Mechanoid Closure

Finally meeting the man who changed my life.

It was August 1987, I was travelling around the USA and Canada. It was the year I learned an important lesson. It you are a bit miserable at home and you try to resolve it by travelling halfway around the world only to discover you are still a bit miserable when you arrive. You understand that you carry that misery with you like a back pack.

I was miserable due to the breakup of a long relationship and the disastrous failure of a sitcom I had co written and recorded in 1986. I may describe the sadly underwhelming ‘Cornerhouse’ in another post, but simply put, it was all sit, and very little com.

So I ran away to New York, then Chicago, then Seattle, then Vancouver, a short stop in San Francisco, and finally down to LA. I was a tourist, plain and simple. I was trying to forget my woes but I could feel them hanging around all the time.

I was picked up at LAX by an amazing man called Mike Novotny, we drove to a massive hotel in Downtown LA where we met up with his wife Lizzie.

Mike and Lizzie were friends of friends and had very generously offered to put me up in their charming house in the hills above Echo Park, an eastern suburb of the massive, endless urban sprawl that is Los Angeles.

No sooner had I dropped my bag at their house than we set off to go to the premier of a movie they had been involved in making. Mike was a special effects wizard, I had seen some of his crazy pyrotechnic work in Amsterdam a few years earlier. He enjoyed blowing things up.

As we drove to the cinema, Lizzie explained that Mike worked in special effects on movies, and he’s built a few props for the movie we were going to see.

We parked up on a side street, crossed the road and walked toward an extraordinary looking cinema. A place I know know to be Manns Chinese Theatre on Sunset Boulevard. At the time, the whole experience was overwhelming, this was the premier of a new movie I had not heard anything about.

Manns Chinese Theatre in 1987

It was called RoboCop.

Part Man,

Part Machine,

All Cop.

It was fantastic. I loved every frame. If I remember correctly, Mike and the team he worked with built RoboCop’s right leg, the one that opens and reveals the enormous gun he wields with laser guided accuracy.

Whatever self pitying misery I had been wallowing in fled the scene, I felt elated, excited, inspired. Something about the anarchic brutality of the film, the absolutely tragic ‘solution to crime’ that pervades every aspect of the American psyche was wonderfully sent up in the movie.

Obey the law

After the two year long disaster of writing, producing and performing in a flop, I felt like trying to create something for the first time in over a year. I didn’t know what, but I suddenly had ideas swirling around my head.

Six months later, back in London, I started writing a two hander play I wanted to take to the Edinburgh festival. I didn’t want to create a robot law enforcer, I wanted to create a robot money making character. This was the late 1980’s, the era of the Young Urban Professional, better known as the Yuppie.

I wanted to create:

Part Man

Part Machine

All Yuppie

After many rewrites, read throughs, and trial runs in front of a few friends, a 55 minute comedy play called ‘Mammon - Robot Born of Woman emerged.

I took this to the Edinburgh festival in 1988, the show worked, people loved it, it was sold out for the entire four week run. A producer for a sci-fi comedy show came and saw the play and asked me to join the cast.

In 1989 I started to work on that show. It is called Red Dwarf.

Cut forward to 2026. Prague Comicon. A very large and wonderfully well organised sci-fi and fantasy event held in an enormous convention centre in the beautiful Czech city.

One of the other guests at the convention was a man I immediately recognised. Peter Weller, the man who played RoboCop. He was utterly charming, maybe a little baffled by my explanation of the connection between RoboCop and Kryten, but nonetheless, he clearly recognised a someone with deep part human part machine experience.

It really was a very special moment for me. Without seeing RoboCop that unexpected and bizarre evening in Los Angeles in 1987, I would not have written Mammon, without Mammon I would not have been asked to join Red Dwarf.

I would not be here writing this.

So finally meeting Peter represented some kind of closure for me. And if you have never seen RoboCop, it truly is a classic, a way above average 1980’s sci-fi story, brilliant plot that actually holds together and a very early exploration of the human-machine interface.

And if you’ve never seen Red Dwarf, then the character I play is more machine than human, but Kryten does have a small amount of human DNA in this central cortex and control systems. So you know, it’s a tentative connection I grant you, but I felt it.