Robert Llewellyn

The first thing you notice when meeting Robert Llewellyn, star of Red Dwarf, is that he is rather good looking and doesn't speak with an American accent. 'I can put it on. I've spent rather a lot of time over there, which is how we ended up doing it [as Kryton in Red Dwarf]. It was one I could sustain without having to think about it. It was meant to be friendly mid-western, mid-atlantic.'
So, I wondered, how did a successful actor in a long running sci-fi series get to write an off-the-wall reworking of the Pygmalion story? 'It's my first published novel; it's my fifth published book. All the others were non-fiction. It's what I have been trying to do for as long as I care to remember. I think I had my first novel rejected when I was 19 or 20. I've been trying to do it for that long. It was always what I wanted to do; it's really been a combination of life taking over and other jobs taking over. So I'm very grateful now; it's easier if you're over 40, you have a lot more people and things, places to call on. If you get stuck up a blind alley you go I know, I'll make him like so-and-so I met in 1972. You've got a lot more history of your own to call on, which I do. I ruthlessly call on mine. Even if you don't do it consciously, and I do it consciously. When members of my family read my stuff they go But that's your cousin so-and-so, and it genuinely hasn't occurred to me. It was just something that came out. Where it came out from was something that happened to me when I was 8 that I'd forgotten about.'
Although the beginning of The Man On Platform Five (out now from Hodder & Stoughton price £14.99) is very Pygmalion, Robert is at pains to point out that that is where the similarity ends. 'The premise, the beginning, is exactly Pygmalion. It's two people having a wager on whether they can change a third into the sort of person that they want. Except it's two women and they're trying to change a man. The story doesn't follow Pygmalion at all, it's a totally different story. But the original idea is exactly that, I'm not trying to hide that. He's a guy who works in a supermarket. He's got a low-rent job, he's not that fashionable and he's not particularly interesting. He lives with his Mum, he's not married , he's 31 and he's on the Internet a lot. He has all the cliches of a nerdy guy but, as they get to know him they get to realise that there's more to him than meets the eye. It's a romantic comedy.'
Having come from a relatively privileged background only to 'drop out' to live the hippy lifestyle in the 70's, Robert is, perhaps, ideally suited to chronicling the life of an outsider who gets 'inside'. 'Not particularly, but my sister told me that it was a self portrait, that that is what I am like now, which I find a bit depressing. So, in a sense, I relate to him [Ian, the hero of The Man On Platform Five] because [as a child] I didn't do anything normal. I wish I had. I'm trying to do normal things now. He doesn't quite fit into the fashionable world. He works in a supermarket and is very into bulk retailing. He's not really an outsider.' If that is the case then what, I wanted to know, did Robert do in terms of research for the character? 'I spent a lot of time in supermarkets talking to people who work there, trolling up and down the aisles.'
Having portrayed Kryton in Red Dwarf for ten years (series eight is halfway through filming and will hit our screens in the New Year) Llewellyn is, some would say, ideally placed to observe anorak culture at its finest. 'Lots of people put down Red Dwarf fans by saying Don't you get tired of seeing all those anoraks.? Well, I don't, cos I don't see any anoraks. There are definitely Red Dwarf fans who fit the bill. There are some very weird ones, but they are a tiny minority. The vast majority that we meet at conventions are just obsessively keen on the show. You wouldn't be able to pick them out on an identity parade as being nerdy sci-fi fans. They look just like you or anybody. I have to admit, though, that I have been to a Dwarf/Trek convention in America and some of the Trekkies are pretty much on the edge of what we would classify as normal.'
During the 80's Robert was doing a lot of writing, plays, sketches and even a sitcom for Channel 4. 'Nobody remembers that, thank god. It was called The Corner House. It wasn't very funny. Very much sit and very little com. I was also writing a sketches for a theatre group called The Joeys which toured all over the country. That's where my writing really took off. I was writing comedy sketches, monologues and songs which were, 2 days later, on stage in front of 500 people. If they didn't laugh I realised very quickly. It was a great training ground. I have a stack of scripts from that period 10 feet high.' It was at the same time that his breakthrough play, Mamo, Robot Born Of Woman, was conceived. 'Some hippy friends of mine from Amsterdam moved to Los Angeles to do special effects on Robo Cop. I went to LA in 1987 and stayed with them. They took me to the premiere of Robo Cop and it just made me scream with laughter. I then had this idea for a robot that wasn't designed for killing but to be rather nice. A PC, New Man before there was such a term. But the more he observed male behaviour the more of an idiot he became. The actor I'd written the part for couldn't do it and I had to; Paul Jackson, producer at the time of Red Dwarf, saw the play and me, so it was a real fluke I came to be in Red Dwarf. I sort of fell in through the back door and I wasn't even pushing. The first series I ever did, which was series three, ended with a huge party in Manchester with all the people who'd ever been in it. Everyone was really pleased with three series. I was pleased that I'd got into the show on the tail end of it. No-one realised it would keep going.'
Of course, being in a long running series has it's draw backs but being the body inside the rubber mask of Kryton has its own, special problems. 'It's not as bad as it was. It's the time spent in the makeup room was really debilitating. By the time you got on set you were tired and you'd had enough. It was five hours the first series, three hours in the second and now it's about an hour. During production it does isolate you from the rest of the world, wearing that thing. It is very peculiar to stand near someone wearing a square rubber head that looks like a half chewed rubber tip pencil. Some people can't handle it, they walk past you and pretend you're not there. I imagine it's what being facially disfigured is like. Some people are nice and talk to you and some just turn away.' And there are other, more unexpected, side effects when the mask is removed. 'The glue that they use to attach it to my face is so strong that they have to use a special oil to remove it and that degrades the rubber. The mask only lasts a day. It's destroyed every time. When the director shouts Clear I can't tell you how quickly the back gets ripped off. It does get horribly hot under there and it does mess up your thermostat. I feel incredibly hot for a few weeks after, even if it's cold I can walk outside in a T-shirt.'
The Man On Platform Five is the story of two half-sisters, Gresham and Eupheme, who have bickered with each other throughout their life and, stuck in Milton Keynes on a train, relieve the boredom by betting each other that they can take Ian Ringfold, archetypal sad trainspotter and anorak clad mummy's boy, and turn him into a sophisticated man about town welcomed into the beds of the rich and famous. The journey upwards reveals rather more in the trainspotter than either ladies could have guessed and the comic and incisive narrative of Robert Llewellyn keeps the reader gripped in laughter from page one.

First published in Thud
© Paul Towers 9/1997