Robert Llewellyn turned 70 this year. Most people who know him as Kryten from Red Dwarf will not know that he pitched what became the Fully Charged Show to the BBC in 2009 and was met with genuine confusion. The executives wanted to know if he meant milk floats, or perhaps disability vehicles. He had not meant either. He had meant that something interesting was beginning to happen in electric vehicles and someone should cover it. The BBC passed. He started a YouTube channel, filmed it himself, and built what is now one of the most widely watched EV media channels in the world. The show has been running for close to 16 years.
The Fully Charged Show is a genuinely unusual thing in automotive media. It has no brand deals, no manufacturer access arrangements, and no advertising relationships, which gives it a credibility that most publisher-funded EV coverage cannot claim. Llewellyn's background explains a lot about how he approaches the subject. Before television, he was an apprentice bespoke shoemaker off Marylebone High Street, trained by craftsmen who measured quality in things you had to hold and feel. Before that he built a geodesic dome out of cardboard and RAF packing tape at his school in Oxfordshire, got expelled, and found his way into alternative theatre. Red Dwarf came later, and the show he and co-creator Rob Grant made turned out to be the most-watched programme BBC Two has ever broadcast. Llewellyn notes that this fact tends to be quietly ignored. Craig Charles, he adds, still calls him the new boy.
The interview, filmed live at an Everything Electric event, covers the Scrapheap Challenge years, the invention of the Carpool format (which predated James Corden's television version by several years), and his book Ghost Camera, a novel set in an Oxford research laboratory whose janitor protagonist gradually realises the scientists he cleans up after have done something consequential. Llewellyn's honest account of seeing BYD at the 2009 Geneva Motor Show and dismissing them entirely is one of the more charming admissions in the conversation. He looked at the cars, decided the company would never make it, and moved on. BYD sold eight million vehicles in 2025. The conversation keeps returning to a particular kind of optimism: not evangelical, not chest-beating, but the quiet confidence of someone who has watched 70 years of things being worse and then improving, and has concluded that this is probably the direction of travel.
Bottom line: The Fully Charged Show exists because the BBC did not commission it. That is worth sitting with. Llewellyn is an interesting interview regardless of the EV angle, but the EV angle makes the whole thing land differently. He got there before the mainstream by being curious rather than strategic, and the interview makes that feel like a repeatable method rather than a lucky accident.