Gosh! National treasure Sir Lenny is getting edgy in his old age . . .
The Lenny Henry Birthday Show Hang Ups
Who remembers Windsor Davies — ‘Shoulders back, lovely boy’? or Frank Spencer: ‘oooh Betty, the cat done a whoopsie in my beret, mmm’?
Not the studio audience at The Lenny Henry Birthday Show (BBC1), to judge from the baffled silence that met most of the comedian’s impressions as he talked about his early days on the club circuit.
When he did Bruce Forsyth, the reaction from the crowd was as much relief as recognition.
More than the number of candles on his cake as he turns 60, the real proof of how long Sir Lenny’s been around is his repertoire.
he came up through the talent show New Faces doing Muhammad Ali and Tommy Cooper. Even now, he’s more at ease with yesterday’s stars — like the Stevie Wonder skit that opened the show.
But the energy he showed, as he talked us through the changes that have kept his career alive, was quite an inspiration. This retrospective, with Trevor McDonald guiding him through an avalanche of anecdotes, has conferred official national treasure status: Len’s made for life now, and he must know it.
he shows no sign of slowing down, though. he performed the final soliloquy from othello with all the
TUBBY TOT OF THE NIGHT: Beni the obese baby ape weighed 65lb and faced a strict diet on Orangutan Jungle School (C4). Banned from guzzling all the milk and fruit, he looked so forlorn. Beni, it’s not your fault — you’ve just got big bones.
fervour of a teenager at a make-orbreak audition. he was cast in that role at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2009 — and if the RSC can’t see that Lenny Does Lear is a guaranteed seat-filler and critical triumph, they don’t know their own business.
There’s an edge to his comedy, too, one I don’t remember from the days of Tiswas and Three of A Kind. Recollecting how his entire family turned up at Windsor Castle to see him knighted in 2015, he joked: ‘The last time royals saw so many black faces, it was a slave auction.’
Yee- ouch! Sir Trevor actually flinched at that one.
Not that this was an unbroken hour of success. The finale, a YouTube-style video accusing TV producers of ignoring young black viewers, was a waste of primetime: teenagers don’t need a 60-year-old to champion their entertainment.
A superhero skit about the Black Panther cinema blockbuster was painfully unfunny, and there’s no knowing why Lenny suddenly started rambling on about Kate Bush.
But we can forgive these transgressions: after all, he’s a national treasure now.
What’s harder to forgive is the excruciating sitcom Hang Ups (C4), which is almost unwatchable despite its stupendous cast.
If the combined star-power of David Tennant, Charles Dance, Jessica hynes, Stephen Mangan, Richard E. Grant, Katherine Parkinson and Celia Imrie can’t save a show, it must be a monumental stinker — and this is.
hang Ups is a series of breakneck cameos, shot on phones and laptops, which flicker on and off at sickening speed. It’s not just unfunny, it’s exhausting to watch.
Mangan plays an incompetent therapist, deep in debt to loan sharks, who thinks he can earn some quick cash by handing out trite platitudes to clients over an online video link.
It’s a tribute to Mangan’s clout as an actor that so many of his friends have signed up to this show, which he created and wrote. Disastrously, though, once you get past the pell-mell editing, the concept is insufferably smug.
All the therapy clients are treated as pathetic and contemptible. Monica Dolan is a woman obsessed with Princess Di, Sarah hadland plays a PR guru so uptight she can’t discuss sex: there’s no charity shown to any of them. If a show loathes its own characters, how can viewers like the show?