Lenny Henry’s cry of existential anguish

LENNY Henry owes me an apology,’’ said a black friend recently. “For all those years when he told unfunny jokes against black people on TV, Lenny owes me.”

But, focusing on the first decade of his career, Henry argues in his memoir, “Who Am I, Again?” (2019) that for a black performer to survive in the world of 1970s light entertainment, it was best “to get all the dodgy jokes in before (the audience) did”.

My Jamaican family always considered him a candidate for compassion, for it seemed obvious that his youth and talent were being exploited.

For decades, the buffoonery of black TV personalities — from Ainsley Harriott to Frank Bruno — was encouraged and expected by white producers. Pandering to British bigotry appeared a prerequisite for employment.

Henry’s breakthrough came as a teenager on the television talent contest “New Faces”. With his back to the audience, in that first dramatic appearance, he gave a passable impersonation of Frank Spencer (a much-mimicked TV character), but audiences were both aghast and thrilled when Henry turned round to reveal that he was black.

A year later, aged 17, Henry was assured by Robert Luff, the entrepreneur and impresario, that his next step, appearing on “The Black and White Minstrel Show”, would prove his making. Henry doesn’t shy away from this problematic stage of his career.

For f i ve years, he toured with the long- legged dance troupe the Television Toppers and their blacked-up partners, performing Al Jolson melodies; they were also a recurring delight for millions of Saturday evening viewers on British TV.

Looking back now, Henry detects a degree of cynicism on Luff ’s part, for when the minstrel act was criticised, “His staff could point at me and say: ‘How can we be racist? Look — we’ve got Lenny Henry in the show.’”

The experience left Henry with a “palette of conflicting emotions”. Born in Dudley to Jamaican parents, with a mother who was especially determined to assimilate, Henry now discerns in her the roots of his inversion of Malcolm X’s maxim: “Perhaps one of the products of (mum’s) H’Integration Project was that I was . . . told to fit in by any means necessary.”

He paints a sad picture of a confused man-boy. Through much of his early career, he was an invisible man, a mimic with a chameleon-like personality, and unknowing to himself. Appearing at tough working men’s clubs, he confesses now to being schooled in a comedy vocabulary targeting “thick Irishmen”, “lascivious blacks” and “randy housewives” that was soon outmoded and no longer fit for purpose.

As the title suggests, the memoir is a cry of existential angst. “Beginning to think,” wrote Albert Camus, “is beginning to be undermined.”

Henry took safety in not thinking, and he wrestles in the book with the lessons he might have learned, or hopes to impart. Nonetheless, in charting the popularity of the often cruel, clichéd comedy of the period, Henry has written a painfully honest account of his ascendancy in British culture. ◆ Read the full review on www.herald. co.zw