Scrapheap Challenge has inspired garden-shed engineers up and down the country, but presenter Robert Llewellyn is most proud of the inspiration the series gives to children.
'Kids love the show,' says Robert, who lives in Gloucestershire with his wife and two children. 'We get tons of letters from children with diagrams of their mad inventions. My son Louis is seven and he rushes over to his Duplo set to build things after the show has gone out.
'A lot of kids just aren’t interested in science at the moment, but the series seems to inspire them – they go out and look at their parents’ cars and washing machines and they understand the principles that make them work.'
Kicked out of school.
But despite his current enthusiasm for learning, Robert was actually kicked out of school. He puts this down to two things: 'Well, I was a ghastly, horrible kid at 16. But the teaching was pretty terrible too – I used to refuse to do maths because I couldn’t see the point and the art master let me sit in on his lessons instead.
'I wish I’d shut up and listened a bit more. I have regrets that I could have done so much more. But they decided to kick me out and I became a professional hippy.'
Rubber mask.
Robert’s apparent early lack of promise is now well in the past. Today he is a respected comedy actor, with credits including Red Dwarf (he plays rubber-faced robot Kryten) and The Joeys, which, although Perrier-nominated at the Edinburgh Festival, he describes as ‘an agitprop '70s theatre group with horrible '80s haircuts’.
'I started in comedy around the time that the Comic Strip and the Comedy Store were at their peak,' says Robert. 'We used to play in pubs and clubs all over London as well as the Edinburgh Festival. We became pretty successful – in fact, my claim to fame is that Ben Elton used to be our warm-up man.
'I used to write most of the material and I ended up getting a call from Paul Jackson, who’s now head of comedy at the BBC. He offered me the part of Kryten on Red Dwarf and we’re still going strong – we’re shooting a film next year. The show has been very good for me, but fortunately I don’t get recognised much because of the rubber mask I wear.'
Rave reviews.
Robert has also written a number of books. These include The Man in the Rubber Mask, a comic memoir of his time in Red Dwarf, chock full of back-stage stories, and Thin He Was and Filthy-Haired, about the first year he lived away from the parental home, when he was just 17, and did the washing up for the future rulers of England at Oxford.
His first novel, The Man on Platform Five, is now in paperback and is being developed into a movie, set in New York. His second, Punchbag, received rave reviews. A third, Sudden Wealth, has just come out.
A collection of junk.
Robert has now found his vocation cajoling the teams on Scrapheap Challenge. He’s full of admiration for the contestants who, using only a collection of junk, have just ten hours to construct outlandish machines.
'It’s great fun to work on and I take my hat off to the guys. They can muster up anything from a flying machine to a steam-powered car in less time than I could put up a shelf.'
Robert Llewellyn's website:
www.llew.co.uk/.
Red Dwarf:
www.reddwarf.co.uk/.
Cathy Rogers stepped from behind the camera to present Scrapheap Challenge … because she was the best woman for the job.
Before the 1999 series, Buckinghamshire-born Cathy was working as a producer for the show when the team decided they needed another presenter to work with Robert Llewellyn.
'I was involved with the auditions for the new presenter,' says Cathy, 'but somehow, we couldn’t find the right person. Then someone suggested that I did the job. I wasn’t sure but I gave it a go and it was fun. As I’d worked on the show for three years, it felt perfectly natural to chat to the Scrapheap Challenge teams on air. After all, I’d always talked to them anyway.'
Keyboards and medicine
Though Cathy had never presented before, she was no stranger to being in full view: she plays keyboard and sings backing vocals in a band called Marine Research. They've toured the US and, in 1999, played the Reading Festival.
Apart from her presenting role, Cathy has an impressive CV. At Oxford, she studied human science and then trained in medicine for three years. She also managed to complete an MA in health policy before moving into TV documentaries.
She has produced a raft of programmes including The Iceberg Cometh for Channel 4's Equinox series and Waxworks of the Rich and Famous – about Madame Tussaud's – for the BBC's Modern Times. She has also worked on the three Scrapheap Challenge series as producer and co-presenter, and has presented the American version Junkyard Wars.
A good skill
'When I started the show, I didn’t know what a sprocket was,' she admits. 'Now I’m about to start learning how to weld because it seems a good skill to have.'
Cathy says the most worrying times have nothing to do with facing a camera: 'The scariest moments are when the machines don’t work!'
Now that the filming of this year’s Scrapheap Challenge has finished, she has returned to a behind-the-camera role for a new documentary about Mars, to be broadcast in February.
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