The Man In the Rubber Mask (32 page)

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
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, 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!'