Written by Lenny Henry, this article was published by the Times, October 14 2018.  The origin can be found here – www.thetimes.co.uk

A new string to his bow: Lenny Henry with musicians from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire

Uncle Clifton wrote to his family back home in Jamaica. He told them to come to England, there were jobs to be had. Bring me a wife, he added. The family was poor, the children weren’t eating enough, so they took the advice and arrived in England with Madge, a wife for Clifton.

Winifred and Winston Henry had four Jamaican children, and they had three more in England. The first of these three was christened Lenworth George — Lenny Henry.

“We three were the British posse,” he says. “We were very different from the Jamaican posse. We ate fish and chips, and we couldn’t take the cap off a bottle with our teeth.”

Now aged 60, Henry is, as he puts it, a “Sir Doctor”. He was knighted in 2015 for services to drama and charity, and this year he received his PhD for his thesis Does the Coach Have to Be Black? The Sports Film, Screenwriting and Diversity: A Practice-Based Enquiry.

“There were very few black coaches in those classic sports films. The black guy was always the unbeatable opponent or the magical negro best friend.”

More important, Henry is also a folk hero. “I don’t read reviews, but everybody tells you what’s in them. Bus drivers shout them at you as they go by — ‘Four stars in The Guardian, Lenny!’ Or somebody will walk past my dressing room, saying, ‘Bastard Daily Mirror.’”

They want you to do well, I say. They love you. He pauses for a moment, as if he had never thought of that. “That’s very touching.”

Henry performing on the TV talent show New Faces in 1976

The PhD was the climax of a long process of self-education, the latest phase being an induction into the language of classical music. He is to front the first episode of Our Classical Century, a four-part series going out on Radio 3 and BBC4. His period is the interwar years, and he had immersed himself in the works of Holst, Gershwin and, above all, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. “With the people we’re looking at — Holst and Coleridge-Taylor and Gershwin — there’s a whiff of the autodidact about some of them, where they teach themselves to be good. Gershwin’s brain was extraordinarily compartmentalised with all kinds of music and traditions. Rhapsody in Blue — the mixture of blues and ragtime and Arabic stuff and conventional Broadway and American Songbook, all those things in that piece is extraordinary.” Henry clearly detects a kinship.

He left school in Dudley with few qualifications and low expectations. The family had suffered appalling racism. “My mum was followed round the streets when she arrived, people asking where her tail was. My dad could have been in a fight every day, and two of my brothers talked about defending themselves daily from teddy boys. ‘Keep Britain white’ was painted on the walls. It was a hostile environment.”

Winston regretted the move to England, and his sadness seemed to make him a distant figure. But Winifred adjusted. She was religious, and Lenny went with her to the Pentecostal Church of God of Prophecy, sometimes twice on Sundays. He gave up on the church when he was 14, but he had absorbed the morality of the stories he had heard.

“I pretty much trod the straight and narrow when I was a kid, because I had images in my head that had been put there by church and my mum — she was a strict disciplinarian. To me, shoplifting or joyriding or scrumping…”

Scrumping?

“Stealing apples or pears from somebody else’s yard. I didn’t want to get caught, because then they’d go to my mum.”

Henry with his mum, whose death in 1998 hit the comedian hard

He did various jobs, including welding and being a “pot lad” at the bar in Dudley Zoo. Then, suddenly, everything changed when he won the TV talent show New Faces with an impersonation of Stevie Wonder. That more or less set him up for the show-business life, but there was, first, a horrible induction.

He was taken up by The Black and White Minstrel Show, a by then venerable exercise in staggering light-ent insensitivity and outright racism. Blacked-up white singers sang minstrelsy and show tunes, with comic interludes. Henry was on the show for five years, playing “second-spot comic”.

“People used to say Lenny was the only one who didn’t need make-up. It was half funny once, but to hear that every day for five years was a bit of a pisser.” He grew depressed about the show’s overt racism and was later to say he regretted that his family did not intervene to get him out.

Still, he learnt how to structure an act and took his impressionism to a new high — he did “the Six Million Dollar Man, Tommy Cooper, Max Bygraves, Dave Allen, Muhammad Ali, Windsor Davies, Frank Spencer, and then I finished on a song”.

The music was a lasting legacy of this freak show. As a teenager, he had been soaked in ska and reggae as well as rock’n’roll, blues and pop: “I had this extraordinary musical barrage of tastes coming at me, which I had to navigate.” He listened to a giant ghetto blaster with 45 batteries, which sat on the front seat when he got a car.

He keeps up with contemporary pop, too, producing a masterly BBC short, Wildish Bambino’s This Is the TV, lampooning the friction between inclusive words and TV product. Taking its style from the viral hit This Is America, by Childish Gambino (aka Donald Glover), it shows Henry in a blue jumpsuit, rapping his way through the oddities of output, before Trevor McDonald announces that all channels are closing down because “young people have given up watching television — unless, of course, they’re in it”.

Apart from the songs, the Minstrels had a 24-piece orchestra. “My show hung together because these guys were playing in exactly the right places on cue. There was a long way to go, but at the age of 17, to be performing with an orchestra who were holding your act together… I was fortunate. If I never said thank you to those guys, thank you.”

Depressed by the whole experience, but thoroughly equipped, he embarked on decades of stardom. He was one of the nation’s favourite comics, and married another, Dawn French. They adopted a daughter, Billie, who is doing well. He won’t say what she does. There’s a no-publicity thing about her. “I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you.”

He had reservations about this period. He waves jazz hands as he describes it as his “woo-ha, pink suit” phase (which persisted in those Premier Inn TV ads). He doesn’t reject his multiple comic personae or his success, but he is a restless soul who will constantly seek new ways of proving himself.

Henry as Wildish Bambino, in a parody of Childish Gambino’s This Is America for a BBC short period

“I’m interested in stuff, and there was the thing of proving to myself that I wasn’t an idiot. I never felt like an idiot, but I was always treated like an idiot. For a comedian, there’s always that danger. There should be a badge for comedians that says, ‘Just because I’m funny doesn’t mean I’m a fool.’ There’s quite a lot of people who underestimate comedians, and I went through a long period when I felt underestimated.”

Perhaps it was his mother’s stern, moral voice he heard, telling him to work hard, to stick to the straight and narrow. He adored her, and when she died in 1998, “it was like the universe pulling a carpet from beneath my feet — cosmic”. She had been stricken by glaucoma, asthma, heart problems and diabetes: that last one resulted in the amputation of both her legs.

“When my mum passed away, everything just stopped. It was pretty bad. I decided to focus on my marriage and bury my mum, then suddenly 2000 comes along, we went round the world. I was still focusing on my marriage and on what I really wanted to do.”

Henry inherited the diabetes, but treated it ruthlessly with diet and exercise: much broccoli was consumed. He is 6ft 2in and, at one point, weighed 22 stone; now he is down to 14 stone. He looks different, but well. So I am startled to see him consuming grapes and mints throughout our interview. I suggest this might not be a good idea. He shrugs.

His marriage ended amicably in 2010. I ask if he is still with Lisa Makin, a theatre producer. He is. Phew.

Through it all, his autodidactic impulse was undimmed. He got a BA in English literature from the Open University and an MA in screenwriting from Royal Holloway, as well as, later, that PhD. He also tried to learn the piano. He got up to grade 4, but then realised he just didn’t have the time to keep practising.

He agitated for better treatment of BAME — black, Asian and minority ethnic — people all the while. He doesn’t want diversity, he wants inclusivity. “Inclusivity is where we need to be going, because diversity can be something imposed on people. Inclusivity feels like people doing it themselves.”

And now there’s classical music, about which he is wildly enthusiastic. It’s impossible to change the subject when he gets going — not that I want to.

“To be in a room with an orchestra playing Holst’s Mars is a fantastically transformative experience, because it means something, you learn something — all those people playing the same thing at the same time, that’s powerful. So I might not be able to read the music as well as I’d like, I might not be able to play the piano as much as I’d like, but I know what I like, and when I sit with those people, I am transformed.

“I want to get to that, I want to figure out what that does to me. I’d like to present more programmes like that. Why does music have that effect on us?” He says the “gen pop” — general population — should get involved. This, of course, is music to Radio 3 ears.

In working on this show, he seems to have discovered an alter ego, a soul brother, in Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a London-born black composer and conductor. His three Hiawatha cantatas were, for some time, the most popular shows at the Royal Albert Hall. In New York, he was called the African Mahler.

“It was a big ritual in London to go and see the Hiawatha show, and it ran and ran. But the big thing about a lot of these guys — he signed away his royalties. He would have been a millionaire if he had kept the rights, but he ended up dying in poverty. Black people have been getting ripped off for years.”

Even Henry — but not any more. Apart from this show, there’s one more big Lenny thing to come. Next year he will publish his autobiography. It’s called Who Am I Again?. Great title; good question.