Usually, says Lenny Henry, the talk pootles along for a while before it hits the tricky stuff. It covers the TV show that bears his name, revisits the old triumphs like Alive and Kicking and Tiswas and takes in the charity work for Comic Relief. Then, just before it’s time to go – Wham! – it enters the Shitstorm. This is his word, and he brings it up barely ten minutes into our serious and surprising conversation. It refers to some traumatic experiences he had around the turn of the millennium, and is the budget version of annus horribilis.

In fact, he raises the Shitstorm so early that it doesn’t have time to turn into an elephant and sit in the corner of the room. This is lucky, because he’s a big man and it’s a small room, as theatre dressing rooms tend to be, even in posh towns like Winchester. It was a storm of many strands, some of them the standard stuff of stars’ mid-life turbulence. There was the young female fan in his bedroom one night at a hotel in York. There was the furious, famous wife, Dawn French. There were the tabloids on him like wolves. There was the mandatory stay at the Priory hospital. This was not for substance abuse but reportedly for the less fashionable option of depression. There was the long, cruel death of his heroic mother, an early immigrant from Jamaica who raised seven children in the West Midlands. Not many laughs here. At least, not until he reveals that he was only in the Priory for a week, and suggests that the real problem was that he was there when he wanted to be at home.

Perhaps depression was just an expensive name for sadness. He doesn’t disagree with this, and reels off a list of reasons he had to be distressed. There were three other deaths around the same time – his aunt, his brother-in-law and sister-in law. “It affected absolutely everything in my life,” he says. “It made me think about long-term goals rather than short-term ones. I thought, ‘If all you are doing is trying to get laughs, then really, is it worth it?’”

A middle-aged man taking stock, then. But also – the inevitable cliché – a comedian in pain. He’s very familiar with the notion and quickly says, “Sad clown, sad clown,” referring to the Smokey Robinson song Tears of a Clown. From here he moves straight into a recollection of the late Tommy Cooper: “I saw him once at the Albany Empire. He said, ‘Excuse-me [imitating Cooper’s chaotic slur],’ and they all laughed. Then he said, ‘I’m just going to leave the stage,’ and they all laughed. He leant on the table and they laughed again. He came back out, they laughed. He said, ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ and they just roared. Afterwards, I went to see him backstage and he’d had some kind of stroke. Sitting there with his shirt off and the doctor holding his heart, holding his head.”

Henry doesn’t look remotely ill, although he declares he is tired at the end of another long national tour of solo shows. He’ll be 50 this year and seems to have been around forever. He was just 15 when he started appearing on the TV talent show New Faces, which means that he predates by several years his more didactic contemporaries, such as Ben Elton and Alexei Sayle. When I suggest, cautiously, that this longevity might have something to do with the niceness that he peddles, he clutches his head and lets out a scream so massive that I’m expecting a concerned face to come round the door. But he has never really scared the horses, even in his days with the emerging alternative circuit in the early Eighties; never been drawn to the obscenity of a Chubby Brown or the alienation of a Jerry Sadowitz; never played the race card in an edgy way. He says, “Hello Winchester, where all the black people come from,” peering out over a landscape as white as Hampshire chalk. They’re a sitting target and they love it like that. It makes them complicit in the well-tempered business of laughing at difference, incongruity, minority.

Something of this kind has been going on ever since Henry, still little more than a boy, started impersonating white characters such as Frank Spencer, the gormless Michael Crawford creation in Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em. He has always been a hit with the kids, a sometimes unobtrusive supporter of charities, and seems the embodiment of decent, industrious, mobile Britain. He came through massively in the Thatcher years (Tiswas, Three of a Kind) and consolidated in the Blair ones (Chef, Lenny’s Britain, Harry Potter). He married a successful, if weird, fellow pro, adopted a little girl with her, weathered that Shitstorm he was speaking of, became a CBE and then a BA (Hons) Eng. Lit from the Open University.

The qualification is hugely significant to him. He says that when he was starting out, he was aware of being made different not so much by his colour as by his state-school education and lack of a degree. He doesn’t say this with a sense of envy or inverted snobbery, but more with the approval of someone who has taken the long road to assimilation. “The first thing you notice is that everyone has a degree except you,” he says. “At the [comedy programme] meetings everyone had been to Oxbridge, or been working at the Beeb. They said, ‘You won’t be writing this yourself. You’ll be working with other writers.’ And the first thing I grew to respect was the power of writing. Writers were the people who made things happen.”

Did it feel like a mafia to him? “Not really that, no. Although they did all seem to know each other, that’s true, either because they’d been in the [Cambridge University] Footlights together, or else gone to the Edinburgh Festival.” People like Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie? “Yes, people like that. Whom I respect. I always used to think, coming from a secondary modern in Dudley, it’s good this degree thing, there must be something in it. I thought, these guys are funny, and meeting deadlines, and used to working in a collegiate atmosphere. Someone would say, ‘Give me a page, or an outline, or a treatment, we need six sketches about this that or the other,’ and they would do it. That’s the way they were used to working.”

So 30 years on, he too is a graduate. It took him six hard years, during which time he was doing Lenny Henry in Pieces, two series of The Lenny Henry Show, as well as tours of Australia and the UK. “A whole part of my brain became completely engaged with how to get the next essay in on time; Zola, Hardy, all that. Hardy I loved. I mean, anyone who can spend four pages, describing Gabriel Oak’s face in Far from the Madding Crowd. Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple I also loved. Devastating. And I found myself so absorbed by Middlemarch that I didn’t want it to end. I’d never known anything of these classics, and one of the reasons was that I hadn’t gone through the thing of watching BBC drama. I’d think, ‘Oh, no. More bonnets, more crinolines, no blacks, no Indians; just the way it is in this country, they never have anything post-Windrush as period drama.’”

I first met Henry almost 20 years ago, when he was appearing in The Secret Policeman’s Ball to help raise funds for Amnesty International. I thought then that he was a justifiably proud man who also underrated himself. It’s not quite the contradiction it sounds. He takes pleasure in his ascent and his durability, sometimes quite defiantly so, but at the same time he seems oddly unconfident about his ability to express himself. That, at least, is the impression in private, and might explain why he, like actors, puts his best articulacy into the characters he inhabits on stage – the Barry White-like Theophilus P. Wildebeeste, the Brixton pirate radio DJ Delbert Wilkins and the rest of his broad gallery. Sometimes, as a stand-up, he seems to be striving for laughter; in the extended routines, though, he gives himself space to develop deeper and more reflective techniques. The character studies evolve into free-standing playlets, none more effectively than his portrayal of marital remoteness between Lister and his wife Rachel.

On this tour, called Where You From?, I first caught up with him at his home-town gig at the old town hall building in Dudley. It was disconcerting. Early in the first half he went into a riff about The Man From The Times, all tweedy vowels and old-chap vocab. It got more laughs than it deserved. There were about ten times as many black faces there than in the Winchester audience (man on stage included), which meant about ten. After the show, I sought him out in the bar and he was surprised to see me because no one had told him I was coming. Surprised, but completely unabashed, of course, saying he just felt like doing Man From The Times.

The ten black faces were there with him, almost all of them being his relatives. There was an absolutely vast brother, with the same look of a docile heavyweight, plus sundry in-laws, nephews and nieces. These people remain crucial to him, perhaps the more so since the death of the matriarch, Winnie. She and her husband, who died many years before she did, came over in the Fifties with their young children. Lenny was the first of the seven to be born in Britain. His brother Paul recalls Winnie as “strong-willed and forceful… She instilled in us the positive feeling of being accepted”. She was in a home when she died, a glaucoma victim with both legs amputated; asthma, heart trouble and a lot more besides. “I remember telling someone about the end of her life,” says Henry, “and he started laughing. I said, ‘Why are you laughing?’ and he said because it was unbelievable that someone could go through so much.”

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