The Man In the Rubber Mask (9 page)

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: