A 60th birthday bash I was delighted to be invited to
In the interests of full disclosure, I must confess I wasn’t much looking forward to The Lenny Henry Birthday Show (BBC One). Admirable as Sir Lenworth George Henry is – a tireless charity campaigner, increasingly accomplished straight actor and all-round good egg – I’m afraid haven’t found him funny for decades.
The last time he made me laugh was in Three of a Kind and Tiswas, in the early Eighties. His signature characters, soul stud Theophilus P Wildebeeste and Brixton pirate radio DJ Delbert Wilkins, have dated badly. His impressions – Frank Spencer, David Bellamy, Tommy Cooper – are so retro, they almost belong on Antiques Roadshow.
With Henry turning 60 next week, I told myself not to be a party pooper and ended up pleasantly surprised. Hosted by Sir Trevor Mcdonald (“Look at us, a couple of knights of the realm,” grinned Henry) in front of a studio audience, this celebration took a light-hearted look at his eclectic career, interspersed with new sketches.
Wisely, the show steered clear of reviving hoary old creations and instead concentrated on surprisingly edgy topical material. Henry delivered solid spoofs of superhero film Black Panther and Bishop Michael Curry’s “long-assed sermon” at the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
Best of all were the chat show interludes with the man he once mimicked as “Trevor Mcdoughnut”. Henry proved a skilled raconteur as he told tales of his Jamaican immigrant parents (“Everywhere they went, signs said ‘No blacks, no Irish, no dogs’.
So if you were a black Irish wolfhound, you were b------d”) and Midlands childhood (“You got to hintegrate with the Dudley people dem,” said his mother).
We heard how teenage Henry bunked off school to audition for talent show New Faces, became a pioneering presence on the club circuit, co-founded Comic Relief and was knighted at Windsor Castle, where a footman whispered: “Are you staying in a Premier Inn?”
Mcdonald dissolved into giggles regularly. Henry even gave us a taste of his critically lauded role as Othello. Despite my doubts, I found myself thoroughly cheered and charmed. As Henry himself sang in the style of Stevie Wonder: “Happy birthday, Lenny, happy birthday to ya.”
How to Lose Seven Billion Pounds (Channel 4) might have been titled like an extreme dieting show but was actually a hard-hitting Dispatches documentary. One that would have made awkward viewing for former bosses at construction giant Carillion. Hopefully they were shifting uncomfortably on their superannuated backsides.
This film forensically detailed the catastrophic collapse of Britain’s second-largest building company in January – a spectacular implosion that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn called “a watershed moment” for public services but which will likely turn out to be nothing of the sort.
City analysts and company insiders queued up to explain how Carillion created a fortress of phoney profits, hiding mounting debts with aggressive accounting. We heard how Carillion, pumped up on taxpayers’ money and handed lucrative government contracts even after warnings were sounded, ran a “legal form of Ponzi scheme” and got away with it.
Chief Financial Officer Emma Mercer, who emerged as something of a cult heroine, found vast holes in the accounts, broke rank and blew the whistle. For her trouble, she lost her job – while infuriatingly, directors walked away from the wreckage even richer, leaving hospitals half-built, jobs lost and debts unpaid.
Despite his hammy inflections, presenter Liam Halligan told the sorry tale with righteous anger. The subject matter wasn’t terribly televisual but director Nick Tanner did his best, deploying time-lapse photography and a neat visual gimmick of showing interviewees in unguarded moments – fiddling with phones, sipping water, shuffling papers – to give a glimpse behind the investigative scenes.
This wasn’t just a story of corporate mismanagement. It was about systematic failure of our business and political establishments, from the toothless pensions regulator to ineffectual auditors KPMG. Can we ever truly trust private companies with public money? Especially if the bodies meant to protect us neither spot nor stop problems? This was sobering, slightly scary viewing.
The Lenny Henry Birthday Show ★★★★ How to Lose Seven Billion Pounds ★★★