The Man In the Rubber Mask (34 page)

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.