“He’s a mixed-status character,” Rickard nods. “They all have their role in the family and like you said, in some ways Robin’s the dog but also – and this is something Jim [Howick] has always said – he’s like a joker in that you never know which way you’re going to play him. He feels completely consistent as a character if he’s the stupidest person in the room or the smartest.
“If it’s something Robin’s picked up, or he’s interested in, he’s had 10,000 years to think about it, but equally, he’s massively out of touch because he can’t quite remember what a car’s called, so you get to play him high status or low status depending on the story. You don’t get to do that a lot with characters, they start to feel inconsistent, and he’s a rare example of one where you’ve got that laxity within it. It’s the most fun to play.”
Robin’s millennia-based insights were baked into him from the gang’s very first character breakdown, back when Ghosts didn’t yet have a production company and went by its original title “Dead”. “The speech centre of his brain is tiny, but what he’s had is a lot of time to see a lot of stuff, so, he sounds dim but he’s actually smart.”
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Some of Robin’s speech problems are more real than you might think. Wearing the character’s teeth and nose-plug prosthetics, Rickard struggles to make certain word shapes intelligible. Lines are either tweaked, or the mispronunciation is written into the script as a gag. “They can become one of his weird little idioms, like ‘getting your knickers in a Twix’. That was an on-the-day thing because I kept stumbling over the word with my teeth in the original and then we thought, actually, he should get it wrong.”
Teeth and fleas notwithstanding, Robin is also now a bit of a sex symbol. Rickard laughs that he doesn’t quite know how to deal with the strangeness of that. Perhaps the character explains it himself in series five when competing with Pat for the imagined affections of a TV weather presenter: he’s a bit of rough?
“Maybe he’s the ultimate bit of rough!” Rickard laughs. “On the one hand he’s like the rawest roughest, down-town guy, but equally – and there’s a bit of a nod to it this series – if he needs to pull out the stops, he knows where you go for the best cocktails.” Robin’s unknowably vast (after)life plays a part in making him so many people’s favourite character.
