect for the rubber-headed one,’ I said, as we gathered on the set. My joy was not reflected back to me, the rest of the cast were wrapped in huge warm coats until Andy De Emmony said ‘Action!’

We were all very thrilled to be in the presence of Jenny Agutter though; for the very few of you who never saw The Railway Children it’s hard to imagine the impact of being in her presence. I believe the term MILF is now in common usage. Just as well it hadn’t been coined in 1993, as we would all have been using it far too often and that wouldn’t have been pleasant for Ms Agutter.

Jenny and I shot the scene where Professor Mamet makes Kryten climb into the garbage compactor to be crushed into a cube of waste metal.

I then had to go off to the little caravan and get changed into the cuboid Kryten outfit. The cube had been constructed with remnants of Kryten’s old costumes and gloves stuck on the outside, basically a perfectly square Kryten.

My mask was semi-removed from around the back of my head and the excess rubber was stuck on the outside of the box making it look as if my head had been crushed flat. It was a difficult procedure that required me to lie on the floor of the dirty old caravan as the box was glued to me. The Kryten face, obviously with me still attached, poked through a hole in the box.

When Jenny Agutter had finished all her scenes she entered the caravan to find me lying on the floor surrounded by busy make-up women.

‘I’m going to get changed now,’ she said. ‘I hope you’ll be a gentleman and not look.’

‘Of course not,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry it’s so cramped.’

So I lay on the floor of a dirty old caravan in the middle of Bankside power station while Jenny Agutter stripped off in front of me, and guess what dear readers, as Mr Craig Charles is constantly reminding me, I am a middle-class, wet liberal twat. I didn’t even sneak a tiny peek.

‘What a waste!’ said Craig when he heard tell of my exemplary behaviour a little later. ‘Not even a little sneaky peek?’

‘No, nothing, Craigy, it would have been rude.’

Craig walked around in circles holding his head. ‘I don’t believe it, la, he was in a caravan with Jenny Agutter fucking starkers and he didn’t give it a gawp.’

When Jenny had left, I opened my eyes and was praised by Andrea, my long-time make-up artist, for not looking.

‘Very well done, Robert,’ she said as she dabbed glue behind Kryten’s flattened head, ‘I thought you’d have a little peeping Tom gawp because you’re such a pervert, but you didn’t. Jenny Agutter was standing right above you in nothing but her knickers and you didn’t look.’

‘She wasn’t was she?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes, Robert, she was nearly completely naked. She’s very beautiful, but of course, you’ll never know because you didn’t look.’

Back on the set I was helped into my position for climbing out of the garbage compactor, it was only then that I realised something. If you are in a situation where you are likely to trip over and fall on your face, what is the first, totally automatic, reaction you have to the falling sensation? That’s correct, you put out your arms to break the fall and protect your head. It’s not an intellectual exercise, you don’t need to study such behaviour at postgrad level, it’s just something we all do. Well, put someone in non-slippy shoes on rusty grating walkway, enclose them in a box with their arms inside and ask them to shuffle along as best they can. Suddenly the whole tippy-forward thing becomes rather alarming.

If I had tripped forward, the first thing to come into contact with the metal grating of the raised walkway would have been my nose. Okay, to be specific, the rubber glued to my nose, but I’ll be frank, that does not offer a great deal of protection.

I managed to make the short walk from the garbage compactor to the edge of the platform without facial injury, this was then followed by the empty box being thrown down on the rubber and wire Psiren standing beneath, allowing Kryten to save the day.

So, once all the pre-recording was done, we settled down to the weekly routine of rehearsing and recording the shows in front of the audience.

I moved into my little flat above the NatWest bank on Shepperton High Street and paced around every evening trying to learn my lines. Judy was touring what would be her last one-woman show. She wasn’t having a great time. I spoke to her regularly on the phone and she said she was feeling sick, especially in the mornings.

She came to stay in the flat for a couple of nights when she got a break in her schedule. She suggested I go down to the chemist next to the bank and buy a pregnancy test kit. I did so without really thinking what this could all mean, or what impact such an event might have. I was probably standing in the chemist reciting a long and complex Kryten speech. Probably, if memory serves, from the episode Out of Time where due to weird, sci-fi smeg, Kryten believes Lister to be a slightly inferior model of mechanoid and therefore makes Lister perform basic domestic chores, when Lister complains, Kryten corrects him most sternly saying:

‘You encouraged me to break my programming and ape human behaviour. Now I find out you’re no better than I! But worst of all, the most bitter pill to swallow, for four long years, I had to hand-scrub the gussets of your long johns. Now, unless you want to wallow in the eternal fires of Silicon Hell, I suggest you bring a tray of refreshments up to the cockpit, pronto!’

Excellent stuff, but as usual, old porridge brain had to repeat it endlessly until it could be delivered without fault.

So I returned to the flat, Judy did a wee on the pregnancy stick and ten minutes later we both studied the results.

‘I’m up the duff, darl,’ she said in the charming, romantic and overly sentimental Australian style I had grown used to. ‘Don’t tell anyone you gobshite.’

I promised to keep quiet, but there’s no question, we were both thrilled to bits. I was thirty-seven years old and convinced I had ridden bikes too much, damaged my vas deferens and was unable to procreate. For those of you not au fait with the whole vas deferens thing, it’s basically the little tube arrangement that transports the sperm from the testes to the… well, you get the picture. Humans, so messy and agricultural.

Anyway, it looked like I was finally going to be a dad, but I had to keep quiet about it.

Many hot and long days were spent on the set, some cold and long days were spent on various gravel heaps and quarries; I remember Chris got particularly cold shooting outdoor scenes from Rimmerworld, but clearly enjoyed the chance of playing a planet load of bitter, insecure and back-stabbing cowards.

It is strange to reflect how, at the time we made this series, Chris and Craig were still quite competitive with each other. Both had very successful TV careers and both were driven and determined to be successful. I can’t even recall all the other TV and radio shows Craig did at the time, but they were plentiful. Chris, of course, was involved in The Brittas Empire which had been running for a couple of years by the time we recorded Red Dwarf VI and Brittas was already a well-established and much-loved series.

Danny and I, while no slouches, really didn’t try to compete with the big boys. It’s not like we were suffering, Danny was still appearing in West End musicals at the time, including Carmen Jones, and I was doing all my own writing nonsense.

My involvement in the American Red Dwarf pilot was largely ignored by the cast, it was mentioned every now and then, with comments along the lines of, ‘Oh yeah, you took the nice middle-class white guy to Hollywood with you, la,’ from Craig, but nothing was really said. The response to this from Rob (Dr Love) Grant was, ‘You didn’t think we’d take you did you? They wanted class, not scum!’

Charming. As you can imagine, these moments of bish-bash banter were less than comfortable for a conflicted, guilt-ridden, wishy-washy liberal, but we got through.

Recording the episode Out of Time was enormous fun, the make-up and costumes were a source of hilarity. It’s important to remember that when we are being prepared for a scene like the entrance of the future Rimmer, Cat and Kryten, we will not have seen how each other looks. The preparation for the costume and make-up will have been done individually. Kryten was, of course, swathed in a comfortable powder blue lounge suit with white polo neck jumper and gold medallion. Basically pretty much what I wear at home when I’m chilling.

But when I saw Danny with his comb-over and monster butt you could park a plane in, and Chris, his grey hair, middle-aged ’tash and massive gut, it was very hard not to corpse.

Obviously Craig’s make-up was less arduous for him as he was merely a brain in a jar.

Another very memorable episode was Gunmen of the Apocalypse. I don’t really have favourite episodes but this one has to be in the top ten. It’s a brilliant concept: a classic Red Dwarf plot where Kryten has to do battle with a particularly ruthless computer virus, which he interprets in his bizarre internal mechanoid mind as a gun battle in a cowboy town.

As the sherriff, Kryten is faced with the four horsemen known as the Apocalypse Brothers. Kryten is a drunk, hopeless sherriff who apologises to thugs when they trip him up. That last bit was very familiar, no acting required for that skill. When people barge into me in the street I always apologise. Tragic, but true.

The script, as usual, described something in a short sentence that took an age to actually capture on the day. For a start, this episode required horses, cowboys and a cowboy town. The first two you could imagine being able to procure in the UK, the latter? No chance, we’d have to go to Wyoming.

Except that in Kent, strangely enough, right next to the Brands Hatch motor racing circuit, there is a small cowboy town called Laredo.

Grown men and women go there every weekend to be cowboys and cowgirls. Laredo was a short street of very authentic-looking wooden buildings at the edge of a green Kentish field. I’ve been to some weird places through work, but again, this one is in the top ten.

We arrived very early as usual. I got a quick bite of a bacon sandwich before heading into the make-up bus. When a TV show or film is shooting on location, a wide variety of specially converted vehicles are needed to accommodate costume, make-up, catering and all the ancilliary needs of the industry.

The make-up bus was just that, a double-decker bus with the make-up chairs, mirrors and lights in the upper deck. Very nice.

I sat down and went through the now very familiar rigmarole of having a full-head prosthetic mask applied. The rest of the cast arrived and the banter started.

‘I feel rough, man,’ said Craig, rubbing his face. ‘Didn’t get to bed ’till five this morning.’

‘Did you see what Madonna said?’ said Danny. ‘Man oh man she is earning serious money doing her tour, they pay her in bullion, big blocks of gold. She won’t accept cash, to Madonna, that’s just litter!’

‘Indeed, Danielski,’ said Chris. ‘Probably earns enough to buy my 1952 Bentley R type, which, as I’m sure you are aware, has the 4.6 litre straight-6 engine and a beautiful walnut veneer dash and is, without question, a classic vehicle.’

And so it went on. There was, however, in this particular luxury make-up facility, one small problem. When Andrea is applying glue to the mask around my eyes, it’s a very delicate operation. She has a very steady hand and always advises me to keep my wobbly head very still. In a concrete and brick building that is no great challenge. On the upper deck of a bus with people getting on and off all the time, careful, delicate movement is a bit more of a challenge.

‘Try not to wobble the bus!’ shouted Andrea, as she held a glue brush less than a millimetre from my eyeball.

It was hopeless. After a few moments, the bus rocked alarmingly and as Andrea moved her hand away from my semi-glued eyeball, this violent retreat resulted in an accidental muscle spasm resulting in the glue brush being stuck up my nose.

The phrase ‘stick it up your nose’ is in common usage and has no glue-based connotations; well, it didn’t until that moment. As I’ve already implied, the glue used on Kryten’s mask is very strong and very quick-drying. The glue brush stuck to my nostril hairs in a flash. Andrea started laughing. I don’t blame her. She let go of the brush and let it dangle. I could see in the mirror why this might be funny. Kryten suddenly had a long, wooden bogie hanging from his rubber proboscis, but let me assure you it didn’t feel funny.

‘Oh my God, I’ve stuck a glue brush to Robert’s freaky nose hairs,’ she said. Obviously this was a sight everyone wanted to see, the rest of the cast gathered around.

‘Eeeuw, that looks sick,’ said Craig. ‘Let me pull it out, Bobby, man.’

‘Go on then,’ I said.

‘This is going to make your eyes water,’ said Craig, who quickly wrenched out the glue brush, and with it, a sizeable clump of male nasal hair. Yes, it did made my eyes water, never a good thing in a prosthetic mask.

Once we’d all been suitably attired, by the indefatigable Howard Burden in the costume department, we wandered onto the set. It was cold and damp, everyone was wrapped up in Puffa jackets. Rob and Doug were stood on the porch of the town barbers smoking. Rob in particular was very happy, he fancies himself as a bit of a cowboy.

We were introduced to the four horses, the idea was to get a shot of all four of us riding into the town as a part of a trailer for the new series.

‘We don’t want to spend long on this shot,’ said Andy De Emmony. ‘Just ride past the camera and we’re done.’

It’s that easy. Get four grown men up in the saddle of four very well-trained stunt horses and get them to ride past the camera.

So we mounted our steeds. I want to point out here and now that we had a wide range of horse riding skills between us. I’d grown up riding horses, I’d been pony trekking for weeks as a kid, I’d looked after horses on a neighbouring farm when I was a teenager, I’d ridden small ponies and thundering hunters. I knew a bit about them. That is, I knew they could be very dangerous and falling off them really hurt. Danny had also ridden a bit, he has a natural physical grace and excellent balance and he also knew how dangerous they could be.

Chris hadn’t, I believe, ever sat on a horse before. He was naturally a little nervous, complaining that there didn’t appear to be any steering wheel or indicators and, in particular, no brake pedal.

Craig loudly announced that he’d once sat on a donkey on Blackpool beach when he was a toddler, and knew how to control one of these beasts. Craig is blessed with a missing fear gene.

‘I wonder how fast this baby will go?’ he said, as his mount skittered around in an energetic circle.

‘Let’s not find out, Craigy,’ said Chris, as his horse did some mild reary-type stunts. It was too late. Craig used his cowboy hat to encourage his steed to let rip, and let rip it did. The rest of the horses, well-trained as I said, clearly thought they’d heard someone shout ‘Action!’ Being well-trained, they naturally assumed the scene required them to run full pelt out of Dodge. Well, Laredo, and into the big field that surrounded the fake cowboy town.

We thundered along, members of the crew throwing themselves out of the way as a grinning Craig Charles whooped and holler’d as his horse led the pack.

Danny and I stood in the stirrups and leaned forward to aid our balance, I have to say galloping on a horse when you’re wearing a full-head prosthetic with limited vision and hearing is quite an experience. I did glance at Chris briefly as we charged across the field, he didn’t look happy. He didn’t know about standing in the stirrups and looked like a rag doll being tormented by a spoilt kid.

‘How d’you stop this bloody thing?’ he cried, as we headed toward the open gate at the far end of the field. Thankfully one of the crew had the forethought to quickly close the gate otherwise we might have galloped all the way to Maidstone.

We did eventually do the shot of all of us trotting past the camera. What should have taken three minutes took an hour and the shot was only every used once in a trailer.

The horses were then ridden by proper riders; stunt riders who knew how to handle them. Well, that’s what I was told.

When the Four Gunmen of the Apocalypse confront the drunken sherriff Kryten outside the saloon bar, they had to fire guns to blow Kryten’s hat off and shatter his whisky bottle. We had learned that these stunt horses were very used to gunfire, they wouldn’t panic, it was all fine.

So, the Gunmen of the Apocalypse approach, we do the lines then they open up with their multiple six shooters. The horses totally freaked out. They panicked, reared up, bucked and ran off in all directions. Excellent stuff.

Then there were the doves.

Ahh yes, the wonderful doves of peace. The doves were representing the antidote to the computer virus that had infected Starbug’s navicomp. It all made sense in the read-through, but when we were standing in a cold field in Kent holding two real doves that were meant to fly out of my hands, it was very easy to lose the plot.

I released the doves and with the most elegant and energy-efficient hop, they gently landed at my feet. They didn’t take to the wing and flap away, they barely opened their wings, they just hopped off Kryten’s rubber gloves and plop, landed.

‘Throw them a bit,’ suggested Andy De Emmony. So, in the next take I gently tried to launch them without it seeming like I was actually throwing them. This time they did flap their wings, but it was very half-hearted. One and a half flaps and they landed at my feet again. They were very tame, they didn’t mind being held at all. In fact, they would have happily sat on my hands all day.

Eventually I threw both of them with some vigour and they slowed down the shot in the edit so you do see the doves make a half-hearted attempt at flying. I think I could have done better with a big cloak.

On the last night of recording series 6, there was a party in the old orangery of Shepperton House. We’d all brought along our best clothes and scrubbed up for the knees-up. Everyone who’d worked on the series was there. Sadly not Jenny Agutter, but pretty much everyone else.

Chris did his round of impersonations, all of them brilliant. He got everyone spot on, managing to weave all the different characterisations into a kind of story. Within a couple of words or simply the way he pulled a face, Chris could capture someone instantly. About halfway through, he started doing what I took to be an impression of Cliff Richard as a sort of jumpy, apologetic, slightly lispy, middle-class tosser. He twitched around on the floor saying, ‘Sorry, it’s all my fault, sorry, sorry.’

Everyone in the room was roaring with laughter, Craig gave me a hug and I can honestly say it was a good few seconds before I realised who this was meant to be. I stared around the crowd with my mouth open, everyone was pointing at me and laughing. The twitchy, lispy Cliff Richard impression was meant to be me. I didn’t recognise it at all but it was painfully and embarrassingly obvious that everyone else did. Hey ho.

Just before leaving that night, I told Rob, Doug and Ed that Judy was pregnant. I’d discussed it with Judy, and as by that time she was already fairly obviously pregnant and everyone in her family knew, she said it was okay to announce it.

It was one of those brief moments that I recall very clearly. They were all really thrilled for me and told me to give their love and congratulations to Judy. I don’t know why I was surprised by their reaction, it was very genuine and heartfelt, even Rob Grant gave me a hug and didn’t say anything nasty.

I then told Craig, he gave me a big hug and shouted in my ear, ‘Didn’t know you had it in you, man, thought you only fired blanks!’

Chapter 9

At one-thirty in the morning on 17 October 1993 I drove Judy to the Ronkswood Hospital just outside Worcester, about forty-five miles from where we live. The reason we had to travel so far in the middle of the night in a rattling Land Rover was because this particular hospital had a built-in birthing pool.

If you don’t know what a birthing pool is, there’s not much to explain. It’s a big bath, like a hot tub, except it’s specifically designed to give birth in. It was Judy’s intention to give birth to her first child under water.

I won’t go into the details, a birth is a birth; long, messy and ultimately life-changing and amazing. We arrived at the hospital at two in the morning, at three the following afternoon, I watched my son Louis emerge into the world deep in a massive pool of very warm water. The experience was beyond description.

The impact of a young baby on our lives was fairly immense. We coped. He’s still around and he’s a lovely big chap now, so we can’t have done everything wrong, but it was an enormous upheaval.

I was incredibly busy around the time of Louis’ birth; I was in the latter stages of rewriting a stage play called Punchbag that was due to open at the Hampstead Theatre in London. I attended rehearsals as regularly as I could, which wasn’t often enough. I didn’t do much sleeping for the first year of Louis’ life.

The two male actors, Eamonn Walker (the Lord of War in the Nicholas Cage movie of the same name, and many other roles) and Andy Serkis (yes, the Gollum/King Kong chap) were both amazing. The two female roles played by Sophie Heyman and my long-time friend, Buffy Davis (she plays Jolene in the Archers) were also magnificent. Danny John-Jules helped with the choreography. Watching Danny work out moves and block the routines with the actors was a real treat. That man knows how to move.

On the last day of rehearsals, I watched a run-through with baby Louis in his little carrycot thing. It was all looking good. We stayed on stage for notes, I made a couple of last-minute changes and then we retired to the backstage area when the theatre started to fill with eager audience members. I would have been talking and joshing with the cast for a full ten minutes before I remembered Louis. Where was he?

I went to the wings and glanced out onto the stage, he was right in the middle, fast asleep in his little cot. He looked like part of the set. Eamonn, now fully kitted up in his self-defence teacher’s costume walked proudly onto the set, tutted, picked Louis up and carried him off. No one in the audience said anything, they must have assumed this was a subtle message about male strength and tender care.

During this period, I was constantly in meetings with Rob, Doug and Ed about Red Dwarf and another TV series they’d had commissioned called iCamcorder which they wanted me to present for them.

The iCamcorder idea was very much Rob’s baby, a six-part TV series designed to encourage people to use their newly acquired video cameras in a slightly more creative way. This was at a time when what was effectively a TV camera that had been blisteringly expensive was becoming more and more affordable.

These large, cumbersome devices were pathetically crude and low res by today’s standards, with fewer features than a current mobile phone you get for free, but it was a bit of a breakthrough at the time.

However, through all this I could tell during my many meetings with Rob and Doug that not all was well in the Grant Naylor universe.

I was never party to any information, Rob and Doug always kept a healthy distance from us, but I was busy writing in their London office one day when I saw a phalanx of lawyers enter the Grant Naylor inner sanctum.

I didn’t know who they were, but they clearly weren’t actors or producers, they were too well dressed, they all had briefcases and they didn’t stop to chat to anyone.

It was only much later that I discovered that Rob had, as I was told, decided he didn’t want to be involved in Red Dwarf any more.

Danny, Chris, Craig and I have talked about this a great deal and all came to the same conclusion: we feel like the children in a divorce. One parent left and we don’t really know why. I don’t think we ever will.

Hence the real reason there was a long gap between series 6 and 7. The popular myth around at the time was we couldn’t make series 7 because Craig got in a bit of bother.

In my muddled brain I always connect Craig and the shocking rape allegations made against him, and iCamcorder the TV series, as the two things happened around the same time.

There is no other connection between them except that when I was filming in west London, I went to visit Craig after work. He was held on remand for three and a half months in Wandsworth prison. I’m not going to go into any detail about this event, it was very distressing for everyone who knows and loves Craig, and the fact that he was found not guilty on all charges in a High Court in front of a jury is enough for me.

He was incredibly stoical through the entire nightmare, visiting him in prison wasn’t pleasant, but we did laugh a great deal. His sense of humour never left him.

The one observation I want to make is the ethnic make-up of the remand prisoners. When someone is accused of a crime, they are arrested, charged and then either bailed out or held on remand if the charge is serious enough or they are deemed a danger to the public.

When I sat down for a cup of tea in the visitors’ room I became aware that 99 per cent of the remand prisoners were black. There was literally one white man. A very posh white man, wearing a pinstripe suit (remand prisoners are allowed to wear their own clothes).

This posh banker type was being visited by his family; a mother and two children who would not look out of place at a private school garden party.

Every other remand prisoner was black. Okay, now without question some of the men being held there looked well dodgy, without question the fact that they were being held in prison was a great relief to the rest of us, you really wouldn’t want to meet some of those blokes in a brightly lit supermarket, let alone the clichéd dark alley. But all of them?

Afro-Caribbean people make up about 1.2 per cent of the UK total population. Okay, Wandsworth prison is in west London where the percentage is much higher, but it’s not 99 per cent, maybe more like 5 per cent.

I have witnessed at first hand examples of overt and aggressive racism in the British police force, but being the wet liberal I am, I assumed this didn’t include the judicial system, wet liberal lawyers, judges, probation officers, etc. What I saw in Wandsworth prison was a brutal rebuttal of that limply held view. The British judicial system, in 1994, was very racist. In the years since then, I fondly hope this has improved a little, but I fear it is a vain hope. I know with some certainty that not all those men needed to be held on remand, many, like Craig, would have been found not guilty.

The only time I’ve ever been in a car that got pulled over by the police, not for any traffic infringement, just because the car ‘raised suspicion’, was when I was being given a lift by Danny. He was used to it. ‘Chill out, guy, this happens all the time,’ he said, as I started getting huffy and indignant on his behalf.

The police officer was perfectly charming, asked to see Danny’s licence and proof of ownership, which by habit he kept with him. He then recognised Danny and was really chuffed. The officer loved Red Dwarf, he shook both our hands and happily waved us on our way. As the cast of Red Dwarf have been known to say: ‘E-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-extraordinary’.

Anyway, moving on.

I spent the summer of 1994 shooting the iCamcorder series, which was a wonderful experience, and it’s one of those fairly obscure TV shows that keep reappearing in my life.

Far more recently I was in an episode of a children’s TV series called M.I. High, which featured Danny John-Jules as a school janitor and top secret agent. I played the prime minister who was actually a robot, there you go, typecasting again. Anyway, the director, a lovely young chap called Toby Haynes, told me he had been allowed to stay up to watch iCamcorder when he was a schoolboy and it’s what inspired him to become a director. It made me feel very old, but in a good way.

At the end of the shooting process I spent some time talking to Doug, who explained to me that Rob was no longer going to be involved in Red Dwarf and he was going to write series 7 with a large pool of new writers. He also implied that I could be one of those writers. This was a real challenge, an exciting one. But still, I approached the task with some trepidation.

The other Red Dwarf-related experience that took place that year was a trip to the USA with Craig. We flew to Chicago together to appear at a science fiction convention. I can’t believe now that I had no idea what this meant, but I think I really didn’t.

The convention took place in Chicago and was held over Thanksgiving weekend which, for those of you who’ve never experienced it, is about as big a family event in the United States as Christmas is in the UK.

The convention was based somewhere outside Chicago in a massive hotel and convention complex which may have been near the airport. When you get off the plane and are met by people who whoosh you around in big limos, you kind of lose track of where you are geographically.

I had never been to an event like it before, so to be confronted with many thousands of ardent Red Dwarf fans was quite an eye-opener. The organisers were fans too, they looked after us very well but it was not a holiday. By the time we finished and were delivered back to the airport they estimated we had signed around twenty thousand items. That was the quote I remember.

Our days at the convention were very tightly controlled: wake up, massive American breakfast, first signing session which took place in a huge room with a roped-off queuing area where fans waited for hours while we signed pictures for them.

Then we would be ushered into another big room where we would pose for pictures next to the fans, not one or two, but hundreds of fans. A solid line of them for one hour.

It was during one of the photo sessions that Craig and I met Big Bob.

I have to mention Big Bob because one, he was such a lovely chap and two, he is very hard to forget.

The door opened and quite simply the biggest human being I have ever seen walked in. Big Bob was tall, probably around six foot five, but that was the least spectacular thing about him. Big Bob was big everywhere.

Okay, so you confront a lily-livered wet liberal apologist like me with a man so gargantuan and I am thinking, ‘Oh my God, he is SO FAT!’ but I’m not saying anything, just smiling and saying, ‘Hey, Bob, nice to meet you.’

Not so Mr Craig Charles. As soon as he saw Bob his first words were, and I’ve checked with Craig to make sure I get the quote right, ‘Fuck me, man, you could skip lunch.’

That’s what Craig said to Big Bob. I cringed, Big Bob laughed and gave Craig a hug. As Craig described it, ‘When he hugged me, I disappeared into Big Bob, man, I never thought I was going to get out!’

Many British people will have heard of a famous seventeenth-century chap from Leicester called Daniel Lambert. At his peak he weighed 52 stones, or around 700 pounds (318 kg). Big Bob, so we were told, rounded out at around 950 pounds or 67 stone.

Now, one of the cruel myths about science fiction fans is that they are all like Big Bob, but I recount this meeting just because it was so exceptional. The vast majority of Red Dwarf fans are nothing like Big Bob, they are just normal, kind and very polite people who love the show. But Big Bob was extraordinary. I may have this wrong too, but I seem to recall that he owned a pig farm. I admit that Craig and I did, privately, share humorous badinage about how Bob needed a pig farm because he probably just ate whole pigs for breakfast. Cooked of course. He wasn’t a monster, just a very substantial chap.

He had, as he described them, ‘good friends’ who helped him wash, dress and perform his basic functions. When you weigh 950 pounds your arms cannot reach any lower parts so I imagine his friends had to be very good indeed.

One of my anxieties about someone as big as Big Bob is that they can’t really wash. I admit I had that slight fear of substantial odours as he lumbered his massive bulk toward us. Nothing could be further from the truth, he smelt lovely, clean and freshly washed-down.

We survived the convention, met loads of wonderful people and although exhausted when we got the flight home, we both really enjoyed it.

A timely observation about the flight. We flew British Airways in both directions. On the outward flight Craig and I were sitting in business-class seats. Nice.

Now, it’s no secret that Craig smokes. By this time the smoking ban had been applied to all flights so Craig was a little tetchy about a long-haul flight. The following incidents illustrate how much has changed in the last fifteen years. For one thing, a lovely flight attendant explained to Craig, discreetly, just how to smoke in the toilets without setting off the smoke alarm. I kid you not.

Every twenty minutes or so, Craig would climb over me with a big grin, expressing his surprise at how many times he needed a wee. When he came out of the toilet there would be a small queue, he would then waft his hand around in front of his face and say with his best innocent face, ‘I think someone’s been smokin’ in there, la.’ He got away with it every time! I’d totally blow it if I tried to do that. It’s so unfair!

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.

We spent the majority of time in the studio in an incredible multi-level set, the like of which we’d never seen.

On one particular day, Judy and my then three-year-old son Louis were coming to visit Daddy at work. I had explained to Louis how important it was that he was very quiet when the tall man called Ed said ‘action’.

His little eyes were wide open as I explained that he could talk in the studio, he could talk to me even though I looked like a robot, but when the man said action, he had to be very quiet.

When they arrived we were in the middle of shooting a scene where Lister was about to go off on a daring escapade, ‘Being brave in a hostile universe.’ Kryten, Cat and Kochanski were waving farewell from a gantry above. The scene was set, Judy, now heavily pregnant sat on a chair just out of shot, young Louis right beside her.

The floor manager said, ‘Quiet on the floor please,’ and moments later Ed shouted, ‘Aaaaaand Action!’

Without missing a beat, everyone in the studio heard Louis say to his mum, ‘You’ve got to be quiet now, mum!’

Perfect, much laughter, poor little Louis obviously rather confused.

Due to the availability or otherwise of the T-72 tank, we had delayed the exterior shoot for Kryten’s intervention into the Jane Austen World AR game.

On the big day, we gathered by a lake at a Surrey army camp where a wonderful gazebo had been built right by the water. It was a very hot day and as soon as I was fully made-up, Andrea made a rather unusual suggestion.

‘Robert, you’re going to get very hot today. I know you’re excited about your little tank, but you do need to keep cool. Why don’t you go and sit in the freezer trailer.’

I discovered that the catering truck had a large trailer to store food that was actually a mobile freezer. Andrea asked if I could sit in it to cool down, they were fine about it.

So, I was sitting in the dark, in a freezer, in pants, vest and rubber head when I felt the whole trailer start to wobble. This movement was accompanied by a low rumble that gradually grew louder.

‘Oh my God,’ I said to myself. ‘The T-72’s here.’

I dashed out of the trailer and ran to the track we had arrived on. Sure enough, there was a massive Russian tank rumbling toward me. I followed it through the woods until it arrived next to the gazebo.

One of the crew later informed me that he believed he would never see anything more bizarre to his dying day than a Russian tank approaching him followed by a half-naked man sporting a square rubber head.

We then set about shooting the moment Kryten comes out of the lake in the tank and informs the rest of the crew that ‘dinner is served’. This brief moment of screen-time took ages; getting the tank into the water was a challenge, the engine had to be kept running to operate the pumps, the noise was deafening, no one could hear anything, but eventually that part was done.

Then we all had to retire to the far side of the lake as the special effects chaps got to work rigging up Mr Bingley’s gazebo for the detonation shot. What we didn’t know was that due to the excitement our presence had created on the army base, some of the explosives chaps from the army lent a hand. Well, more accurately, they lent us some Semtex ribbon, or demolition tape I believe they call it. They use it for blowing up bridges and stuff, big explosions, they love it, it’s all normal to blow stuff up in the army, that’s what we pay them to do.

After what seemed like a long wait, we sat on the far bank of the peaceful lake. I was watching the moorhens and ducks paddle about. A warning horn sounded and suddenly Mr Bingley’s gazebo was launched into low orbit. When things blow up on telly it’s usually just flash powder and maybe a bit of petrol. It doesn’t make a lot of noise, that’s all added afterwards. This was not the case with Mr Bingley’s gazebo. It made a lot of noise. The shock wave hit us like a frenzied rugger bugger, people screamed, especially Chloë Annett.

We watched as bits of burning debris fell all around. We watched as the top of a tree came crashing to earth. We listened as car and burglar alarms went off for miles around. We also watched as some local residents came into the public area of the camp to explain that windows had broken in their houses. Mr Bingley’s gazebo, I think we can proudly claim, set the bar for on-screen explosions. It was a monster.

When we’d finished recording series 7, I’m sure there was a wrap party. I’m sure everyone hugged everyone and thanked them for being so lovely, that’s what we do in showbiz, but I truly don’t remember anything about it.

The next thing for me was the birth of my wonderful daughter who also came into this world under water, but this time in a birthing pool at home.

When she was still a tiny mite in a basket, we all gathered at a screening room in London where a large audience were shown the first four episodes of the new series. Their laughter was recorded to be laid on the sound track later and this is the nearest Red Dwarf has ever come to canned laughter.

We repeated the event a week later, for the last four episodes and my chief memory of this event is trying to control my son who was doing a lot of four-year-old play-fighting with Craig’s son Jack, who would then have been about ten. He was very patient with my son and they wrestled and giggled and fell about in heaps for hours, neither of them the least bit interested in watching either of their dads on a big screen.

Now many hardcore Red Dwarf aficionados have said they didn’t like series 7; they thought it had lost a lot of the original strengths of the previous six series. I can see why they said that but I think now, after many years to reflect, it had some brilliant ideas in it that were carried out incredibly well. Without question, the cast all prefer to perform in front of an audience but I think series 7 was a very brave experiment that came very close to being brilliant.

Chapter 10

1998 started with a dizzying hive of Red Dwarf-related activity. Once again, I spent Christmas and New Year in Australia with Judy and the kids. Christmas in Australia has a unique flavour and I have to say I loved every minute.

I spent all the time with the kids, doing kid things: going swimming, making things, reading stories and cooking. We went for long walks in the rainforest – think I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here!, only with pushchairs. In fact the I’m a Celeb series is made just down the road from Judy’s mum’s. Well, down the road in Australia terms, which means about forty miles away.

We had travelled to Australia separately due to my work commitments. Judy left first with our son Louis, he was then four years old and loved flying in the big aeroplane. I constantly remind him now he is an incredibly over-privileged kid to have had that experience. He doesn’t agree with me.

However, on this trip the poor little lad developed a lung infection on the flight and spent four days in a hospital in Singapore. Massive stress and anxiety, many midnight phone calls, but thankfully he pulled through and they went on to Australia.

I was left with our delightful, easy to manage, one-year-old daughter, but I was still quietly grumbling to myself that I had drawn the short straw.

Our flight left Heathrow at eleven-thirty at night. When I arrived to check in with my already sleeping daughter, I descended into chaos. It looked like a scene from a sci-fi movie where all the residents of the city are trying to escape the hordes of mutant zombie killers.

It turned out all the baggage handling machines had broken down and passengers had to carry their own bags to the waiting lounge where they would be hand-loaded onto the flight. Not such a nightmare if you are young and have a backpack, a bit more of a challenge if you have a sleeping one-year-old in your arms, her carry-on baby requisites in a big bag, and another massive bag full of stuff, I don’t even know what was in it. When I travel alone, I travel super light, one small carry-on bag, nothing else. Babies take that bit of easy selfishness and laugh in your face as they throw it out of the window. Babies gurgle and say to you, ‘I need a lot of back-up equipment Daddy, I mean a LOT.’

I waited in the check-in queue with a sleeping baby in my arms, shuffling bags along the ground. The very nice check-in lady said she was a big Red Dwarf fan. Normally I would be ready, happy to joke along with someone. But not this time.

I tried to smile, I tried to be charming but I wasn’t in the best of moods. I signed an autograph for her husband, took my boarding pass and made the long, slow journey to Gate 122.

When I finally walked onto the plane, ready to turn left for my economy seat down the back near the toilets, the lovely man from Singapore Airlines ushered me to the right. I hesitated for a moment before checking my boarding pass. Without me asking, the woman at the check-in had bumped me up to first class. I was gobsmacked, dumbfounded, knocked back, staggered. I didn’t even know such a thing was possible. I have had people say to me, ‘Oh, I bet you get bumped up all the time,’ but this was genuinely the first occasion. I wanted to run back to the check-in and thank her.

So I turned to the right and placed my still-sleeping daughter down on a massive luxury seat, covered her with a massive luxury blanket and then took my place in an equally enormous seat next to her. I almost cried.

The faces on the other first-class passengers were a picture of discomfort when they saw a scruffy bloke with a baby settle down. They didn’t want a screaming infant spoiling their incredibly expensive luxury. However, by the end of the flight, the fact that my daughter was an absolute angel had won her many admirers. She never made a sound, she slept like a log, she had her bottle, did a bit of wobbly walking and never embarrassed her dad for a moment.

After a big family Christmas, and many hours in swimming pools and visiting ancient aunts, Judy suggested I go off and spend some time on my own and do some writing. Maybe I was getting grumpy, she’s very good at noticing and the fact that she notices makes me grumpy.

I had a lot of writing to do. I had finished my first novel, The Man on Platform 5, which was going through the painstakingly slow process of being published. I was also halfway through my second novel, Punchbag, which was a project very close to my heart that had seen many different guises, a film script and a stage play.

So I went off to the Gold Coast, an incredible beach about sixty miles south of Brisbane fringed with the most absurd array of high-rise apartment blocks. Face one way and you see a sight of incredible natural beauty. Face the other, well, it’s the Gold Coast baby, like Las Vegas with a beach.

I rented a room in a cheap hotel, settled in quickly and got down to work. I rang Judy the first night to check on how things were going, she told me the Mayor of the Gold Coast had rung up as they heard I was ‘in town’. They had found Judy’s mum’s number after I had done an interview on a local radio station. Judy had gone to college with the radio interviewer, the Mayor’s office had got in touch with them, they gave the caller Judy’s mum’s number. If the media village is small in London, it’s a three-house hamlet in Brisbane.

The next morning, I was woken by a call to the hotel room. I have to remind myself this was before the mass adoption of cell phones and people used to actually ring you at the hotel. You know, on a phone with wires. Quaint.

It was the Mayor of the Gold Coast on the line, a charming man with a full-on Queensland accent and he invited me out for lunch.

The whole purpose of my stay in the Gold Coast was to get a bit of peace and do a lot of writing. I didn’t want to talk to people, but I couldn’t be rude, it’s not in my programming. So I went for lunch with him and his staff and it was all very pleasant.

He discreetly enquired as to why I was staying at the rather cheap hotel near the main road. I said I just needed a bed, a desk and no interruptions to write. He said he’d sort it out, and without me doing anything, I was suddenly staying in the presidential suite of a five-star hotel overlooking the beach, all inclusive.

I only recount the events of being bumped up on a flight and getting a massive hotel suite because the experience was unusual for me. I don’t get those sorts of treats every day. I’ve never had one since, but I have to say, first-class travel and sitting at an enormous desk looking out of the massive tinted window on the thirty-second floor, where I could only see the Pacific and the golden beach, was rather pleasant.

Not only did I still manage to write a lot, I went for a five-mile run on the beach every morning, had a fabulous breakfast, wrote for six hours, went to the gym for an hour, slept for an hour and then wrote on into the night. I don’t want to rub it in too much, but I had the most fabulous time and I didn’t even feel guilty.

During all these events I started hearing rumours from the Grant Naylor offices in London about all manner of madness. It seemed the BBC were going to mount a Red Dwarf night to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the original broadcast.

At the time it all seemed just a chaos of arrangements, international travel, jet lag, child-care, transport difficulties and associated stress, but looking back now, that was a truly remarkable thing for the BBC to do.

When I got back to the cold, wet United Kingdom that year, I had just enough time to get over jetlag before the Red Dwarf night recording was scheduled.

A whole night dedicated to one TV series; it was a strange, but I have to say, very enjoyable series of programmes including the cast taking part in a Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook special with Ainsley Harriott. Ainsley had played a GELF Chief in the series 6 episode, Emohawk.

We also took part in a Red Dwarf quiz, chaired by Bamber Gascoigne, where the combined intellectual might of the Red Dwarf crew was pitted against a bedraggled crowd of Red Dwarf fans. The fans won hands down.

All through 1998 there were rumours about series 8. They were confirmed in midsummer and I started to make arrangements.

During that summer, I shot a new series for Channel 4. It felt like a one-off, weird quirky show that might find a microscopically small audience. It was called Scrapheap Challenge.

I loved working on the show. It combined many things I was interested in, passionate about even: tinkering, engineering, bodging things together and recycling rubbish. The shooting schedule was insane and the exhaustion legendary but it was an amazing show to be involved with.

It was also during this year that I was sitting in the writing shed in my garden, watching a thrush clean its beak in the hedge outside the window, when the phone rang. I don’t know why I remember watching the thrush but there we go, that was what I was doing.

The call was from my literary agent in London, who told me to sit down as she had some news. A company called New Line Cinema in Hollywood had made an offer for the film rights of my first novel, The Man on Platform 5. They offered one million dollars.

Although I knew we had received one or two enquiries from London-based filmmakers, it was all a bit hazy. They wanted to talk to me about making the book into a film, nothing more than that. This news from Hollywood came totally out of the blue.

I sat looking at the thrush in the hedge. It hopped about, utterly unaware that inside the shed it was beside, a man was going through a major life moment. I was feeling a bit dizzy, I was sitting down and I think I said something like, ‘Yeah, alright then.’

Just to tie up this rather bonkers bit of information, the story of the film rights deal is long and very complex, I won’t bore you with it but needless to say the film was never made. The individuals in Hollywood who bought the film were all fired, then reinstated, half a dozen screenwriters were hired to write the screenplay, then they were all fired. If they had been in a position to fire me I’m sure they would have, but that morning in the shed I wasn’t that bothered. I had sold the film rights to my first novel for one million dollars. I lit up a massive cigar Danny John-Jules had given me and immediately felt very sick.

By the autumn of 1998 I packed my bags and headed off to Acton to start work on Red Dwarf VIII.

Instead of either schlepping all the way from Islington where we still rented a flat, or renting another one in Shepperton, I begged a room off an old friend, Maria McErlane, in her lovely house in Acton, which was only half an hour from Shepperton. Maria and I had worked together for many years, we had also toured together as stand-up comedians.

It was Maria’s cheeky voice you may have heard describing the German man who made amusing sculptures out of plaster cast penises in the disturbing and delightfully tacky TV series Eurotrash.

Series 8 brought together quite a few people I had known as long as Maria. I first worked with Mac McDonald (Captain Hollister) when he was part of a sketch troupe called The Chip Shop Show in the early eighties. He was a very funny man then, he’s a very funny man now, so it was a great pleasure to work with him again. And even more of a surprise, another man I’d worked alongside many years before, Norman Lovett, returned to play Holly, the ship's computer. In all the time I’d worked on Red Dwarf I’d never done an episode with Norman. He’d been in the original cast and was, other than Hattie, the only person from the original cast I knew, but he left before I started in series 3.

When the cast and crew gathered in the autumn of 1998, there was quite a big crowd. What had once been mainly the four of us had grown into a much bigger cast.

Along with the core crew from Starbug (which crashed into the newly reconstructed Red Dwarf right at the start of the series) was Graham McTavish playing the terrifying Akerman and Andy Taylor playing the ship psychiatrist, Doctor McClaren. Lovely. Just check that chair is screwed down will you, with really really long screws going deep, deep into the ground.

It was also around this time there was much talk of money among the motley main crew of Red Dwarf.

If I recall correctly, the theory went that once we had finished series 8, there would be fifty-two episodes of Red Dwarf, enough for a big US broadcaster to buy them as a season. If this happened, so the speculation went, we would be paid literally gazillions of pounds. We could all retire and float about on our luxury yachts being fed peeled grapes by scantily clad youths of our preferred gender choice.

Guess what? Yes, you’ve got it in one, it never happened. But as Cat would say, ‘You gotta dream!’

While I’m on the subject of money, there’s one aspect of my involvement in Red Dwarf I need to get off my chest. Cough.

Before I start I should warn you, this is a classic thespian moanfest, so you may want to skip over the next chunk. However, in my defence I think the following sad tale goes beyond the whining sulk of a well-paid actor in a popular situation comedy. It is a perfect illustration of what has happened in the United Kingdom in the last thirty years. It’s a tale of how careful corporate lobbying and the demise of the trade union movement added to a flurry of deregulation and privatisation, while having some benefits, has generally shifted wealth from the very many to the very, very few.

The earnings gap between the highest paid and the rest of us numpties has opened so wide since the glory days of one M. Thatcher, that it has gone beyond the gap between Pharaoh and pyramid-building slave. So, Red Dwarf and VHS tape sales, ahh let the pain begin.

We were always paid very well for our work, I’m not complaining about that aspect. However, just before I started working on the show back in 1989, the British actors union, Equity, signed a rather surprising agreement with an organisation called PACT, or the Producers Alliance for Cinema and Television.

Let me just clarify that.

Equity, the union which apparently represents British actors, signed a deal with PACT, an organisation which very professionally represents the interests of the creative business sector, whereby people who appeared in films or television programmes would be given, not offered a choice, but given a buy-out fee as part of their contract.

In our case, that added up to around £600 per series. This was to compensate ‘upfront’ for any vaguely possible future royalties we might or might not receive from further exploitation of the work we did.

It’s important to remember that, at the time, other than repeat fees, where an actor received a percentage of his original fee if the broadcaster showed the programme again, there was zero residual income. There wasn’t any way you could earn more money from a TV show, no DVDs, downloads or even VHS tapes. In these circumstances, getting that £600 sounded well generous.

This agreement was signed in 1989, just before I started work on Red Dwarf III. The people at PACT were very prescient. They could clearly see what was about to happen.

By then millions of people had bought VHS machines so they could record TV shows in the comfort of their front room. When VHS machines first appeared in the early eighties, they cost literally thousands of pounds, but they started getting cheaper. Supermarkets started stocking six-packs of blank VHS tapes. Slowly, the cost of buying something like a film on VHS came down to make the purchase of such an item within the reach of millions.

Let’s be kind to the idiotic, short-sighted old duffers at Equity, they were not quite so prescient. In fact they were duped, fooled and suckered to a degree that is hard to imagine. Of course, they were also working in an environment created by a very corrupt regime under Margaret Thatcher that handed so much power to their paymasters, the big corporations and banks that Equity were on a hiding to nothing.

Anyway, I didn’t know any of this when I signed my contract, an extra £600, thanks very much. Ker-ching!

Zoom forward ten years, and during those intervening years you could walk into any branch of Woolworths (that dates it), HMV, Virgin, etc. and witness the vast stocks of Red Dwarf VHS tapes on display.

Red Dwarf and Mr Bean were pretty much the first TV series that sold serious warehouse-loads of VHS tapes around the world. Everyone would rightly assume that the artists appearing in those shows would get a cut of the proceeds, maybe only a small percentage, but something. I can state here and now that none of us got a penny in royalties. Well, we got a £600 buy-out fee.

When the true enormity of this folly became apparent, not long before we made series 8, I wrote a strongly worded letter to Equity. I say strongly worded, it resembled the petulant ranting of a sulky teenager. When I dropped the letter into the postbox I immediately regretted it.

I had used foul language, I’d accused them of being idiots. I’d claimed, with nothing to back this up, that if they hadn’t signed this ridiculous agreement I would have received ‘half a million quid in royalty payments’.

It was a silly letter, I was embarrassed, I felt like a schlemiel (Yiddish slang. A habitual bungler; a dolt).

I got a reply from Equity within a week, a charming, long and detailed reply which clearly stated that every point I had made in my letter was accurate, that the organisation of Equity had changed since the agreement with PACT was signed and indeed I had been effectively swindled out of money I would have received under the long-established pre-1989 agreements.

The only section of my letter they strongly disagreed with was my hare-brained estimate of how much I would have received if I had been paid my meagre percentage from the sale of many millions of VHS tapes. It would, the nice man at Equity informed me, have been just short of a million pounds.

When you discover something like this you have to let it go or it will eat your soul. I am only reminded of it every now and then when, still to this day, I receive a royalty cheque from my appearance in Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson’s series Bottom. I played a Falklands War veteran in one episode. This was an in-house BBC production, which was on a different contract. With this contract I was eligible for royalties and a cut of video sales.

I have been paid more for VHS tape sales from that one appearance in one episode than I was for six entire series of Red Dwarf. And just to further clarify, the sales of Bottom VHS tapes, while impressive, were but a smear compared to the gargantuan sales Red Dwarf generated.

To again give the fullest picture possible, by the time DVDs arrived, the wickedly one-sided Equity–PACT agreement was long dead, so the situation has finally been rectified. Of course, it was rectified just in time for the plummet in DVD sales, the closing of Woolworths in the UK, the closing of massive record and video stores and the emergence of online video and all the good and bad things that implies.

Lastly, who got the money that didn’t come to us? Very good question.

Was it Rob and Doug? No, although they would have received proper compensation and they thoroughly deserve every penny. If anyone ever thought writing a long-running and successful TV sitcom is easy, they only needed to glance at Rob and Doug toward the end of a series to see two men who had worked really hard.

The people, or should I say the body that would have benefitted by not giving us our fair share were the BBC, in the guise of BBC Worldwide, their commercial department. So that’s a good thing isn’t it? At least it didn’t go into the coffers of some rapacious private corporation who used it to buy massive yachts, pay for hookers at cocaine-fuelled orgies and waste it on gold trinkets.

I think that’s how I feel.

So, enough of that whining. On with series 8. As always happens in life, you’ve either got nothing happening and you sit alone twiddling your thumbs, or everything you’ll ever do is suddenly crammed into a few short weeks. That’s certainly what it felt like in the run-up to the recording of series 8.

The Man on Platform 5, which I had finished writing over a year earlier, was published just before we started recording.

I spent that time charging all over the country attending readings and book signings, doing interviews and appearing on the early morning TV shows like The Big Breakfast. The Man on Platform 5 got really good reviews in proper broadsheet newspapers, and the dream I had nurtured for most of my life of being a novelist had come true. Sort of.

I say sort of because all the time I was engaged in this activity I was in constant touch with my agent and the Red Dwarf office trying to work out how to fit everything in.

It was with some relief then when I finally arrived on location very early one morning to start filming. As with previous episodes, we recorded a lot of the scenes that required an exterior location a while before we started the studio work. One setting that has stayed fresh in the mind is the amazing sewage pumping station on the Isle of Dogs. A classic glamorous setting, the sort of place we had grown to love on Red Dwarf. Not an idyllic Italian castle, a Greek island, a luxury hotel in Dubai. No, a sewage pumping facility on the Isle of Dogs. For those of you not familiar with the geography of Greater London, and not wishing to denigrate the wonderful history and cultural legacy this area of London has bequeathed the world, the Isle of Dogs doesn’t feature in romantic comedies like Four Weddings and a Funeral or Notting Hill. If you want to make a movie that makes London look attractive, suave, sophisticated, the Isle of Dogs is not at the top of your possible location list.

The only time you’d see somewhere like the Isle of Dogs in a movie is if it starred Jason Statham and involves murder and car chases through abandoned warehouses.

The sewage pumping station served as the previously unknown brig on the thirteenth floor, the floor we didn’t think existed. Yes, Red Dwarf had reappeared, reconstructed by Kryten’s tiny pals the nanobots. Obviously they’d stolen Red Dwarf, shrunken it to nano size and hidden it in Lister’s laundry basket. Oh come on, keep up.

After donning rubber, I joined the rest of the cast outside the pumping station. This was when we first met the wonderful extras who were playing the other prisoners in the brig.

One individual has stayed with us in terms of mental scarring. He was a very well-spoken individual, clearly well-educated and very polite. However, he did have a metal face. That may need some explanation; his face was very heavily pierced, not like one or two namby-pamby rings in his eyebrows or a little stud in his nose, it was literally covered in studs. I fear I cannot remember his name but that’s partly due to the mental scarring and the therapy I had to undergo after seeing what I saw.

As I have explained before, Craig Charles will often say the thing I am thinking in the deepest recesses of my guilt-ridden liberal brain. On the day we met the man with the metal face, Craig immediately said, ‘Bet they love you at airport security.’

This man had the most piercings in the history of human adornment. I think he had fifty-two studs on his face, at least, I seem to remember that being the number. But hold hard, that was nothing. He explained that he used to work in a bank, but then all his piercings were on his body and hidden by his suit. Since retiring he’d allowed the obsession to spread.

I’m thinking, ‘I wonder how many he’s got on his body?’, but I’m not wondering that out loud, because I don’t want to know. Of course Craig immediately says, ‘How many piercings have you got then, la?’

The man lifted his shirt. It looked like he was wearing chain mail. We all stared in open-mouthed shock. That was nothing he assured us as he dropped his trousers and we all turned away as fast as we could, but not fast enough. I’m not going to tell you what I saw, because my therapist said such knowledge is like a psychic contagion; once you know, you cannot un-know.

Along with the motley crew of extras, we made our way into the bowels of the sewage pumping station. It was very cold and damp, just how Kryten loves it. We were then entertained by the magnificent anger of Akerman and started to get to grips with our new roles as prisoners on board Red Dwarf.

The whole notion of Kryten being assigned to the female quarters because he ‘had nothing down there except plastic underpants and a trademark’ was a classic moment of Dwarfy madness. Not only that, but Archie, Kryten’s unruly penis, caused much mirth on set. Particularly when the cheeky little chap went on the rampage through Kochanski’s quarters.

Once all the pre-recording days were done, we started the weekly process of rehearsing and recording the eight shows in the series. Being back in front of an audience was an absolute joy, this felt like proper Red Dwarf. The scenes in Lister and Rimmer’s cell were reminiscent of the classic sleeping quarters scenes of previous episodes.

When Chris and Craig rehearsed these scenes, I suppose I should have been off lounging around in the green room, but I love to watch these two very funny men rehearse, so I would be standing by the side of the set laughing and giggling. It’s pure pleasure.

Chloë and I, obviously both women, had quite a few scenes together. The moment where Kryten holds up a tampon with a ribbon tied around it and wishes Kochanski a ‘happy period’ was a moment to savour. Quite a long moment, the laughter was so intense Chloë and I just had to stand looking at each other for what felt like minutes.

I don’t have favourite episodes but I have to say recording Krytie TV was a bit of a highlight. Yes, I had to stand in a shower with two dozen semi-naked women as they foamed their silky smooth skin. I had an umbrella and a paperback to read, as it was all so unnecessary witnessing all those inny and outy bits. This scene was shot in a rugby club shower room somewhere in Surrey, not the most glamorous location, but who cares? It was shot on a closed set which meant that the normal contingent of crew were cut to the bare minimum, rather like the swimming costumes all the young women were wearing. Once again the rubber mask worked its magic. I have never been less interested in dozens of semi-naked women soaping their svelte torsos.

Obviously Craig was furious when he heard I hadn’t been gawping at the plethora of semi-nude female flesh on display. I told him that staring at their wet, lithe bodies would not have been gentlemanly. I leave you to imagine the verbiage of his chagrin. Add some swear words while you’re at it.

Another wonderful experience was working with Jake Wood who played Kill Crazy and Ricky Grover who played Baxter. There is something about Ricky Grover’s face that just makes me laugh. It’s not a small face, there’s plenty to look at. He’s not a small man either, and he is very, very strong.

The boys and girls from the Dwarf had been made to join the Canaries, the disposable rabble sent into dangerous situations to hunt down mutant GELFs. The scene was where we all sat in a pod on our way to another dangerous mission. This was a difficult scene to record as it took place in a small closed set. We pre-recorded this before the audience was in the studio.

Kill Crazy was describing how he wouldn’t be scared of any demented GELF, and as he spoke, Ricky, who had no lines in the scene, would just look at the imaginary beast Kill Crazy was describing with such fury we all started to crack up. It was a chronic giggling fit resulting in the whole scene collapsing in disorder.

We tried again and again to get through the scene without laughing, but none of us could help staring at Ricky’s face, the intensity of his hatred for Genetically Engineered Life Forms was palpable, terrifying.

If you have ever seen Ricky Grover’s legendary character Buller either on TV or live on stage, it is a truly terrifying while at the same time very funny spectacle. Of course the man behind the character is one of the gentlest and most sensitive fellows I’ve ever met. Ricky is an ex-boxer and hairdresser which is in itself a fascinating mixture, and he’s also very loyal.

Many years after his stint on Red Dwarf, I suffered a classic male lower-back strain while I was performing at the Edinburgh festival. News must have got around that I was laid up, and after a couple of hours of lying on the ground with a pack of frozen peas on my agonising back I got a text message from Ricky. It just said, ‘Who dun ya?’

I knew that if I had indeed been ‘done’ by someone, Ricky was ready and willing to ‘give ’em a slap’. Obviously a slap from Ricky would resemble being run into by a forty-ton articulated truck travelling at speed.

So there we were, giggling away at Ricky and Kill Crazy and things were getting seriously out of hand.

The incident highlighted the non-technical role of a cameraman in such a situation. The set was very small, one of the camera operators was sitting right next to me to get a two shot of Danny and Chris. He was wearing headphones through which Ed Bye could communicate with him during a take. During recordings, Ed is seated in the luxury control room studying the monitors, which have feeds from all the cameras on set.

On this particular occasion, Ed expressed his disappointment to the camera operator about the behaviour of the so-called professional actors he was trying to work with. That’s a polite interpretation of what he said. Unusually, because I was sitting right next to the camera operator I could overhear the original statement coming through the headphones, mainly I suppose because Ed was screaming down the microphone. It went something like this:

‘Tell that twat Llewellyn to stop fucking giggling or we’re going to be here all bloody night!’

The camera operator then very diplomatically translated the statement to me:

‘Ed is wondering if you can possibly concentrate on the scene as we have quite a lot to do today.’

We did finally manage to get through the scene despite Ricky’s facial antics and heard the two words I always love to hear on the set of Red Dwarf: ‘Moving on.’ This means whatever we have just been filming is okay and we can start on the next scene.

It was during the recording of the infamous Rimmer Song that I experienced what became known as Black Thursday. Oh dear, I hang my head in shame, Black Thursday is without doubt a blot on my copy book.

One of the things I always beg when we are in the early planning stages of a new series of Red Dwarf is very simple. I want to work. When I am in the rubber mask, I want to be on set all the time. Essentially, I don’t want to hang around waiting. One of the things anyone who’s ever appeared in a TV series or film will know is that there is always a great deal of hanging around that needs to be done. I understand why this is, the set needs to be prepared, the lights need to be set, the camera shots need to be worked out, it’s all fairly obvious and perfectly understandable. What the producers and director need during these complex times is the actors standing by. It’s the nature of the beast, if you don’t like it, get a proper job.

However, the hanging around aspect takes on a very different hue if you are hanging around with a rubber head glued to your face. Time passes very slowly. The discomfort and restriction become very apparent, hence the reason I beg, plead and whine on like a spoilt kid. Generally speaking, the production staff and obviously lovely Ed have been brilliant in accommodating this as best they can. I don’t have to hang around too much. But on any TV production, things go wrong, lights don’t work, the picture looks wrong and something needs to be adjusted, tweaked or fiddled about with.

This was happening in shovel loads on Black Thursday. We were shooting the Rimmer Song, the part where the crew enter the Rimmer Experience fairground ride. We’d had great fun in the morning playing the plastic versions of ourselves. Chris had been rehearsing the song and we all had its annoyingly catchy lyrics running around in our heads for days. No, months. Actually, I can still hear that damn song now!

I had the mask glued on at about six-thirty in the morning, did a little bit of filming around nine o’clock, and then, nothing. I hung about with Danny, joshing and listening to his bonkers stories. I’d hung around with Craig, reminiscing and joking. I’d discussed various brands of classic car and the sounds of various Second World War aircraft with Chris.

Time dragged on, by four-thirty in the afternoon I’d still not done anything. I’d been in the mask for close to ten hours and only shot one scene. I started to fret, which is a bad idea. I use all my energy to steer myself away from fretting. Fretting in a rubber mask is a very bad idea. But the fretting got the better of me. Craig loves a good fret every now and then, so we both started fretting. We were walking up and down the corridor outside the studio in a right old fret. The fretting developed into a full-on actor-whinge, a stroppy moan fest, and then to the full-blown effing and jeffing expostulation of an affronted thespian.

What, during this expression of frustration, we had forgotten was that we were both wearing carefully concealed radio microphones, and what we learned later was that the sound department were playing our self-righteous indignation to the rest of the crew and in particular, Ed Bye. Poor Ed, who was up against it as usual trying to get complicated shots in the can and the last thing he needed was two moody actors, but that’s what he had.

I want to point out that we all got over it. We did shoot the scene and it’s clearly very popular, but it was a bad day. I vowed to myself that I would never allow myself to get in such a state again, if for no other reason that it always makes a bad situation worse.

We finished filming just before Christmas 1998, but during the last few weeks in the studio there was much talk of the Red Dwarf movie. In fact, it was all Doug would talk about between takes. That was going to be the next thing we’d all do together, it all seemed very likely.

When Red Dwarf VIII was broadcast the following year it got the biggest viewing figures of any show on BBC2. Ever. This record has still not been broken. That is pretty amazing isn’t it? It couldn’t happen now, there are too many TV channels and what were reliable TV audiences are now dissipated through a myriad of screen-based entertainment options.

In late 1999 after the show had gone out, I attended a party at the BBC where the then director Michael Jackson, thanked everyone who had helped make the channel such a success in the previous year.

I was standing politely listening to him when someone grabbed my arse. Not a gentle pinch but quite a muscular grapple. I turned around to see the Two Fat Ladies, Clarissa Dickson Wright and Jennifer Paterson, sitting on chairs behind me. Jennifer Paterson, who was sadly to pass away very soon after this, said, ‘Such a delicious pair of buttocks, I couldn’t help myself.’ I smiled and said, ‘Help yourself, love,’ and turned my back to them. My buttocks then took a right old pummelling. The flattery I got from the Two Fat Ladies was then nicely counterbalanced when an enormously tall man with curly hair stood over me and asked what car I drove.

Yes, it was the man himself, Mr J. Clarkson. I laughed and said, ‘I don’t believe you really ask people that when you meet them.’ He didn’t crack a smile. He just repeated the question. I knew he lived quite near me, although I’d never met him before. So it was possible he’d seen me driving in the area. I also knew that whatever car I said I drove would undoubtedly be ‘the worst car … in the world’. Does it really matter what car you drive? Do people really judge you because of it? I know I don’t, but I know he does.

I had two cars at the time, one was a VW Golf VR6, an unnecessarily fast Golf with an engine out of a truck. The other was a Land Rover Defender. I thought the second one was probably a safe bet so I told him, ‘I drive a Land Rover.’

Still no smile, just a curt nod and ‘Good car.’ Then a shadow fell across his enormous face, ‘Does it have big knobbly American tyres that only a c**t would fit on a classic British Land Rover?’

I knew at once that he had seen me in the Land Rover in the market square in Chipping Norton. How else would he have known that my Land Rover was indeed kitted out with Grabber All Terrain American tyres? Massive great fat knobbly things that I thought at the time looked really manly and butch. I nodded in embarrassment.

‘You realise you have degraded a perfectly decent British vehicle and made it into a four-wheeled abortion don’t you?’

I hadn’t known that but thanked him for informing me. However, I didn’t feel picked on by the big, balding, bullying, homophobic, right-wing, middle-aged-man-in-jeans-nutbag we all know and love.

When the boss of BBC2 gave his thank you speech later that evening he said, ‘I’ve had a wonderful time meeting you all tonight, I’ve also learned tonight that I drive around in an underpowered Nazi staff car that only a c**t would drive, I don’t need to tell you who furnished me with this opinion.’

Fair do’s Mr C.

Chapter 11

Come with me now as we travel through a tear in the fabric of space-time and jump ahead to the year 2001. It’s late April. Cue spinny lights and whizzy stars backed up by ethereal music as we jump across a fold in the cosmic order, where two differing sectors meet in a way that is most unnatural.

We arrive in Shepperton Studios, to be most specific, the orangery of the old Shepperton Manor. Oh what a lovely setting. Very spacious and airy. Outside above the busy car park that was once an ornate garden, the birds are singing, the jets are flying low on their way into Heathrow and a bit of old script is blowing in the damp morning air.

Craig Charles, Chris Barrie, Danny John-Jules, Chloë Anett, Norman Lovett and I were standing in the delightful old building reading through a scene of Red Dwarf: The Movie, blocking out various scenes with director Ed Bye. I had flown back from Los Angeles specifically for this event and it was all very exciting.

I had been living with my growing family (by that I mean the kids were bigger, we still only had two), in Sydney, Australia for the previous six months and then two months working in Los Angeles on series 4 of Scrapheap Challenge. The weird, quirky one-off Channel 4 series had become rather popular. So popular in fact it was also by then an American series called Junkyard Wars. ‘In Britain it’s a Challenge, in America, it’s a War!’

I’d arrived back in England to record a BBC series called Hollywood Science. It was a simple premise; scientist Jonathan Hare and I tested out the scientific veracity of various plots and stunts in big blockbuster Hollywood movies. We would then conduct experiments in the back garden of a suburban house to find out if, for example, it was really possible for Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock to make a bus jump a forty-foot gap in a Los Angeles freeway overpass.

If you are interested, it is technically possible, but the bus would need to be travelling at over 400,000 miles an hour, not fifty-two.

As we sat having lunch in the kitchen of the house we were recording the series in, a motorbike messenger arrived with a package for me. It was the script for Red Dwarf: The Movie.

I started to read the first few pages as the camera crew started setting up for the test to see what would really happen if you jumped off a high tower with a fire hose wrapped around your waist. If you’re interested, this was a stunt from the Bruce Willis smash hit Die Hard, the original one. We soon discovered that if you jumped off the Nakatomi Tower, dropping at terminal velocity and suddenly stopped when the non-elasticated fire hose went tight, this would result in Bruce and Willis dropping to the ground in a rather unpleasant and very separated manner.

As soon as we’d finished, I devoured the script. It was very, very funny. It was so brilliantly constructed by Doug Naylor that if you’d never seen an episode … I’ll go further, if you’d never even heard of Red Dwarf, it would still make perfect sense. But likewise if you’d seen every episode over one hundred times, had all the VHS tapes and books, the T-shirts and nodding head Kryten figures and you wore a glittering H stuck to your forehead when you went to parties, you’d still get a hell of a kick out of it.

Doug had been writing the script and going to meetings to try and raise the money for the film and it all seemed to be coming together. We were all very excited about it.

So it was with some anticipation, and of course rubber mask trepidation, that I made my way to Shepperton on the first day of rehearsal a few weeks later. Apart from the core boys from the Dwarf, Chloë was in the film playing Kochanski. Norman was back as Holly the ship’s computer. He was grumbling and moody as always, but he was back. There were fabulous rumours that Madonna was going to play a role, a merciless GELF queen who does her best to kill us all. There were brilliant slapstick scenes with Kryten and various groinal attachments that doubled as non-lethal weapons.

I had managed to arrange my schedule to allow six weeks rehearsal before I returned to Los Angeles to complete that year’s series of Scrapheap. I would then return in the autumn to shoot the film.

While we read through the script and blocked out various scenes at Shepperton I also went through the process of having a new head cast for a new mask and a new body cast for an amazing new Kryten body, complete with pistons and tubing at my knees and elbows.

This head casting was the first one I’d ever had a problem with. I’m not saying it’s a whole bunch of fun having your head encased in alginate and plaster of Paris bandage, but it wasn’t exactly a new experience for me. I sat in the chair with a bald cap glued over my hair, the plastic cape over my shoulders; they rubbed the Vaseline over what represents my eyebrows. I harbour deep genetic shame around my lack of eyebrows and a deep jealousy of Dennis Healy, the British politician who has truly spectacular brows.

Then shlumph, on goes the alginate, cold and minty, in the gob, over the eyes, all over the head, small hole for the nose. Everything fine.

Wallop, on goes the plaster bandage, suddenly your head gets heavy and then hot as the plaster starts to set. Still fine, no problem, breathe calmly, in, pause, out, pause, in. Keep the pulse low, keep calm, stay silent in the imagination, picture white light, meditate, calm; be very, very calm.

I can’t hear anything except muffled noises of the crew patting the plaster bandage into shape on my now massive and very heavy head.

Breath in, pause, out, pause, cough. Oh, problem. Major massive life-threatening problem. Can’t cough, something in throat, can’t breathe. Alarm signals rush through the fight-or-flight sectors of my crude, lower mammalian brain. Can’t fight, can’t flight. Massive panic descends and yet there is no physical movement I am aware of. Can’t swallow, can’t cough, can’t breathe, can’t move, about to die. Childhood flashes through my mind’s eye, picking peas in the vegetable garden with my mum on a summer evening when I was eight years old. Standing next to my dad on bonfire night when I was five. It’s all there in hyperspeed.

I suddenly sense movement outside, people ripping and levering at my massive plaster head. I can feel movement now, someone is shouting ‘Lean forward!’ in my right ear. I lean forward and the front half of my head comes away and I cough and splutter and wheeze. I apologise and cough some more, I breathe in like a pearl diver who only just made it back to the surface.

Later, my long-suffering and ever-patient make-up woman, Andrea Finch, explained to me what they saw. I was sitting very relaxed, my hands resting on my thighs, then suddenly my hands started gripping each other. Whenever she is with someone when they have a head cast, Andrea explained, she just watches the hands. Apparently my hands were going ballistic, flippering about like a puppy’s ears in a strong wind. She knew something was up, and thankfully for all involved two very important things didn’t happen.

One, for me the most important, was that I didn’t die. The second, much more important for everyone else, the plaster had set enough for the casting to be useable. They would be able to use it for the new mask. I’d done it, without question, the very worst part of the whole process of Red Dwarf: The Movie, was over for me. From now on it would be just one big glorious bag of laughs. However, that experience under plaster would haunt me for the remainder of my involvement in the series.

We spent an afternoon looking at the storyboards; elaborate drawings of each scene, mock-ups of the shots that would go to make the movie. Incredible designs for sets and life-size Starbug constructions.

Yes, you heard right, the plan was to build a life-size Starbug front section which would be mounted to the front of a huge hydraulic crane, this would lower down slowly with us inside looking out of the windows. We would then emerge down the exit ladder and into the new world we were visiting. Aliens eat your heart out, this was the big time for the boys from the Dwarf. It was all very heady major motion picture stuff.

This was taking place before Facebook and Twitter were an itch on the back of a nerd’s neck, but I did run a web page at the time. Remember them? A web page, so cute. ‘Welcome to the official page of Robert Llewellyn’ it said on the homepage. Yes, homepage, how wonderfully modern. It had links to stuff about Red Dwarf and Scrapheap Challenge, it had links to the Amazon pages for my books. It was an absolutely cutting-edge, cross-platform, multimedia wonderland.

I’m not sure there was even an official Red Dwarf web page at the time, there were certainly loads of fan sites and chat rooms, all of which were buzzing with excitement about the film. As we rehearsed scenes and got rewrites from Doug, attended meetings with line producers who’d worked on films we’d heard of and saw the latest designs for sets and storyboard updates, it all started to get very concrete.

Then, one day as I was getting ready to head to Shepperton Studios for more rehearsals, the phone rang. It was Doug, he sounded exhausted and crestfallen. It was all off. The money that had been promised from who knows where, I truly don’t know, had disappeared. The deals had fallen through, the final lynch pin had dropped out and the whole Red Dwarf movie machine ground to a sickening halt.

It wasn’t that we would never make the film, I was assured, it was just that we’d have to postpone the shoot until the finances were secure. To say it was a bit depressing is a bit of an understatement, it was heart-breaking.

I am happy to admit that I don’t know a great deal about film financing, but I think it’s generally accepted that it can often involve very wealthy people who live on the fringes of what most of us would consider legal. Without question some of the people you see at the Cannes film festival are seriously dodgy-looking. The sort of people you never see shopping at B&Q on a Saturday, in fact the sort of people you never see anywhere; they live in another world. I’m not suggesting that Doug was involved with dodgy back-room film financiers, in fact the BBC had put some of the money up for the project, but it is a notoriously flaky business populated by an enormous number of flaky people who can talk the talk but little else.

I had arranged my whole working year around the Red Dwarf movie. An entire production team had spent weeks planning the schedule of Scrapheap Challenge in Los Angeles to accommodate my trip back to London. Judy had stayed in Sydney with the children because I’d be working away all year and suddenly the whole thing came tumbling down.

I met up with Chris, Danny and Craig and we talked over what had happened but there was nothing we could do. We knew Doug was frantically going around trying to salvage a deal to raise the money. We eventually went our separate ways, I went back to Los Angeles and the whole project faded into the background.

I eventually ended up back in England in early September. I spent a few days in New York on my way home and stayed with Chris Eigman, who’d played Rimmer in the ill-fated Red Dwarf US pilot. Chris lives in a lovely old house in Brooklyn. On my last morning there, we walked his dog along the Brooklyn Heights shoreline, it was 8 September 2001, a beautiful crystal clear sky above the mind-boggling Manhattan skyline that was still, on that day, totally dominated by those two enormous towers. I arrived back in England on 9 September 2001 and, well, you know the rest.

The Red Dwarf movie soon became a distant memory. My life had taken a different turn; I was busy doing so many other things I barely thought about it. I still have the script, it’s a brilliant script and it’s a small tragedy that we never got to do it. I like to keep tragedies like that in perspective, it was just a comedy science fiction film, not an earth-shattering event or a game-changing piece of technology, but it’s a shame none the less.

For the next few years I didn’t see the rest of the cast that often, although we did all gather together to record the cast commentary tracks for the DVDs. The shows had been out on VHS tapes for years, but in the early noughties, the entire smegload was released on DVD, eventually resulting in the big fat boxed set.

Spending all day sitting together in a small audio studio watching telly was enormous fun. It reminded me how much I enjoyed being with the rest of the cast, the long and rich history we had together, the in-jokes, the constant banter and the hysterical laughter which would suddenly explode. One of the things that surprised us all was the amount of Red Dwarf we had completely forgotten; no surprise in my case but even Craig would occasionally pipe up and say, ‘I don’t remember doing that!’

It is a very peculiar feeling watching yourself on telly and having no recall of that moment. Generally when I watch an old episode of Red Dwarf I not only remember the actual recording but also events in my life around that time, the visual stimulus of seeing Kryten’s absurd head knobbing about causes connections in my fetid brain matter and events come swirling back. Judy being pregnant, or the period when we moved into our house just before we recorded series 5, or the day I took my old Land Rover to the garage when the exhaust had fallen off. Weird unconnected memories from fifteen or even twenty years earlier come bobbing back over the calm waters of the distant past.

So when I watch a scene I don’t recall it’s quite disturbing: Kryten walking along a corridor in Red Dwarf with Mr Rimmer and Mr Lister. Nothing. It’s like I’m watching it for the first time. How could I not remember anything about it? Every now and then as we recorded the cast commentary the sound engineer would speak to us over our headphones, ‘Doug has asked if you can try and stop saying “I don’t remember doing this”, especially you, Robert.’

Thanks, yeah, okay.

However, I think we all had the overriding sense that we were commenting on something we had done; we all used to be in this bizarre sitcom back in the twentieth century. Things had moved on, Red Dwarf was no more, held in great affection by millions but just a memory and a DVD boxed set.

My oh my, how wrong we were.

Chapter 12

I would suggest that by the time I did the final day’s filming on the final episode of Scrapheap Challenge in the summer of 2007, the very idea that I would ever do another series of Red Dwarf only existed in another time dimension. One inhabited with a far better-looking version of me, a man of much greater intellect and charisma, a man who had eyebrows and the ability to see into the future with his psychic powers.

Scrapheap had by that time filled my working life for 10 years. I have no idea how many machines I witnessed being built, it is in the many hundreds; nor how many team members I met, must be in the thousands; nor how many hours first Cathy Rogers and then Lisa (no relation) Rogers and I sat in rain, sun, mist or drizzle talking about them. How many amazing judges I spoke with, people who were leaders in their fields and who all took an immense interest in what was going on. Too many to recall without notes.

In the ten years from 1998 until 2007 I met the most astonishing engineers, scientists, mechanics and mad-cap bodgers, or in the US, kludgers. Some brilliant, some bizarre, some just a little bit frightening but all incredibly inventive and enthusiastic. It was through working on this series that I became more and more interested in engineering, in large energy projects and more directly in alternative-fuelled vehicles. While I was working on the series in California in 2001 I had my first ride in a hybrid car, the Toyota Prius. I didn’t know what it was and I wasn’t interested when I was given a lift in one.

This first-generation Prius belonged to a member of the production crew. To me it was just a dull, faceless and rather dusty car. It was only as we pulled away from a set of lights on Sunset Boulevard late at night that I realised something was different about this entirely unremarkable looking vehicle. It pulled away silently. It felt like it was being towed by a wire, there was no engine noise.

‘How did you do that?’ I asked incredulously. The woman driving the car just said, ‘It’s a hybrid.’

I didn’t know what that meant, ‘A hybrid? A hybrid what?’ Half man, half machine? It wasn’t an explanation that meant anything. When she dropped me off outside my apartment in West Hollywood I didn’t ‘invite her in for coffee’, I asked her to ‘pop her hood’, which is a far more respectable request for a middle-aged married man to make to a young female researcher. I soon surmised that under the bonnet, as we Olde Englanders would have it, was a petrol engine and an electric motor working in spiritual harmony.

That was a pivotal moment for me, it may seem unremarkable and dull to most normal people but for some reason that wonderful technological achievement got my imagination working overtime. From that moment on, my whole life and world had moved away from being an actor toward being a kind of weird advocate of engineering education and specifically alternative-fuelled vehicles and renewable energy.

That was, until I got the call.

‘Darling, I’ve just heard from the Red Dwarf people,’ said my agent Maureen. She’s very dry, she doesn’t get excited about showbiz shenanigans because she deals with them day in, day out. ‘Apparently they want to make a new mini series.’

‘What, of Red Dwarf?’ I asked.

‘Yes darling, a three-part special for UKTV.’

‘What now? After all these years?’

‘Yes, plus they want to do something they’re calling Red Dwarf unplugged.’

‘Oh Lordy, what does that mean?’ I asked, immediately full of dread.

‘I think they expect you to improvise a live show, in a theatre, in front of an audience darling.’

‘A what? A live show? Red Dwarf? In costume, covered in rubber, in a theatre? Has the world gone mad?’

‘The world went mad a long time ago dear,’ said Maureen flatly. ‘What shall I say to them?’

So I talked to Craig and Danny and Chris and eventually to Doug.

Red Dwarf Back to Earth was going to be on Dave, which for those of you outside the UK media bubble isn’t a chap, it’s a cable and satellite TV channel and a very successful one. Dave showed Red Dwarf repeats on a regular basis and had decided to commission a brand new three-part mini-series plus a special called Red Dwarf Unplugged.

Doug explained that the three-parter was entitled Back to Earth. It was to be made on a very minimal budget and I wasn’t allowed to say anything about it on Twitter. Doug was going to direct the shows and I wasn’t allowed to say anything about that on Twitter. Every description of the way we would work, or the storyline that Doug explained to me always ended with the firm request, ‘Don’t say anything on Twitter, Bobby.’

So I didn’t say anything on Twitter. I was very good. I kept schtum. I feel it’s important at this point to remind you that the last time we’d recorded a series of Red Dwarf, back in 1998, there was not only no such thing as Twitter or Facebook, there was barely the internet. I know I had a dial-up modem at home, I would occasionally sit in front of my hefty laptop and ‘dial into the web’. Three-quarters of an hour later, I’d be online, an hour after that I may have been able to download two or even three emails. By the time Back to Earth came to be, things had moved on. I had web pages, blogs and nearly twenty thousand followers on Twitter.

I’d joined Twitter in early 2007 when I was working in Los Angeles. During that period I went to some kind of tech party thing, I can barely remember the circumstances, but someone I met there asked me what my Twitter handle was. I thought they were being rude, assuming a Twitter handle was some kind of euphemism for gentlemen’s downstairs equipment. Once the cleanliness of the term had been established and the basic rudiments of what Twitter was all about had been explained, an enthusiastic young man signed me up for Twitter. He asked me what I wanted my Twitter handle to be.

At that time the crew on Scrapheap had taken to calling me Bobby-Llew due to the fact that my current co-host was called Bobbi Sue Luther. They found it amusing that she was Bobbi Sue and I was Bobby-Llew. Well, none of them knew how to say Llewellyn, so when someone suggested I call myself bobbyllew it all seemed perfectly fine. From that day, for maybe a year and a half, my Twitter account remained resolutely dormant, one tweet, a classic from the era, read, ‘What is this?’

The next time I checked, maybe in late 2008, I noticed I had over five thousand followers. I felt guilty, these poor five thousand people were waiting for me to say something. It was just rude to ignore them. So I typed ‘Hello’ and it’s been downhill ever since. So, Doug begged me not to say anything on Twitter.

We were all sworn to secrecy. UKTV wanted to make the announcement on a specific day, it was all explained to us in great detail.

Not long after we’d all had this explained to us in great detail, Craig did an interview on Radio Abergavenny or somewhere and when asked if we were ever going to make new episodes of Red Dwarf he said, ‘Yeah, we’re making a new series very soon la, but it’s all a bit hush-hush at the moment.’

He said this live on-air. I’d say it was twenty or maybe even thirty seconds after the words left his mouth that the first tweet hit my mentions column. Within a minute I’d received maybe seven hundred tweets asking me if it was true. I still didn’t say anything, I didn’t even tweet ‘no comment’. I let it be.

I checked later that day and estimate (it’s very hard to count tweets) that the questions were now in the many thousands.

‘Hey @bobbyllew, just heard new Red Dwarf!!! Is it true???’

I spoke to Doug. ‘I think just possibly there’s a chance people are quite interested,’ I said. I explained to Doug that I was about to head off to America to attend a load of meetings and record a few episodes of Carpool, the online talk show I record inside a Toyota Prius. I was also attending an event called Dragon*Con in Atlanta, Georgia, listed as ‘The Biggest Science Fiction Fan Convention … In the WORLD!’

A few days later, I was informed that I’d been invited to do an interview on KCTS television in Seattle, Washington State. KCTS is one of the PBS stations in America with a long tradition of showing Red Dwarf. I had visited Seattle with Craig in the nineties when we’d taken part in pledge drives and huge Red Dwarf events in that glorious city. Pledge drives are an unusual, and it seems uniquely North American, tradition where regular viewers and supporters of PBS television channels give financial support to the local station during a pledge drive. The channel uses ‘celebrities’ who are popular on the channel to raise the profile of the event. Craig and I spent most of the evening baffled but we joined in as best we could.

I do love Seattle, there’s no point trying to cover it up. I am a lefty liberal and I love Seattle. Okay, pigeonhole me, I won’t complain. It’s usually dull, cold, wet and I feel completely at home there. A few adjustments to the travel logistics and it was all sorted. I was told by Doug to announce the new series while I was there.

I flew to America with my son Louis, we stayed in a lovely old downtown hotel in Seattle, went for walks in the rain (it always rains in Seattle) did a lot of sleeping, visited various skate parks and the original Starbucks, then, after a couple of days, made our way to the KCTS studios.

I talked about the new series we were going to make during an interview in front of an invited audience, I mentioned that we hadn’t made any Red Dwarf for ten years and I couldn’t remember how to do it. It was all very jolly.

As the interview was broadcast live, the news spread with extreme rapidity. I started getting text messages as we walked out of the studio. Obviously, there had been discussions back in the UK. I was being asked not to say anything. I laughed nervously. It was just a bit late. The Twitterverse went ballistic.

I then visited a wonderful man called Leo Laporte in his studio in Petaluma, a small town about sixty miles north of San Francisco. Leo had been an inspiration to me and had convinced me to start making Carpool as an online series. We are the same age and both have a traditional TV background, only he now runs a multi-million-dollar-a-year podcast company called TWIT which stands for This Week in Tech. It’s nerdgasm city, listening to TWIT is what keeps me in the loop, baby, pushing the tech envelope. You can easily find it online and if you’re the least bit interested in techie things, social media things and all related topics. I highly recommend it.

After leaving San Francisco we flew to Atlanta and I was immediately overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the Dragon*Con event. As I waited at the airport we were herded toward a large group of actor-y types, some of whom I recognised from various sci-fi shows. I’m not talking Leonard Nimoy or Sigourney Weaver, I’m talking about that bloke, you know, the one with the funny head in Battlestar Galactica.

We were conveyed to the hotel in a large bus and I was given an all-areas pass and a key to my suite. I had a suite, baby. Yeah. Luxury, with a fourteen-year-old son who was determined to try every caustic caffeinated ultra-high-sugar energy drink on the US market, something he was never allowed to have back in Blighty.

‘I want to see how long I can stay awake, Dad,’ he said to me with glee, just as I was trying to get to sleep. He had a kind of camp bed at the other end of the huge suite we were in. He moved the furniture in the night and made himself a little corner nest. I have no idea how he did it without waking me up, but when I climbed out of bed the following morning I couldn’t believe my eyes, everything in the room had moved! My son was out for the count, the one, and I say this with caution, the one advantage of ultra-high caffeine ‘energy boost’ drinks is once they wear off, even my son, who has never done the sleeping thing easily, just hit the deck.

On the first day of the convention proper I found my signing table, I was situated right next to Micky Dolenz. For those of you not old enough to know about Micky, he’s a legend. He used to be in the Monkees, a sixties American version of the Beatles. Micky Dolenz was a massive star in his time, girls screamed when he walked down the street, girls had pictures of him on their bedroom walls. I’m talking proper famous. He was very charming but he looked a bit bored as he signed pictures for a huge queue of middle-aged women who clearly still loved him.

I sat behind my table a little forlorn. This was such a massive event, there were so many TV stars sitting behind tables in this huge cavernous hall, some of whom you’d all know, some of whom I’d put money on you never having heard of even if you’d seen the show they were in. But they all had a queue of people waiting to meet them. I, on the other hand, had not a soul.

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.

Easy-peasy.

So we get in the small submersible set that had been built up on a raised platform. This allowed the special effects chaps to get underneath and control the massive, heavy, thick, solid tentacly things made of thick, heavy solid rubbery stuff. Easy peasy.

All we had to do was wrestle with the tentacles in a very confined space, with some splashy water. The tentacles looked very convincing, they looked quite dangerous, little fear-acting required, they scared the bejeezus out of me as they thrashed around the tiny space we were in.

Craig and I took a right battering. It’s fine for him, he’s tough, he does all his own stunts. I’m a wet liberal pacifist, that’s essentially a politically correct term for out-and-out limp-wristed coward.

I slammed around in that stoutly built box with very little physical restraint as the out-of-control tentacles thrashed about in chaos. It seemed to go on for hours. A number of different camera angles and only one camera meant we needed to perform the battle again and again.

I’m making it sound less fun than it was, actually it was brilliant, but we did get quite badly bashed about. I smashed part of the set with my head, it’s amazing how little protection a rubber head gives you. Craig got seven bells knocked out of him, but then he does that fighty stuff with gusto and never complained. Danny’s hair got very slightly messed up and that was a tragedy.

We then started working with Sophie Winkleman who, apart from being just ever-so-slightly gorgeous, is frighteningly clever and quite posh. The cast of Red Dwarf don’t really do poshness, we don’t quite know how to handle it, but to give Sophie her due, she didn’t seem to hold it against us.

As former Red Dwarf science officer Katerina Bartikovsky, she was meant to be clipped, efficient and slightly frightening, which she did with panache.

I’d seen some of the very funny sketches Sophie wrote for the Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse show: the sketches where Harry plays a louche trustafarian who runs a shop in Notting Hill that sells tiny cushions for £450. Women come into the chintzy emporium (called ‘I Saw You Coming’) with their husband’s credit card and fall for every half-baked sales technique the poshly pouting Harry throws at them. When they can’t remember their husband’s credit card PIN, Harry obliges, assuring them he does. Top stuff, and if you’ve ever walked around the posher parts of Notting Hill near where the Camerons live, it’s frighteningly accurate.

While we were working with Sophie, we heard she was getting married. How lovely! I think we all pictured a nice wedding ceremony in some outer London suburb, maybe even a Rolls-Royce her dad hired for the day. In fact, she was due to marry Lord Frederick Windsor at Hampton Court Palace, I think the fleet of Rolls-Royces came from Buckingham Palace and I have to say, we weren’t overly shocked when none of us received an invite.

The final scenes were shot in the studio where we met our creator, brilliantly played by Richard O’Callaghan. He’s effectively playing Doug, the creator of Red Dwarf the TV series based on the lives and adventures of the Red Dwarf crew – come on, keep up. The Creator had written the last episode of Red Dwarf, the episode where we all die.

The chase sequence through the night-time market was an amazing experience. Everyone who could be corralled into action gathered in the studio that night. A few extras, friends of friends, anyone hanging about was dressed by the ever-resourceful Howard Burden. If you’d seen the set in daylight it would have looked like a bunch of students in cloaks with weird hats standing next to some tables, but at night, it looked like a futuristic Blade Runner marketplace. We had to run out of a building and through the market being chased by the Creator who was determined to kill us.

On the second take, some plastic bins filled with paper were placed in our way, my job was to kick one out of the way to add a bit of drama to the chase. When I was a kid, I could walk up to a stationary football with the determined intention of kicking it. I would invariably miss. I am utterly useless at sport.

However, on the night shoot, I suddenly gained incredible skill in the kicking arena. I kicked the bin with enormous force and it flew away, as I continued to run, following Craig through the parting crowds, we heard a loud bang, actually more of an explosion. I thought it was part of the scene, a special effect, it sounded very realistic and I was very impressed. Once we had passed the camera and stopped, we discovered that the bin I had kicked with such skill had hit a big light stand, sending it toppling to the ground. On impact the bulb exploded, casting the whole set darkness.

If you accidentally knock over a lamp at home, it might cost a couple of quid, your mum gets cross and you have to get out the dustpan and brush, but if you knock over a massive film light, well, let’s just say there may have been a substantial insurance claim.

The finale of this scene was a recreation of the replicant death scene from Blade Runner, when Harrison Ford shoots the replicant woman in the back and she crashes through panes of glass in a slow-mo. It’s okay, it’s not meant to be an actual woman, it’s a replicant so it’s okay for hero Harrison to shoot her in the back. He doesn’t enjoy it, he’s all conflicted and troubled which, apparently, so many ladies have informed me, makes him even more sexy. Ultra-violent but troubled, that’s the way to attract the ladies, chaps. Hey ho.

For many hours, the special effects team hung huge sheets of sugar glass into a makeshift frame, there was going to be no rehearsal for this shot. It was to be a one-take wonder.

Craig’s family arrived on the set as we were getting ready to shoot the sequence, there was much jollity and everyone was excited to see the crashing death sequence.

The special effects crew explained what was going to happen, how we needed to keep going as we crashed through the sheets of sugar glass and dived on the crash mat the other side. None of us knew if they would break easily, we’d used sugar glass bottles in the past, when you bust one over your head, although it shatters and won’t cut you, they are quite hard and they can hurt. Massive sheets of the stuff were a complete unknown, and we didn’t have enough spare sheets to have a practice run.

Everybody was under strict instructions to move carefully, the area of the studio where the sugar glass was hanging was cordoned off, you couldn’t even breath heavily on this stuff it was that delicate.

When everything was ready, Doug called action and we just ran, I was right next to Craig who was headbutting his way through the sheets, I was of course slightly chicken and used my protected Kryten arm to break the glass. It was tougher than we expected and very dramatic, shattering in clouds of shards as we barged through. One by one we collapsed on the fake snow-covered crash mat and lay very still. There was silence, we were waiting for Doug to shout ‘cut’.

There was a long pause, I started to worry that the whole thing had gone wrong or it looked rubbish, but suddenly I heard Doug shout ‘Cut!’ and then he said ‘Fantastic!’ which, believe me, is unusual for Doug. We all gathered around a massive monitor screen a few moments later and watched the sequence in super slow motion. I was almost of a mind to explain to Craig that the Red camera was capable of shooting at seventy frames a second allowing this sort of incredibly smooth slow-mo action, but I thought better of it. The sequence did look amazing, although as always I was disappointed that I hadn’t charged through the plate glass using my big rubber head as a battering ram.

When the final shot was in the can – how dated that term is now – when the final shot was backed up onto remote servers, the make-up was stripped off, the set started to be dismantled and the weary actors wandered off, it was anyone’s guess how the show was going to be received.

It certainly got a lot of attention from the press and a few weeks later we all gathered at the offices of UKTV in the centre of London to do a load of interviews. As Chris, Danny and I walked up the street towards the office we noticed a lot of paparazzi hanging around in the street outside. Oh yes, it’s celebrity time, loads of attention from the tabloid press, welcome to the modern world.

We soon learned, however, that they weren’t hanging around to see us. They were hanging around a hotel next door, a hotel where the BBC was holding a press conference for a new series of Doctor Who. Hey ho, not a problem, Red Dwarf exists in a universe of its own.

Unusually for us, there was big press launch where the shows were first seen by a lot of people in a posh preview theatre. Again it was just Chris, Danny and I from the cast as Craig was filming Coronation Street and couldn’t make it. It was a great shame and we all missed him, but watching the finished shows when for a large proportion of the time we had no idea what they would look like was quite a revelation.

All we had seen for many sequences were huge green screens which we were told would be finished to look like we were in massive Red Dwarf storage areas. When we saw it, there we were, standing in massive Red Dwarf storage areas, it was seamless, it looked amazing. Shots of Craig walking along a corridor looked totally convincing, even though he’d actually been walking along a raised walkway with nothing around him but vast expanses of green cloth.

A big surprise for all of us was seeing the scene where Lister drives off in the Smart car Starbug with Kochanski. Only Craig and Chloë were present on that day so we hadn’t seen any of that sequence.

The shows were broadcast over Easter of 2009. The audience figures, which we heard about a few days later, were nothing short of extraordinary. More than four million people tuned in to see the first episode. On Dave, I mean, I don’t want to show off too much, I know it’s not that important in the grand scheme of things, but four million. Blimey! Okay, in the UK if four million people watched that meant around fifty-six million people didn’t watch, but still. Come on. The small rouge one rocks!

As for critical acclaim, there’s no point trying to avoid the fact that some people clearly didn’t like the way it looked. There were many complaints about the shows containing too much CGI. Many people said they preferred the wobbly sets and the model shots we had used in early series. That said, though, I think most people enjoyed it. I have met many people who loved it and were thrilled to see the show back on the small screen. What they, and indeed we, didn’t know at the time was this was just the start, the small rouge one was definitely coming back.

Chapter 13

I felt my mouth scream out a swear word involuntarily, I really didn’t want to swear, but I had lost all self-control. The reason behind the swearing was essentially down to my right inner ear. I only discovered this after the event, but sometimes, apparently, your inner ear gets a bit rusty as the years pass and this can lead to feelings of dizziness and disorientation. I suppose, to be fair to my trusty old right inner ear, there were some rather violent inputs that could cause such disturbance.

I was in the middle of recording a new series of How Do They Do It? for Channel 5, once again a dream job for me. I went all over the place seeing how things were made, and if the things happened to be big diggers, high explosives, absurdly fast cars or in the case of the swearing, a Red Bull acrobatic aircraft, I’d have a go in them.

I met the pilot of the very small Red Bull plane on a very small airfield on the Isle of Wight. He was a charming and very experienced pilot from Zimbabwe, and he had that particular clipped, slightly Afrikaans accent. He was about the same age as me, had entered many aerobatic competitions and had a long and faultless career as a pilot.

Now I’m not totally stupid, I’d seen what the Red Bull guys do in their tiny and very powerful planes but the director assured me that wasn’t their intention, they just wanted some footage of me inside the plane as it flew. The pilot would explain how the whole thing worked as we pootled along.

When I climbed into the incredibly small cockpit decked out with little cameras like I use on Carpool, the pilot checked my seat belt and told me not to touch the controls that were right in front of me. I was sitting in the front seat, he was sitting right behind me, and I mean, right behind. His legs were either side of me, that’s how small this plane was. Then the director asked me not to swear. I looked at him slightly confused, How Do They Do It? was an early evening show, popular with lads 'n' dads as the TV executives described it. I had never come close to swearing on camera, why did I need to be told now?

We took off, and the acceleration was breathtaking. How can a spinny propeller thing pull you along that fast? Incredible. We flew level with the ground for a few hundred feet. I say level, I could tell we were level because we were no more than ten feet off the ground.

The pilot asked, ‘Are you okay, Robert?’ over the headphones, his thick Zimbabwean accent clear above the noisy engine. I said, ‘Yeah, it’s brilliant.’ Which it was. You see, I love flying, I’ve been in two-seater Microlights, hedge hopping, I’ve flown sideways in helicopters just above the ground in the Mojave Desert, I’ve been in sail planes above Sydney, Australia, all those experiences were wonderful and memorable. I didn’t know I was about to experience something rather more extreme.

We went from flying straight and level with the ground to flying vertically upward in less than a scream, the most violent movement my body has ever experienced. I can’t remember much about it as I immediately blacked out. When I came too I couldn’t see, well I could see red, nothing else, just red. Bit weird. I was also screaming very rude words in a torrent of total terror.

Then my stomach hit the roof of my mouth as we levelled out and I discovered another thing to my cost. I don’t get flight sick. Apparently that stomach-hitting-roof-of-mouth thing makes most people vomit instantly, not me dammit.

‘Do you feel sick?’ asked the pilot. I was rapidly going off this guy.

‘No,’ I said, ‘but–’

Before I could say anything the sky went profoundly swirly and then a load of green field-looking things went very swirly, we were spinning and diving towards the Isle of Wight and I was screaming out more uncontrollable swear words.

We did quite a lot more wibbly-wobbly flying and that’s when we discovered the inner ear thing. If he banked hard to the left I was happy as Larry, looking down at the green fields far below. He did many hard tight turns to the left, no problem for me. If he tipped a little bit to the right I started effing and jeffing like it was going out of fashion. Apparently my right inner ear just sent me into a head-spin, it doesn’t really make sense now but it all seemed perfectly plausible at the time.

So here’s a tip, if you are ever unlucky enough to find yourself in the cockpit of a Red Bull aerobatic plane and the pilot asks you if you feel sick, scream ‘Yes!’ as loud as you can and then tell him you are going to turn your head and be sick all over him. That’ll make him fly steady.

When we did eventually land and I managed to clamber out of the tiny cockpit I hugged the pilot long enough to make him uncomfortable with the whole man-on-man thing. I was so grateful to be alive and standing on the ground I couldn’t stop, I was very emotional.

When the director looked at the footage a few days later he was in despair. There wasn’t anything but swear words. Editors will sometimes apply a sound-killing bleep over an offensive word, in this instance they had to bleep the whole thing and pixilate my mouth because it was very easy to lip read what I was saying.

So that’s one of the many things I did between Back to Earth and Red Dwarf X. I could tell you about the lifeboat in Cornwall, that was fun. Or the military assault craft in the Baltic when I spent a week with the Royal Marines on board HMS Bulwark. Or I could mention the launch and incredible success of Carpool, my online sort-of-chat-show-but-not series. If you haven’t seen it, dig it out on YouTube or iTunes, most of the Dwarfers are on there.

But this is a story about the small rouge one and the adventures of a bunch of now late-middle-aged space bums. Once again, when we were told about the new series, the description ended with the pointed comment, pointed as it was in my direction by Doug.

‘Bobby, don’t say anything on Twitter.’

I didn’t say a word, not one tweet, even though I was constantly being asked if there was going to be a new series. My tweet stream was crystal clear, not a trace of smeg in the flow. I assume we had all been told the same, do not announce anything until it’s officially announced by UKTV and Dave.

Craig was working on Coronation Street; I’d driven him to work in an episode of Carpool and they actually let him in through the gates so I knew he really did work there. During the period between us being told the cold hard facts of the new series and the announcement date, Craig was interviewed on a radio show in Manchester.

‘So, Craig, lots of rumours about a new series of Red Dwarf, have you got anything you can tell us?’ says the jocular morning show host.

‘No way, man, I’m not allowed to say anything about the new Red Dwarf series we’re making, I got in trouble last time, I’m keeping quiet man.’

My tweet stream went ballistic. Hey ho.

So in December 2011 we all gathered in a conference room at the side of K stage in Shepperton Studios. Outside there was a lot of commotion, a lot of horses and a lot of Cossacks. We discovered this was because the final scenes of Anna Karenina starring Keira Knightley were being filmed on the back lot.

Okay, quick pointless actor’s anecdote and then I really will get down to Red Dwarf X.

I visit my agent’s office about twice a year. I’m on the phone to them all the time, emails fly about like gnats around your privates but I don’t often actually go into the office. My wonderful agent Maureen is part of a large management group called United Agents and they represent really properly famous and actually talented actors, including Keira Knightley.

One time when I dropped in for a meeting with Maureen, I walked past an office belonging to another agent. I wasn’t gawping or perving about to see who was in, honestly, I stared because something unusual caught my eye. There, sitting on a chair in a glass-partitioned office with her back to me was a woman with a quite inconceivably long neck. I only ever saw the back of her head so when I saw Maureen further down the corridor I gestured in big, pathetic actor-y mime talk, pointing very obviously and silently saying ‘is that Keira Knightley?’ I was quickly ushered into her office and told to behave. It was Keira Knightley by the way but I wasn’t allowed to go and stare.

So then, first day on Red Dwarf X and there’s a load of horses and men dressed as Cossacks and loads of people in Puffa jackets carrying clipboards and in amongst this throng, trotting away from me on a beautiful horse, is a woman with an inconceivably long neck. It was Keira Knightly.

Twice now I’ve seen the back of her head, I’ve never seen her face, not that I’m obsessed, I’m not stalking her or anything. I’ve just been quite close to her twice and never seen her. In a way it’s a metaphor for my entire life, I’ve been close to stardom, fame, glamour, an exclusive lifestyle, immense wealth and contact with the rich and powerful, but this life has always had its back to me and is moving away fast on a massive white horse.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a classic actor’s anecdote, long, pointless, overly dramatised and we learn absolutely nothing from the telling of it.

So, moving on, K stage in Shepperton, inside the conference room, day one. ‘Okay, listen up people,’ said Jim Imber, the first assistant director, a man who exuded confidence and the ability to get the job done. ‘We’re going to read through the scripts now, afterwards we’ll have a meeting to discuss what we need to do, everyone ready?’

I was as ready as I’d ever be, which is to say, woefully underprepared. There were a lot of people present, some we knew well, some we’d never met before. I’d only been sent three scripts before the first read-through and I’d read them avidly, but now, sitting in this room with all these people, I returned to my default setting for such experiences, that of not having a clue what was happening or what was expected of me.

I love it when I receive Red Dwarf scripts through the post as I had done a few days before the read-through. They plop through the letter box and everything else has to wait; the chickens go hungry, the dog is busting for a wee and hassling me, but I’m reading scripts and they all have to wait. They were funny, punchy, classic Red Dwarf. I loved them, but then I’m just a secret fan-boy covered in rubber, what would I know? As usual the only things that filled me with dread were the long Kryten speeches, and there in the second script I read was the mother of all speeches. It was a classic chunk of Kryten exposition, a wonderfully verbose and intricate explanation of the Erroneous Reasoning Research Academy or ERRA, for short.

Days later, I carried the script as I walked the dog through the autumn mist that covered the Cotswolds; I tried to remember the first three lines. I repeated them over and over again, glancing at the script as I walked. I got up to the first line then went totally blank. Memory’s not improved then, I said to myself.

I have become very adept at either writing a short paragraph introducing something, or simply making it up on the spot and delivering it to camera. I must have done it thousands of times on shows like Scrapheap and How Do They Do It?. I did it while I was driving on Carpool, I’ve done hundreds this year for the Fully Charged series. I’m a bit like a goldfish, I have a really good, really efficient ultra-short-term memory. If I have longer than five seconds from the moment I drop the piece of paper to the moment the director says action, I have problems.

I carried on walking, the dog took no notice of my struggle; she was too busy sniffing for rabbits. She’s quite old, slightly deaf and a bit blind, rabbits cavort right in front of her; they point and laugh their little rabbit laughs. They hop about with impunity, confident they are in no danger. I didn’t notice them either, I was engrossed in deep space.

I knew the coming ten weeks were going to be a challenge. Not only were the scripts littered with killer Kryten speeches, but we were recording this series in front of an audience. That takes the whole rubber-covered experience into a brand new hall of terror, well it does for me anyway. If it’s just the cast and crew in a closed set, me fluffing my lines just requires an apology and some mild jocular teasing from my fellow performers, if I fluff a line in front of an audience, the audience tends to notice.

Not only that, they love it when we smeg up, they are almost willing us to fail. The Smeg Ups and Smeg Outs have been hugely popular and we’ve produced bucket loads of them over the years, I have, as some of you may know, been a prime contributor to this humiliating but popular art form. So, after fourteen years of not performing covered in rubber in front of an enthusiastic audience, I knew I had to raise my game.

The other thing I had to do was lose my hair. I haven’t got that much left anyway but I’ve learned the advantage of shaving it off. Back in the eighties when I started working on Red Dwarf I still had a proper head of hair, like thick and dark. Twenty-four years of Red Dwarf, children, Scrapheap Challenge and general domestic and financial stress has cruelly manifested itself in my once luscious locks. I now have a paltry grey covering that resembles a threadbare fifties bath mat. I sat down in the kitchen the night before I set off for Shepperton and rubber glory, and handed my daughter the hair clippers.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun making you look stupid,’ she said as she cut a swathe right across the top of my slowly balding head. ‘This is so weird.’

Twenty minutes later, with the remnants of a fifties bath mat on the floor around my feet, I looked like the dome-headed old fool I really am.

‘Oh my God,’ I said, as my daughter held a mirror in front of me. ‘That is measurably tragic.’

I went through a box of old clothes my son had once left lying on the floor. It’s one of the joys of parenthood; I grunt around the house picking up and sorting discarded clothes and shoving them in boxes, then return the box to the room of the original owner with tiresome pleading for something resembling order and tidiness.

I’ve never been able to fully explain to my wonderful son what function a chest of drawers could serve in his life, I know he’s never used one. He’s a free spirit, a creative soul and a young man who is able to express himself in the world. For him, the floor is the perfect storage area for anything and everything. In the box among the hoodies and tattered jeans was an old woollen ski hat. I pulled it on and set off for the Dwarf.

The first episode we recorded was Trojan, although when we recorded the episode it was entitled Slow Rescue.

As we were rehearsing and blocking out the scenes we had to record, we became increasingly aware of the soon-to-be-arriving audience. When I’d first walked around the set there were no audience seats in place, but when we arrived for the first full day’s rehearsals, the seating banks were being fitted, a massive truck was parked outside the cargo doors and a forklift truck was trundling in and out, carting piles of lightweight aluminium flooring ready fitted with fold-down seats. How did I know so much about this temporary mass seating system used to such effect at the London 2012 Olympics? Because I’d done a voice-over about it for a Discovery series called How It’s Made. You see? I’m a mine of highly useful technical information.

It wasn’t as if we didn’t know we were going to record in front of an audience, of course we did. But there is a huge difference between saying ‘Oh darling, we have to have a live audience,’ when you’re in a meeting, and actually recording the show with one watching. I was becoming increasingly anxious about the whole thing.

So, we rehearse and josh about and Craig sets fire to my script and we start to get some of the scenes ‘off the page’. That’s actors’ speak for being in a mentally confident position of knowing your lines. I say we, I mean of course Chris and Craig. They were already able to run a scene without gripping onto their script. Danny was close to being in that position while I was still wandering around running my lines again and again, while hoping no one will notice and everyone will remain under the illusion that I am some kind of actor. All too soon for me it was time to get ready for the first audience recording; the seats were in, the lights were up, the cameras were ready.

We did a long camera rehearsal in costume but not in make-up, this is so the lighting cameraman can adjust everything and get some idea of what we’ll look like on the night. Of course, the fact that my daughter had given me a shaved head meant there wasn’t such a big jump from the bald headed old bloke with the metal suit on, and the true glory that is Kryten 2X4B-523P.

At the last minute I headed into the make-up department. Danny soon joined me for his wig fitting, followed by Chris and Craig for their slap-on H, hair enhancements and a bit of helpful powder. Okay, quite a lot more helpful powder than either of them needed back in 1989.

We run lines again and again but this is mixed in with general badinage and reflection on past Red Dwarf glories and behind-the-scenes hilarity. Most of this is re-enacted by Danny, who jumps around recreating certain well-worn stories from our past, me watching him in the mirror while trying to keep my rubber head motionless. Even though I’ve heard these stories countless times, I am still prone to bursting out laughing. This doesn’t make the process of attaching the Kryten mask any easier, as you can imagine.

For the previous lord-knows-how-many series, Andrea Finch had done Kryten’s make-up. On series 10, she was replaced by a very capable, and extremely pregnant, young woman called Liz Hart. It made the experience of having the make-up applied all the more intimate. I would try and sit in positions where my elbows didn’t make jabbing contact with Liz’s quite magnificent mummy bulge.

No matter how much noise, laughter and obscenity were flying around the make-up room, Liz just calmly carried on working. As usual with anyone stuck in a make-up chair for hours, the make-up artist and her victim get to know about each other in some detail. Liz was very skilled, very patient and had a few surprises for me when she told me her life story. I won’t reveal anything here, she’s writing about that herself and I hope to read her book one day. Believe me, it’ll make Fifty Shades of Grey look like a toddler’s nursery rhyme collection.

Next it was down a flight of stairs to the costume department, where I was fitted up in the full Kryten by the charming Katarina Cappellazzi, Howard Burden’s new assistant. She learned to be very patient with us too; as you can imagine with a name like that, both Mr Barrie and myself had to keep repeating her name with as strong an Italian accent as we could manage, which, considering our prodigious vocal talents, was both technically accurate and very loud.

‘Katarrrreeeena Cappellaaaaaaaaazzi.’

I should point out that Katarina was born in England and doesn’t have the vaguest trace of an Italian accent, but why let mere facts stop you expressing yourself?

When everyone was ready, we heard from Helen Norman that the seating banks were chock-full and Doug was about to go in and make an announcement.

It’s important to record that the only reason we recorded the show in front of an audience was because Craig, Chris, Danny, Doug and I insisted on it. It makes everything much harder and more expensive, it puts enormous pressure on the camera and sound crew, it’s as if you are used to cooking over a pile of smouldering sticks and suddenly you’re using a nuclear-powered pressure cooker. Everything is condensed and faster, the pressure to get the show done in under two hours is enormous.

We made our way through the dark tangle of wires and props at the back of the set and waited nervously. I have since confirmed with my fellow Dwarfers that we were all really nervous that night; we hadn’t performed in Red Dwarf in front of an audience for fourteen years. It was a leap of faith, surely they would enjoy it, surely they would laugh like they used to? That’s what we hoped, but there was no way of knowing.

When Doug appeared at the front of the set the noise was incredible. He made a short speech pleading with the audience not to post spoilers on Twitter and Facebook. He explained about the battle we’d been through to get a live audience and if the web were to be flooded with spoilers we’d never convince broadcasters to let us do it again. I am very pleased to report that all the wonderful audiences who attended the recordings were incredibly honourable and posted not a smeg stain of spoilerdom.

Our indefatigable warm-up artist Ray Peacock introduced us one by one in alphabetical order, which meant I went on last. I heard the rip-roaring cheer as Rimmer marched out into the light, looking, as Lister had once commented, ‘Like he was invading Poland.’ I assume he performed the Rimmer salute to welcome the hordes. They went ape. He was followed by a scruffy but lovable Lister, another deafening roar of greeting. Next, Mister Cat emerged, resplendent in a glittering suit and Cuban-heeled boots. He did a few ridiculously energetic Cat dance moves, not bad for a bloke over fifty and of course this was greeted with screams, yelps, cheers and whistles. Finally, old Kryters hobbled toward the waiting crowd and I knew at once that these four lovable characters had been much missed. But then we had to record the actual show.

The first scene we recorded that night took place in the drive room when Cat and Lister discuss the weird facts Lister had learned from a book he’d found that, three million years earlier, had belonged to Peterson. It was all about the Moose causing road accidents in Sweden in the seventies. As usual, we had to shoot the scene a couple of times to get all the shots recorded. Standard practice.

Next was the scene in the sleeping quarters, Rimmer swatting for his Officers’ exam. He wasn’t doing well, particularly on the lateral thinking questions; the one about the Moose causing accidents had him stumped.

We ran through the scene, the audience loved it, they laughed and clapped, it was fast-paced with multiple entrances and exits, and we didn’t trip over, I remembered my lines, Danny remembered his, Chris was brilliant, Craig was fantastic, and to top the whole thing off we got it in one take.

This is not usual, this was a fluke, doing a whole scene in one take with no pick-ups means everything worked, the actors, the cameras, the sound, the lights, the moves, the lines, the shots. A huge list of tasks, any one of which could have gone a bit wibbly-wobbly. When we gathered together to do the next scene, we knew, finally, the old Boys from the Dwarf were back. It was such a good start that we approached the next scene in high spirits, but the next scene, as they say in America, was a doozie.

Not so much because of the story or the scripts, the costumes, make-up, wigs, hair weaves and teeth extensions, that was all regular stuff. This one was a killer because of the set. The Quantum Twister is a supremely advanced Space Corps ship we stumble across, abandoned in deep space. Rimmer is of course most impressed, it’s the pride of the Space Corps, manned by heroic officers who are all ripped and pipped and ready to defend our way of life.

The set was fantastic, it looked great, the captain’s chair on its special plinth with hundreds of special buttons was a dream for Rimmer. However, it was a bit of a nightmare for the camera crew and Doug. It’s all about getting the angles, getting the shots of each of us and making it look like we’re all in the same space. There was just something about the layout that made this incredibly hard. We spent literally hours rehearsing on the set; Danny and I at our front consoles, Craig sitting to one side on the phone waiting for his call to be put through, Chris obviously lording it in his special big Captain’s chair. It’s where Chris should always be, he needs one of those in his house.

During camera rehearsal we had to deliver our lines, then step back to allow the camera to take our place, then move back into position for the next line. The scene was also quite long and the set was at the far end of the studio, not directly in front of the audience. This meant getting audience feedback, our bread and butter when we’re recording, was slightly delayed and distant.

However, the performance of the wonderful Mark Dexter as Rimmer’s brother Howard was a treat to behold, that young man is a natural. We did it, we got it in the can, the audience were fantastic and they’d clearly enjoyed it. It was such a relief to get the first episode done even though we knew there were pick-ups, scenes we didn’t have time to record when the audience were present, they clearly understood the story, loved the jokes, laughed in the right places. After fourteen years off, after countless false starts and heartbreaking let-downs, it really did feel like the show was back. But no sooner had the dust settled on the first episode, we were deep into rehearsals on the second episode, Fathers and Suns.

At the read-through we first met Rebecca Blackstone who played the newly rebooted ship’s computer, Pree. She is not only a rather beautiful young lady but also endowed with prodigious piles of talent. She had an incredible range of voices and as you may remember, an uncanny ability to keep her eyes open. I’m sure an avid viewer might be able to catch her blinking as she tells the crew how doomed they are, but I never saw her so much as flicker.

We were shooting this episode in the week before Christmas. It was mercifully cold which may sound a bit odd, but when we did the long day’s pre-shoot, that meant I was in the Kryten costume from seven in the morning until around seven at night. As usual in this sorry tale I have no wish to go into detail, but let’s just say it all gets a little moist and clammy under the pristine Kryten exterior. Knowing it was bloody freezing outside meant I could go out of the studio for the odd break and cool down and it actually made a difference. I would stand outside the studio, balance my lukewarm milky tea on a car bonnet, rest my script next to it and try and actually learn my lines.

A new aspect of my experience in rubber soon came to the fore. Due to far too many hours in front of crude early computer screens, my once perfect 20/20 vision has gone down the pan, I need my specs or all I can see is the odd blob of colour and light. I certainly can’t read a script without my glasses.

I have a tatty collection of old specs including a pair that have bendy side bits. I can expand them and ease them over Kryten’s ears, and that allows me to see the print on the page. It must look very weird but the rest of the cast and crew got used to it very quickly.

So I’m outside, steam escaping from my neck hole, script on the bonnet of a car, glasses on and a plastic cup of lukewarm milky tea with a straw in it. The glamour. The lovely members of crew who supplied my tea around the clock (I told them I was happy to make my own but they got in there too quickly) soon learned that I wanted my tea vaguely warm, bit of milk, bit of sugar, virtually undrinkable in normal life. I said, ‘Just make a shit cup of tea, that’ll be perfect.’ From then on it became known as ‘shit tea’. Reece, a wonderful young chap who looked after us very well, would approach with a tray, ‘Coffee for you, Chris, and a cup of shit tea for Robert.’

Thanks muchly.

Because I drink the tea through a straw to stop it getting on Kryten’s rubber lips it can’t be too hot. I can’t feel my lips so there is no warning as to how hot the tea is. If you want to try this experiment please go ahead, but it really does hurt. Get a cup of steaming hot tea and shove a drinking straw into it, then put the straw in your mouth and suck. You may need hospital treatment for mouth blisters so I advise not trying it and don’t try to sue me. Just believe me, shit tea is the stuff you need.

One of the big problems we had during the shooting of Fathers and Suns was Craig. He is nothing if not highly professional. I know he has a reputation for being a bit of a lad, and true, a bottle of Rosé doesn’t last long when Craig’s in the room. A vindaloo that could peel paint is seen as a light zesty snack by this man of iron, but he’s always at work on time and he always knows his lines. However, during the rehearsals it was very clear he was seriously under the weather, he had proper full-on man-flu. He had actual doctors look at him and shake their heads.

So, Craig spent two days in bed and we did what we could without him, which, if you remember the episode, wasn’t a great deal. This episode really revolved around him and his issues with fatherhood from the point of view of both father and son. Well, Lister is his own dad, but you all know that. It’s all to do with, as Lister so rightly said, ‘time-travelly sci-fi paradoxy smeg.’

Chris and I recorded the scene when Pree refits the corridor on B deck and everything goes wrong; explosions, sparks and a terrible mess. We gather on the set and run through the scene for the cameras and special effects team. The whole place had been wired with small charges, smoke machines, sparky wiring and bits dropping off the ceiling. We’re used to this kind of thing, we are battle-hardened space bums, a few explosions don’t worry us.

We start the scene and of course it all goes wrong. It has to, it wouldn’t be Red Dwarf if it didn’t go wrong. As the team got stuck into refitting the charges and wiring everything up again, I realise that I’ve finally matured a tiny bit. For once it wasn’t my fault that it all went wrong and there’s nothing I can personally do to make it go right, all I can do is get out of the way and let the professionals take over. In my early days on Red Dwarf I would worry and feel guilty about everything. Even if it wasn’t my fault, I’d somehow work it out that it really was, somewhere along the line, my incompetence had let everyone down.

Second time around and it all went swimmingly; all the explosions exploded, the lights flashed and all the sparks went fitzzzz. Chris and I had to talk to a blank screen that would, we were assured, eventually show the face of Pree. Rebecca was sitting at the side of the set shouting out her lines so we could react to them. It all got a bit noisy with explosions, wind machines, smoke machines and general chaos. Pree explained to us that she had carried out the essential repair work in exactly the manner it would have been done if we had done it ourselves, i.e. utterly rubbish.

Craig recovered from his mega-man-flu and returned to the studio looking suitably rough for his role as his own father. He recorded the sequences as his dad who was berating his son David while getting drunk. His drunk-acting is unsurpassed. No one without deep, personal experience of such states could hope to achieve such a breathtaking and yet underplayed and subtle portrayal of inebriation. All Craig was actually drinking was apple juice, he got through many cartons. ‘It’s weird isn’t it?’ Craig said to me as he wiped his make-up off after the recording, ‘I’ve drunk loads of this stuff and I’m not pissed. Something tells me it’s not part of me regular diet, la.’

Two days before Christmas we got ready for the audience again. There was a bit of a party atmosphere going on as the crowds arrived. Once again we were introduced and started recording episode two. The show went really well, the scenes with Pree were brilliant, the story held together and at the end of a long night, another episode was in the can. Well, most of it. There were still crucial scenes that needed recording, complex, critical, crucial scenes, but we’d do them later in the pick-up week. It was just the start, we had plenty of time, that was the general consensus.

I spent a quiet Christmas day with my family, it was lovely; I was lovely, the Mrs was lovely and the children were lovely. Even the dog made an effort. The family snaps taken of the day make us look like a normal, happy, well-functioning family unit, which alone is something of an achievement. The only tragic thing about the family pictures is the totally bald bloke holding up a small glass of red wine.

‘Look at that massive loser,’ my lovely eighteen-year-old son Louis said later when he saw the pictures.

After two weeks off, it was back to the studio for the long run, four episodes to record plus all the pick-ups. Oh yes, the pick-ups. They loomed over us, an ever-growing list of little scenes and close-ups, reaction shots and special effect sequences that we would do, ‘in the pick-up week’.

Episode three was a real highlight. It includes the only scene we shot outside the studio. In the past we would often spend a week shooting special exterior scenes before the studio recordings in front of the audience. In Red Dwarf X, this was not to be; budget restrictions prohibited dragging the entire team to a gravel pit in Kent or a sewage works on the Isle of Dogs. The only exterior sequence was when the crew of Red Dwarf had completed building the flat-pack Swedish self-assembly time-travelling shower unit and ended up in Albion in the year 23 ad. As you do.

It was a very cold day and the crew were all wrapped up in winter coats, thick socks, boots, gloves, woolly hats, the works. The cast had thick overcoats draped over their shoulders, Kryten was in need of none of these crude, humanoid-warming systems. Minus five Celsius is just about the perfect operating temperature for a rubber-headed mechanoid.

The shot we were doing was a one-take; we had to arrive in the woods and start walking on a pre-arranged route, the cameras tracking us from a distance. We did it fairly fast and completed a few takes of the scene before returning to the warmth of the studio and hot, or in my case lukewarm, tea.

A few days later we learned there was a problem with the scene. Once again not us, not me, not the sound, this time it was the Red epic cameras. It seemed they didn’t like the cold. Watching the footage back on a small monitor didn’t show the error, in fact you could watch it on a big monitor and not notice anything was wrong; however, as soon as you were told ‘it’s dropped frames’ you’d see the little jump. I found it uniquely annoying, I was saying things like ‘no one will notice’ and ‘surely it doesn’t matter that much’. One tiddly frame dropped, it seemed so minor. Naturally everyone else thought it did matter and rightly so, it was a disaster, we’d have to shoot it again, in the pick-up week.

All the time we’d been rehearsing episode three, Lemons, we had been aware that a rather elaborate set was being built where before Christmas the Quantum Twister had been located. This was going to be the Indian market square and as it came together it looked more and more amazing. A wonderful Australian production designer called Michael Ralph built all the sets for Red Dwarf X, including this remarkable installation.

We started working with James Baxter who was playing Jesus, another fine young actor who did us proud. Once the crew of Red Dwarf find themselves in 23 AD, they realise they have the remote for the flat-pack Swedish self-assembly time-travelling shower unit, but no battery, so being the ever-resourceful, battled-hardened space bums we are we decide to make one, using lemons. So we walk three thousand miles across central Europe and Asia and into India, as you do, to buy a few lemons.

Once again, the background to this story was extraordinary, as Doug explained to us the slightly bonkers theory that Judas was in fact the identical twin brother of Jesus. Judas was crucified, Jesus lived on, thus explaining the notion for being raised from the dead; in this story, Jesus went to live and breed in the south of France, etcetera. I say bonkers theory, but that didn’t stop Dan Brown and all the book sales for The Da Vinci Code, which is based on much the same premise.

So anyway, the set of the Indian market unlike any other set in the history of Red Dwarf smelt absolutely gorgeous. My sense of smell is a bit smegged up by years of smoking. Yes I’ve given up … loads of times, it’s been my only physically damaging vice, all my other vices are perfectly healthy, but even with my rubber-covered proboscis I could smell the spices piled up in beautiful brass containers all over the set. Normally a set on Red Dwarf smells of burnt plastic, rubber and fresh paint. This set smelled of hessian, spices and all manner of exotic fruit. Gorgeous. We all walked around sniffing things. The set was incredibly detailed and busy, and that was before all the extras arrived.

We don’t often have extras in Red Dwarf, but when we were pre-recording in the Indian Market set, it was chock full of them. Lovely and very patient Indian people dressed appropriately stared on slightly bemused by the antics of such an odd-looking crew. We were also attired in appropriate clothing, Danny’s hat naturally being a creation of rare beauty.

Come the night of the live recording, we started the scene where Kryten explains how different everything was back in 23 ad. The storyline of Lemons is challenging enough when you watch the finished thing, but the audience were only party to a slightly disjointed rendering of the tale, quite a few missing scenes and a bit of explanation from members of the cast was all they had to go on.

However, a wonderful moment happened as Mister Lister revealed his amazement at the crudity of 23 AD beliefs and culture by saying ‘Jesus!’

Behind him and facing away from the camera was a figure with long hair dressed in white robes. He turned around and there was young James in his Jesus wig looking like the many images painted of Him over the centuries. Yes, Jesus turned unto us and gently and without judgement of mere mortals spake, ‘Sorry, ist thou talking to me?’

The audience instantly got it, they knew, they had followed the twists and turns of the story and knew who James was meant to be. It seems obvious now, but at the time it felt anything but straightforward. In case you’ve forgotten why we had walked all the way from the land of Albion to India, we were simply trying to build a battery for the Swedish flat-pack self-assembly time-travelling shower out of lemons, copper coins and galvanised nails. Obviously we were going to meet Jesus, especially Jesus with a kidney stone.

So we dine with Jesus but he is being hunted down by Roman guards. Were there Roman guards in India in 23 AD? I don’t know, ask Doug, but there were some hulking big Roman guards chasing us.

The scene where we are hiding from the guards in a store room and Kryten explains to Jesus the basic electro-chemical theory which take place in a simple lemon battery was, as you may now be able to imagine, a bit of a brain-melting moment for our rubber-headed hero. If I had worn down various kitchen floors trying to learn Kryten speeches in the past, this one would have resulted in a three-foot deep trench across the room. I paced around for hours repeating it, checking the lines, starting again. The problem was it made perfect sense, it was a very scientifically accurate description of how a battery made of lemons actually works and I needed to be word-perfect.

When we were rehearsing this episode, the props crew put together the lemon battery just as it was described in the script. It was a perfect schoolroom experiment. One copper coin and one galvanised nail had been pushed into each lemon and short length of copper wire ran between the nail in one lemon and the coin in the next. It looked perfect but here’s the thing, Ed Moore, one of the camera technicians had a voltmeter, he put the two connectors on the ends of the wires and got a reading, 7.4 volts. It was a prop on Red Dwarf that actually worked!

‘That is utterly amazing!’ I said.

‘It’s not that amazing,’ said Craig.

‘I think it is fairly impressive, Craigington,’ said Chris.

‘It’s just a bunch of lemons with wires coming out of them,’ said Craig.

‘7.4 volts from a few lemons, that’s a serious amount of electric power,’ I said.

‘Not quite enough for one of your sad little electric cars though, Bobby,’ said Craig.

I had to agree with him.

‘I’m tellin’ you, guy!’ said Danny with a big sabre-toothed grin. ‘If you had, like four tons of lemons, you could power Bobby’s car!’

The mere mention of my electric cars makes Chris feel uncomfortable. I make a point of avoiding the topic when I am in his company, but this notion filled him with glee.

‘Four tons of lemons, I like it.’

As usual, Danny’s crackpot suggestions often turn out to contain a surprising grain of truth. Ed Moore, the charming but, it has to be said, deeply nerdy camera operator did a quick bit of mental maths, he worked out there were about two and a half lemons in a pound, 2,200 pounds in a metric tonne (1,000 kilograms) so four tonnes of lemons would be about 5,500 lemons. If eight lemons produced 7.4 volts, then 5,500 lemons would produce around 8,800 volts, which would be enough power to instantly blow the car to bits. Obviously if you could design a battery management system and inverter which could control the output of the four tonnes of lemons, while taking into account the possible low wattage of the system, plus design a trailer to carry the lemons, the nails and the wires, you could probably get five or even six miles of pure lemon-powered range out of an electric car pulling a massive trailer.

As Ed and I discussed this, I admit slightly esoteric, notion. I leave it to your imagination to picture the expression forming on Mr Charles’s face as he stood close by.

‘I’d normally suggest you try and get out more,’ said Craig. ‘But then who’d want to meet you?’

When it came to recording the scene where I explain lemon power to Jesus, who clearly wouldn’t understand a word of it as he didn’t even know what a lemon was, I was under considerable stress. I had finally admitted defeat at having the speech word-perfect. I could make most of it up quite convincingly but the way Doug had structured the speech was perfect, I really didn’t want to make a hash of it.

I therefore devised a method of having the bulk of the speech written on an idiot board I placed down on the small table on which the lemon batteries were being constructed. I half knew the speech but having the script to hand like this gave me the confidence to dive in and go for it. Strangely, I feel some pride in this admission of pathetic failure. With the help of the cast and camera crew, the scene was completed in one take. When I watch it back even I can’t tell I’m half reading it, the editors careful cutting around the scene with close-ups of the nails and coins being inserted into the lemons helped, but I just want to blow my own very small trumpet for a moment.

Paarp.

There, that’s enough, for someone whose head is at close to thermonuclear temperatures and who has the memory of a particularly dull goldfish, I think I pulled it off.

Of course when Jesus asks ‘What’s a lemon?’ the audience burst into laughter. It was a recurring theme for Kryten, often in scenes with Mister Cat. Old Kryts says ‘Listen’ and then explains some mind-numbing but vitally important piece of space-time logic, there is a beat and then Mr Cat says, ‘I was with you until you said “Listen”.’ Massive laugh. Typical.

Lemons was great fun to do, I loved the script and it has certainly stayed with me as a highlight of series 10, but the production schedule was merciless. There was no laurel-sitting for the Boys from the Dwarf, we had one day off and then we were back. We were ready to get Entangled.

The sheer weight and bulk of Craig’s kebab used in the opening scene was impressive. The production team had procured it from the local kebab shop, and it was a monster. It was a scene Craig clearly relished filming and for once, as I was off-camera, one I could enjoy watching take place.

The opening scene of Entangled had to be pre-recorded due to the explosions, sparks and special effects, as Lister bites into the huge chicken-doner-combo, sauce spills out all over the control surfaces of the drive room causing a small fire which he naturally puts out with beer. When Rimmer discovers him he is, as would be expected, duly appalled, but Lister reassures him that there’s no need to panic, he’s got more beer. What I would like to point out, however, is the fact that Craig ate large amounts of the kebab after the scene was completed, and then went on to have a substantial lunch. I watched him chomp away as I sucked milkshake through a straw.

Entangled has a classic Red Dwarf storyline and some great set pieces; most memorably for me when Kryten and the Cat meet in the corridor and discover the spooky world of coincidence. This was the first scene Danny and I recorded in front of the audience that night; for some reason I have a very clear memory of standing behind the set waiting to do this scene. At the far end of the studio I could see Danny pacing around going over his lines. I became very still and silent, it flashed through my boiled brain that I really didn’t know what I was doing, and equally important, why I was doing it. I was a fifty-six-year-old man covered in rubber and plastic, about to record a scene that we had never once got completely right in rehearsal.

Danny, as I have said many times, has a unique skill that can, at times, be complex to work with. He rarely gets anything right in rehearsals, I can say this with impunity because neither do I; however, on many occasions what you see on the screen is a performance that none of the rest of the cast have ever seen in rehearsal. On hearing the stage manager shout action, I moved forward with a very high degree of doubt that we would ever complete the complicated scene we were about to undertake. Danny and I had to speak the same lines at the same pace with the same intonation and the same pauses between lines.

Something magical happened. For the first time both of us were word-perfect, working in a zone of harmony and we kicked that scene out of the park. Boom. It may seem trivial in the grand scheme of things, but we were both ecstatic. It was only after it was done that I felt a huge wave of relief, realising I had been dreading the whole evening’s recording because of this one fairly short scene. The rest of the show felt like a breeze after that.

Mr Lister had been gambling with BEGGS, Biologically Engineered Garbage Gobblers, not the sort of company you want to get tangled up with. Sadly he’d lost Starbug in the bet and, as we were to learn later, he’d lost Rimmer as well. Not only that, he was now sporting a rather fetching groinal exploder which would detonate if he reneged on the wager. Excellent stuff. All through this Rimmer was trying to instil a bit of health and safety on board Red Dwarf by issuing Lister with reams of forms to fill in.

The scene where Kryten has to inform Rimmer that the forms may, possibly, have been accidentally evacuated into deep space is one of the few times where my mucking about during rehearsals actually made it to the screen. I have no idea what inspired it, but as we were blocking out this scene in rehearsals, Kryten was washing up cutlery when Rimmer storms in. There may well have been some fart jokes going about; if a large number of men are cooped up in a confined space for more than a few minutes, someone is going to make a fart joke. It’s all part of our rich island heritage. I think I then described how Kryten doesn’t fart, he has a heat outlet in his rear undercarriage, which, for no reason whatever, he started to use as a method of drying spoons.

‘It’s all perfectly hygienic sir,’ Kryten assures Rimmer.

In the entire Red Dwarf X series, that line was my only contribution to the script.

Entangled was a great show to record in front of the audience because a lot of it took place in the sleeping quarters and drive room, which were both directly in front of the seating banks. We had pre-recorded the scene with the BEGGS because it required so many complex camera angles and costume changes. Yet again, this scene involved actors covered in rubber, foul-smelling hessian rags and bits of hair stuck all over the place.

The BEGGS chief was played by an old pal, in fact an old mate of Lister’s, quite literally. Steve Wickham, who we could barely recognise under his putrescent BEGGS costume and make-up, had at one time played Lister’s GELF bride in Emohawk: Polymorph II. He clearly enjoyed being once again utterly unrecognisable under the piles of rags Howard Burden had draped him in.

The scene where Rimmer converts to soft light to enter the stasis room on board the Erroneous Reasoning Research Academy was also a pre-record. Lister almost dares to believe the sleeping life form is Kochanski, the description fits! It could be her! Rimmer’s face reveals all as he introduces the crew to Professor Edgington, a chimp. Nice.

Oh yes, the Erroneous Reasoning Research Academy, or ERRA for short, the speech I had been dreading since day one. It was all so straightforward: we arrive at the deserted Academy, get in a lift which goes the wrong way, obviously, and as we ride to the floor containing the stasis pods, Kryten explains a brief history of the institution.

It’s what actors do, they get a script, learn the lines and then supply a performance. Notice I used the term ‘actor’ then; a skilled professional who has honed their craft over many thousands of performances. Not an old numpty with a brain like a sieve who’s been in a rubber mask for ten hours and in that time has only consumed lukewarm tea and a milkshake.

A member of the production crew studiously wrote out the lines in extra large letters on four bits of card– there was no way to fit this speech on one card. I’m talking big bits of card, big letters, big clear letters you could see from fifty meters. However, in the dark of the lift set, crunched up together, all attempts at making it look like I wasn’t reading were a miserable failure. We did shoot the scene in front of the audience and just about got away with it, but it was just another bit of the show we would complete in the pick-up week.

Entangled featured two special guest stars, one in the guise of an uncannily realistic chimpanzee. This was brilliantly performed by Peter Elliott, who makes his living all over the world being a chimp. He’s trained dozens of actors in chimp behaviour and really knows his stuff. The big advantage he has with his make-up is that he can take it off quite easily between takes. I thought I got hot, let me tell you, chimp about for five minutes in a TV studio and you can create energy-generating amounts of heat.

Also, Peter has two assistants with him at all times; although his movements are incredibly chimp-like, he has a bit of radio-controlled assistance with the chimp’s facial expressions. These were controlled by Nik Williams and Jun Matsuuva, who operated the face from just behind the cameras. Even up close, if you ignore the little whizz sounds of the tiny solenoid motors working in his chimp head, it looks incredibly realistic.

Once the crew fathom out we could transform the chimp back into Professor Edgington, who was of course the original inventor of the groinal exploder still strapped around Lister’s nethers, we met Sydney Stevenson.

Although in the script she appears before us completely naked, we didn’t insist on this to help us get into the scene. We may be a bunch of whacked-out space bums, but we have standards, we are gentlemen. Obviously Kryten is the last one to notice the sheer glory of such female beauty and toddles off to get a sheet to wrap the poor professor in, hesitating only because Rimmer insists he follow relevant health and safety protocols.

Anyway, Sydney was great fun to work with and I think I even resisted telling a naff anecdote about her dad. Well, her dad has done a bit of acting here and there over the years, yes, okay, he’s quite famous I suppose.

This fact was revealed to me in a very memorable way and this is the story I didn’t bore Sydney with during her week on the Dwarf. I’ll try and keep it short, not something actors can normally be accused of.

In 2000 I attended the premiere of a Ben Elton musical called The Beautiful Game in London’s glittering West End. It was raining. As I trudged over the rather soggy red carpet my eyes were temporarily blinded by a thousand flash guns as a literal phalanx of paparazzi snappers started taking pictures and shouting ‘Robert! Robert, over here!’

That’s the price you pay for being an international mega-star, I just had to deal with the pressures of fame. I was just about to stand in front of them and smile when I was gently eased out of the way by one of the smartly dressed but burly security types who stood either side of the red carpet. As I turned around, I saw the real Robert they were all shouting for, Robert Lindsay, that actor bloke who is a bit on the famous side. He’s also Sydney’s dad.

The remaining scenes were a joy, well, they were for me; for some reason I knew my lines and we sailed through them. We save Lister’s gentlemen’s parts at the eleventh hour and Professor Edgington trips on a pile of health and safety report forms and falls into the airlock. She obviously presses the wrong button and is sucked out into space. Job done.

Rubber off, shower, change, pack small bag for weekend and head for home. Four down, two to go.

The following week when we arrived in the studio sacks of letters littered the set. One of the quirky little facts I learned on Red Dwarf X was that you can hire sacks of fake letters from a props supply company. Imagine keeping boxes of fake letters on a shelf in case some production company needs a pile of letters to use in their play. It would just never occur to me that there would ever be any demand for them, but there was big demand while we were recording Dear Dave.

The opening scene of this episode finds Lister down in the dumps, missing the human race and Kryten, full of the joys of cleaning, tries to cheer him up to no avail. While we were recording that opening scene in front of, as usual, a very enthusiastic crowd, I was aware of the insightful gaze of two women in the audience. One was my wife, Judy Pascoe, the other was my daughter Holly.

Before I go any further I just want to point out again that my daughter was not named after the ship’s computer. She is called Holly for very different reasons. It’s a long story and I’m not going to go off on that particular tangent, suffice it to say she is a very different Holly, she actually does have quite a high IQ and she’s frighteningly sensible and grown up.

As in any family, there has to be a certain amount of tolerance between husband and wife. I tolerate the fact that my Mrs is alarmingly clever, emotionally mature, calm, sensible, kind, gentle and patient. She tolerates the fact that I am loud, cheap, shallow, vain, sweary, hypocritical, emotionally unstable, immature and moody. It’s a perfect partnership.

The one area where she can be a little bit prickly is when she assesses my performances either on stage or TV. I was nervous about her seeing me as Kryten again. It had been over twenty years since Judy herself donned a rubber mask and played Camille. However, she is one of the few people who knows what it’s really like. Being an Australian and growing up in quite a macho culture (she has three enormous brothers) she’s not prone to overly sympathising with a shallow actor-type who moans about being hot. I’m happy and proud to announce that after the recording that night, Judy and Holly came into the make-up room as I was being de-rubbered. Judy said, ‘Well done, darl, you were quite good tonight, you even remembered some of your lines.’ That, ladies and gentlemen, is praise indeed.

One of the pre-recorded scenes we did for Dear Dave was when the Cat wants to tell the rest of the Red Dwarf crew something important but decides to do it in charades. There was a loose script for this scene but Doug encouraged us to do it off the page, make it up as we go along. Of course Danny was on fire with his physical antics leaving us utterly baffled by what he was trying to say; Rimmer obsessed with a giant death worm, Kryten was fearful of being replaced by a superior mechanoid and Lister is just trying to make sense of Cat’s insane mime skills.

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 room 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 one-liner 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 have 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.

After about twenty minutes we went back to the hotel and got de-Dwarfed. I don’t think I’ve ever had the make-up on for less time, even when we’ve done make-up tests and camera tests I have it on longer. Doug, Craig, Chris and I, plus what seemed like twenty other people, then crammed in another room and did a few interviews over a speakerphone. We had a very hurried supper and headed for the Prince Charles Cinema where the first episode was going to be shown to a packed house. I had quite a few friends attending, Nigel Planer, Lisa Rogers and many other people I’d worked with were in the auditorium, but I never saw them. It was all a bit busy.

The preview went down a storm, everyone seemed to love it, we did a short question and answer session afterwards. I was immensely grateful Doug was there, as many of the questions about plot development and storylines were dealt with by ‘the man who knows’. I just waffle when I’m asked. My son and his supermodel girlfriend were in the audience, she’d never seen Red Dwarf before and she said she loved it. Nice. I asked my son what he thought. ‘Yeah, not bad, can you lend me twenty quid, Dad?’ Nice.

The following night I sat down with my daughter and watched the episode as it went out. We’d had a takeaway curry beforehand, I’d helped her do her history homework about Pitt the Younger and George III’s influence over parliament in 1785, but by none o'clock we were ready. My daughter laughed, she actually laughed, when Kryten gets a bit angry with the droid shopping channel customer service complaints department. ‘That was actually funny, Dad,’ she said and gave me a pat on the back. Nice.

So, what next for the small rouge one? I don’t know. I thought it was all over after series three back in 1989, so I’m keeping my options open.

This ebook edition first released in 2012

Unbound

4–7 Manchester Street, Marylebone, London, W1U 2AE

www.unbound.co.uk

All rights reserved © Robert Llewellyn, 2012

The right of Robert Llewellyn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Cover design by Mark Ecob

Cover photograph courtesy of UKTV

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-908717-77-1