The Man In The Rubber Mask

It was 1989 when Robert Llewellyn first had his head encased in the one-piece latex foam rubber balaclava that is the head of Kryten in Red Dwarf series three, and it gave him a distinctly funny turn.

Gazing at his own reflection and seeing the face of a mechanoid robot staring back was surprisingly scary, not to mention uncomfortable and rather sweaty. And he couldn’t even eat his lunch. Since then, he has sweated, frozen, been set on fire, exploded, spent thousands of hours in the make-up chair and being taunted by Craig Charles for being a middle-class b*****d. So it is a testament to the joyful camaraderie and life-enchancing silliness of the world of Red Dwarf that twenty-three years later, Robert is still willing to risk life, limb and hairline to don the rubber torture helmet for Red Dwarf X, the recent triumphant return of the motley band of space bums. Originally published in 1993 after series six, The Man in the Rubber Mask has now been completely updated with 43.7% extra smeg.

Terry Nation
The Man Who Invented The Daleks

The Daleks are one of the most iconic and fearsome creations in television history.

Since their first appearance in 1963, they have simultaneously fascinated and terrified generations of children, their instant success ensuring, and sometimes eclipsing, that of Doctor Who.
They sprang from the imagination of Terry Nation, a failed stand-up comic who became one of the most prolific writers for television that Britain has ever produced. Survivors, his vision of a post-apocalyptic England, so haunted audiences in the Seventies that the BBC revived it over thirty years on, and Blake’s 7, constantly rumoured for return, endures as a cult sci-fi classic. But it is for his genocidal pepperpots that Nation is most often remembered, and on the 50th anniversary of their creation they continue to top the Saturday-night ratings.

Yet while the Daleks brought him notoriety and riches, Nation played a much wider role in British broadcasting’s golden age. He wrote for Spike Milligan, Frankie Howerd and an increasingly troubled Tony Hancock, and as one of the key figures behind the adventure series of the Sixties – including The Avengers, The Saint and The Persuaders! – he turned the pulp classics of his boyhood into a major British export.

In The Man Who Invented the Daleks, acclaimed cultural historian Alwyn W. Turner, explores the curious and contested origins of Doctor Who’s greatest villains, and sheds light on a strange world of ambitious young writers, producers and performers without whom British culture today would look very different.