Robert Llewellyn

After a long and painful Christmas shopping expedition, Robert Llewellyn had a revelation. He had enough stuff; he’d had enough of rampant consumerism; he would simply stop shopping for a whole year. “Sold Out” follows the highs and lows of a former hippie drop-out who morphed into a wealthy Western male as he attempts to disengage once more from a consumer-driven society. Challenging, thought-provoking and funny, this book proves that it doesn’t have to be embarrassing to darn socks in the 21st century.

Nina Nash is thirty-three when she decides the time has finally come to sort out her annoying little brother. Little brother Jason is thirty now and a failed dot.commer; Nina, who works for a high tech research company, is going to work out at last what makes Jason tick. She’s going to stick a microchip under his skin and, literally, read his emotions on her computer screen. The experiment is more successful than Nina ever could have hoped. And the results of the experiment more astonishing…

Robert Llewellyn is now a successful actor and alternative comedian – he plays Kryten in “Red Dwarf”. This is an account of one year in his adolescence in the early 1970s when he was 16-17. He left a solid middle-class home in Witney to live an alternative life in squats in the middle of Oxford – a life of drugs, pre-aids sex and naive political fantasies. The book includes such escapades as gate-crashing the Magdalene Ball, building a Buckminster Fuller Dome in an Oxford back garden, and washing up in the kitchens of Brasenose, but it is also a portrayal of a young man finding himself.

In a recent pole the robotic Kryten was noted by viewers as their favourite of the four main characters in “Red Dwarf”. In this book actor and alternative comedian Robert Llewellyn, who plays the part in the series, tells the inside story of life as Kryten.