After The Black and White Minstrel Show, Tiswas felt like being in the Beatles. It was like the road to recovery...
Sir Lenny Henry talks to MATT NIXSON about racism, the shock of discovering he had two dads and surviving the tough world of showbiz
LISTENING to Sir Lenny Henry talk about his remarkable early life, it’s impossible not to wonder aloud how it didn’t all go horribly wrong.
Thrust into the limelight at an early age, he managed to navigate fame while avoiding its age-old pitfalls of drugs, alcohol and womanising.
Desperate to “h’integrate” into white society, as his mother would put it, it was clearly a lonely experience.
Lenny did stand-up comedy in working men’s clubs at 15 (getting the self-deprecating, racist jokes in before the audience could), won ITV talent show New Faces at 16 and moved alone to London aged 17 to star in sitcom The Fosters.
Then there were six miserable seasons touring with The Black and White Minstrel Show.
Finally with Tiswas,
Chris Tarrant’s anarchic Saturday morning kids’ TV show, came redemption.
And all before the age of
22 – enough to sink a lesser character but clearly the making of this one.
Indeed, Sir Lenny not only survived to write his riveting new memoir, Who
Am I, Again?, but became a national institution, a Shakespearean actor and Comic Relief co-founder as well as one of British TV’s most familiar faces.
Now aged 61, he laughs when asked how he avoided squandering his nascent talent on loose-living, booze and women.
“The reason I wasn’t a master criminal or going out doing loads of drugs was because I had a big picture of my mum in my head with a frying pan,” he admits.
“That stopped me doing anything naughty or transgressive.”
His mother Winifred, the family matriarch, was indomitable, deploying Victorianstyle discipline to raising her large family (Lenny was one of seven siblings) in the “semi-hostile” West Midlands.
As a child, he was beaten with “belts, branches, boots, sometimes the occasional pan lid”.
He explains: “From the time I started to go to my white friends’ houses, I knew that a Jamaican household was very different. I lived in a house where ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ was the rule. You got hit if you did something wrong and that was that.” Punishment made him fearful of confrontation and he quickly realised comedy was a way to be noticed, fit in and make friends. His father, Winston, a stoic factory worker who had arrived from Jamaica the year after his son’s birth, was a distant presence. He rewarded Lenny’s first television success on New Faces with a pat on the shoulder, telling his son: “Mek sure yu keep yu feet on the ground”. Years later, as he lay on his deathbed, Winston would finally open up. As Lenny writes: “I wanted to scream, ‘Why didn’t you do this before? Why couldn’t we speak like this when I was growing up?’”
In a deeply poignant section of his memoir, Lenny reveals how aged 10 his mother sent him to do pocket money chores for a handsome family friend, Albert Green, known as Bertie. After 18 months, he discovered to his utter shock that Bertie was his biological father. It was a moment he describes as akin to “being flipped by a cosmic spatula”. The revelation led to guilt and shame, but Winston remained Lenny’s dad.
“He was reliable, he was there and he was the dad that raised me. So I respect him for that,” says Lenny.
Playing the clubs, Lenny was forced to throw out racist gags as a form of self-defence. He recalls: “They were all things like, ‘if you don’t laugh I’ll come and move in next door – that’ll bring your rent down.’”
After winning the New Faces talent show in January 1975, he didn’t stop working for 10 years.
“When I discovered that there was a world outside and I was able to ‘h’integrate’ as my mum said, I realised it was mine to grab and I did with both hands,” he recalls.
“Showbusiness was an escape, London was an escape and I ran towards it. It was the making of me.”
Success meant buying a house for his mother and helping his siblings financially.
He recalls: “I was a working-class kid suddenly thrust into a world where people raise their pinkie finger when they drink tea, call each other darling, and go ‘mwah, mwah’.
“You go from making your mates laugh and getting up in discos and then suddenly you’re catapulted into this world of grown-ups.
“First of all, you’ve got to dress like them. So a couple of years in, I’m wearing the clothes of a 40-year-old bloke. I looked like a depressed 45-year-old comic from the age of about 17 onwards. Some of the bow ties you could literally land a small aircraft on.”
The heaviest toll came from Lenny’s six years touring with The Black and White Minstrel Show.
“I learned a lot about how to deal with an audience. Particularly walking out and being the only black person in the building,” he says.
He continues: “In many respects the experience of being in the Minstrel show and surviving it are part of why you end up with a thick skin. I had to deal with my feelings about it and then move on.”
Tiswas, when it came, provided unbridled energy and joy.
“Suddenly it was like being in the Beatles, a huge fanbase and freedom. It was like the road to recovery,” he recalls.
“For me, 1980 was alternative comedy, Tiswas, then Three of a Kind and then The Lenny Henry
Show. It was like wipe the slate clean and start again.”
Girlfriends are absent from the book, which ends in 1980 so doesn’t recount his subsequent relationship with Dawn French, the adoption of their daughter, Billie, or their 2010 divorce.
Lenny, who will be on tour later this month, describes the writing of his memoir as therapeutic, cathartic even. But given the strict discipline, racism and loneliness he faced growing up, I wonder whether he ever sought therapy?
“In the end I had friends so I didn’t need to go to therapy. They would take me out. While all this was going on I was being a teenager, thank God,” he says.
“I was very lucky to have the time to learn from my mistakes and be able to move on to make other mistakes. In the end, having a career is about learning from your mistakes.
“Someone said ‘fail, fail again, fail better’. That’s what I did. I tried very hard to learn from all the mistakes and there were lots.
“Thank goodness there was no Twitter back in the day. I would’ve been shut down because of using self-deprecating, anti-black jokes or being in The Black and White Minstrel Show.”
■ WHO am I, again? by Lenny Henry (Faber & Faber, £20) is out now. An Evening With Lenny Henry tours the UK between October 20 and November
29. For tickets, visit lennyhenry ontour.net