Robert Llewellyn

Robert Llewellyn (born 10 March 1956) is a British actor, comedian, presenter and writer. He plays the mechanoid Kryten in the sci-fi television sitcom ''Red Dwarf'' and formerly presented the engineering gameshow ''Scrapheap Challenge''. He has also founded and hosts a YouTube series, ''Fully Charged''.

Early life

Llewellyn was born in Northampton, England.

Early career

Llewellyn's first foray into the world of show business started out as a hobby, organising a few amateur cabaret evenings in a riverside warehouse overlooking Tower Bridge in London. The shows were a great success and he eventually helped form an alternative comedy theatre group called The Joeys. Within six months, he had stopped working as a shoemaker and started performing professionally with the group alongside Bernie Evans, Nigel Ordish and Graham Allum. The group toured Britain and France in the early 1980s, with an initial idea of exploring sexual politics between men. Llewellyn wrote much of the material, and also began writing novels. The Joeys split in 1985, having toured for years and done thousands of performances. He co-wrote and starred in ''The Corner House'', a 1987 sitcom for Channel 4 about a café run by gay men.

''Red Dwarf''

Llewellyn's involvement with ''Red Dwarf'' came about as a result of his appearance at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, performing in his one-man comedy, ''Mammon, Robot Born of Woman'', about a robot who - as he becomes more human - begins to behave increasingly badly. This was seen by Paul Jackson, producer of ''Red Dwarf'', and Llewellyn was invited to audition for the role of Kryten.

Llewellyn joined the cast of ''Red Dwarf'' in 1989 at the start of the third series. Llewellyn's skills as a physical performer encouraged Rob Grant and Doug Naylor to write him additional characters for the series, namely Jim Reaper ("The Last Day"), Human Kryten ("DNA"), Bongo ("Dimension Jump") and Able ("Beyond A Joke") and the Data Doctor ("Back in the Red"). With Doug Naylor, Llewellyn also co-wrote the episode " Beyond A Joke" which screened in 1997.

In the early days of ''Red Dwarf'', Llewellyn would arrive to do make-up many hours before the rest of the actors; however, that changed as time progressed, as his fellow actors 'have a little bit more help in the makeup department than they used to'. In an interview with ''The Skeptic Zone'', Llewellyn mentioned that he needs a special pair of glasses to be able to read the script with the Kryten mask on. In ''Red Dwarf'', he worked hard to get the more technically difficult lines right because the series tried to be factually accurate in reference to scientific theories.

Llewellyn was also the only British cast member of ''Red Dwarf'' to originally participate in a proposed American version, though other actors such as Craig Charles and Chris Barrie were also approached to reprise their roles.

Other television work

Llewellyn has presented a number of programmes for UK television. His first outing as a presenter was on ''Scrapheap Challenge'', produced by Channel 4; the series saw teams of engineers competing to build machines to complete a given task from materials scavenged from a scrapheap. His other presenting roles include a version of Discovery Channel's ''How Do They Do It?'' and the BBC
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