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saying, ‘Stand back, crip coming.’ The Canadian couple winced, to hear the term crip coming from someone like Jag obviously jangled their liberal nerves, but to ignore him was to be more offensive than calling him a ‘crip’. When Jag spoke, or walked, it was plainly clear that it was more effort for him than most other people. That was all. In every other respect Jag was a bog-standard, egotistical stand-up comic who leched after women. One difference was that he didn’t drink. He claimed in his comedy routine that if he drank alcohol he felt ‘completely legless’.
    I should have been super cool about Doug’s leg but I didn’t know him then, and felt very uncomfortable. I decided to go for broke though and suggested I could base Kryten’s walk on a kid I was at school with. He had muscular dystrophy, a wasting nerve disease, but at the age of fifteen he was still able to walk. He was the hero of our class mainly because he was so funny. Kids can be really horrible about that sort of thing, but for some reason our class had really taken this boy under their wing. If he answered a teacher’s question, he would put his hand up by swinging his shoulders and flicking his arm up, then holding his elbow with the other hand. This style of attracting the teacher’s attention quickly caught on, and soon we were all doing it. I think it had a beneficial influence on the whole class, we were the bad lads of the school, in the problem class, but because putting your hand up to answer a question was such fun, we started to pay more attention. This boy’s walk was also very peculiar. He would flick his legs forward with a twist of his hips, sort of like Douglas Bader with rubber knees. When I perambulated across the floor like this for Rob and Doug, they clearly liked what they saw.Doug walked around in a circle nodding and saying, ‘No, no, yeah, no, yeah.’ Rob smoked another five cigarettes and said, ‘Very funny, Bobby.’
    Ed Bye wanted to know what sort of voice I was going to use. I searched my brains for all the daft comic characters I’d done over the years: Toby, the chinless wonder upper-class twit with buck teeth; Sir George Sprout, the gout-ridden old land owner; the boy Tom, ancient rustic know-all; Steve Crèche Ponytail, the massively right-on non-sexist man. None of them fitted the bill.
    I tried my Dutch hippie accent, then I did my Scandinavian. It was a character I’d used in my stand-up comedy set, who talked about having sex on a bean bag in a stripped-pine living room with a Janis Joplin poster on the wall. Oh, it was very droll at the time, but it doesn’t work out of context. This accent tickled Ed; it has a daft sing-song quality to it, a charming innocence or stupidity, depending on your viewpoint. As I did the walk and the voice, the general consensus seemed to be settling on Kryten being a Swedish mechanoid. Very clean and tidy, very Swedish, a sort of Volvo robot with side impact bars.
    It felt good, I seemed to have cracked it, then Rob and Doug started walking around, standing in a huddle, smoking and talking. I didn’t really notice this, I was busy perfecting my walk, watching myself in the large mirror attached to one wall. Just as the character was starting to work for me Rob walked up and said, ‘The Scandinavian stuff.’
    I said, ‘Yeah, it really feels good.’
    ‘No,’ said Rob, ‘it’s going to drive people insane. That voice really gets to you after a while. What about American?’
    ‘Yeah, American, no, yeah, yeah,’ said Doug. That was okay, I had spent time in America, it made more sense in some ways, a robot was far more likely to come from America than Sweden. You can see how strongly I held on to my opinions, I don’t swim with the tide, I stick to my beliefs, sometimes, for a bit, as long as everyone likes me.
    I did my Californian, my bland Midwest, they were all a bit dull. Then I explained I’d spent time in Vancouver a few years before, having sex with a