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and costume fittings for Red Dwarf , I was busy rehearsing Onan in an old school building in Hackney.
    John and I both appeared in the play and our first night try-out took place in the Soho Poly Theatre in London. Considering it was a comedy the laughs were few and far between. It felt very leaden and worthy, the big audience were crammed into their seats in this tiny basement theatre. Afterwards John and I were both pretty depressed, we had both had successful shows the previous year in Edinburgh, now we were going up with what felt like a bit of a dog.
    Everyone who saw the show in London was very nice about it, ‘It’s fantastic guys, it really says a lot,’ said someone who looked faintly bored.
    ‘I really laughed,’ said someone else, without cracking a smile. We were also in a bit of trouble because in the normal course of events we’d have had time to jiggle the play around a bit, between the first performance and our arrival in Edinburgh. Now, due to my filming schedule, this wasn’t possible. The day after this glamour-free première, I drove to Liverpool and checked in at the hotel.
    I was greeted in the bar by the full complement of Red Dwarf : the sound engineers, the cameramen, the vision mixers, lighting technicians, boom operators, the rest of the cast, Rob and Doug. The whole lot of us took over the corner bar of the hotel. Craig walked in and was greeted at every table he passed. Everyone in Liverpool knew Craig. He implied to me that half the people who knew him wanted to kill him, so I moved myself slightly further away.
    We all went out for a meal, which considering there were about eighty people in all, took hours of careful organisation. Craig and Danny went off clubbing. I had to go to bed. This is the story of my life, everyone else goes off clubbing, I go to bed.
    The reason I went to bed was made apparent in the dark hours of early morning. My bedside phone went, I answered it, a Liverpudlian woman’s voice said, ‘This is your early morning call, Mr Llewellyn.’ It had started; this was my first day proper on Red Dwarf .
    Half an hour later I was sitting in a make-up chair in the temporary BBC Liverpool studios, which were on the site of the Liverpool Garden Festival, which was on the site of the old docks, which were on the site of the older docks, which were on the site of a forest probably. Nothing is permanent on earth, nothing can be conserved, change is the only constant. There we go, that’s the sort of paper-thin philosophy I filled my head with as I sat watching Bethan and Gill put my make-up on.
    This first day I was sitting in the make-up chair for something like six hours. They were trying it out, testing different colours and powders, painting the mask once it was stuck on me. I’ll say it just once because it’s boring, but the masks are extremely uncomfortable to wear. It’s hard to describe, and I’ve tried to do it many times. I’ve said things like, it’s like wearing someone else’s old socks over your face all day, with a local anaesthetic, like a dentist gives you, and then sitting in a sauna. It’s also like having mud slapped on your face and then dried so it goes all tight. What it’s really like is having your whole head covered with prosthetic foam rubber; there is no way of knowing without doing it. It is hot, it is uncomfortable, it does make me a bit irritable, and in fact I’m a bit irritable now writing about it. Just leave me alone will you, don’t stand so close. Get off my case. Jesus!
    Okay, there, that’s it; I’ll really try not to go on about the mask. It may pop up occasionally, but I’ll try and keep it to a minimum.
    It’s that first day; I’ll never forget it as long as I live. The irony warning light was on red alert. Six hours in make-up, I finally stand up and stretch the stretch of the un-dead. I had a hyper-stretch; my buttocks were as numb as a monk’s cassock snake, as they say in Australia.
    I went into the costume