The Man In the Rubber Mask (21 page)

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.

 

 

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.