The Man In the Rubber Mask (6 page)

‘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?