Free The Man In the Rubber Mask by Robert Llewellyn Page A

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