Lenny: Why I missed out on kisses at the disco
SIR Lenny Henry has said girls would not dance with him as a young man because he was black.
Opening up about the prejudice he faced growing up in the West Midlands, the comedian and actor, 61, recalled young women openly telling him they would reject him because of his skin colour.
Sir Lenny told Louis Theroux’s Grounded podcast: ‘If you wanted to meet members of the opposite sex you’ve got to go to a place where they might be and where they might be was St Thomas’ disco next to the church.
‘You would spend nearly all evening ignoring them and then in the last five minutes, there would be this rush to the dance floor to try and slow dance with a girl.’ He said the boys would ‘try to cram the whole dancing with the girl thing’ into the last minutes of the night, hoping they would ‘get a snog’.
Sir Lenny added: ‘I would ask anyone to dance, I didn’t want to be left out and my friends would be dancing. Some girls wouldn’t dance with me because I was a black guy.’ Asked by Theroux how he knew, Sir Lenny replied: ‘They would say.’
The veteran comic also discussed initially keeping his interest in impressions a secret from his family while at home. He said impressions were ‘something I did with my white friends’ and that his parents had ‘no idea’ – adding that ‘my mum was the main funny person [in] our house’.
Sir Lenny, who is one of the founders of charity Comic Relief, said making ‘wise jokes’ as a child prompted ‘a slap round the head’. He said: ‘There was no wise-cracking from a child in our house because that was seen as being cheeky and overstepping the mark.
‘So, if you cracked wise jokes in earshot of your parents, you would get a slap round the head or something... in our house, my mum was the funny one, end of story... it was like a little secret I held in my heart for quite a long time.’
Sir Lenny was married to Dawn French for 25 years but they divorced in 2010. They have a daughter Billie, 29. After his split from Miss French, Sir Lenny began a relationship with his current girlfriend, theatre producer Lisa Makin.
Sir Lenny opened up about the bullying he received at school in his book Who Am I, Again? which he released last year. In December, he told ITV’s This Morning there was a period at school where he was ‘bullied every day’ by a boy who ‘hit me all the time’.