The siblings have all done well. Seymour was in the RAF, in electronics; Kay
works in corporate mortgaging; Bev worked in social services; Hylton became
a counsellor on a big estate; Paul is a chef and Sharon a theatrical agent.
When you see their brother Lenworth – to give him his given name – on stage,
you realise how vital to him have been the characteristics of doggedness and
aspiration. The doggedness is there before you, even as he is performing,
and it brings us to the difficult question of his funniness.
There are some who simply don’t find him amusing, and some of these share his
trade. The most wince-making example of this came in an episode of the TV
series Extras, in which the Ricky Gervais character is challenged to
name a good black British comedian and can’t. During this exchange a Lenny
Henry poster is plainly visible on the wall behind them. What does the butt
of this think? “So many people tell me about it.” Did he not see it himself?
“What did you think of it?” I answer that I thought he would probably find
it offensive; that he might think it nasty, or racist, or a bit of both. I
add that maybe the sequence offended my liberal sensibilities. “Maybe that’s
what it was doing,” he says. Maybe. But what does he make of it? “The
Office was great,” he says. “Genius. I had lots of people
ringing up to sympathise, but I said, it’s a TV show, that’s what Ricky
does, you know.” So he’s not offended? “It’s very much as we crack jokes
about Tarby [Jimmy Tarbuck], and [Ronnie] Corbett playing golf and stuff
like that. Because of being in showbusiness for a long time and having a
measure of success, I’m bound to be someone they can throw rocks at.” He
says he has not seen Gervais since, but that he (Gervais) rang him to tell
him about it before it was transmitted. “He told me, ‘You’re big enough to
take it.’” And was he right? “Hmmm.”
But there is still a lingering sense that he lacks the danger of transatlantic
peers such as Chris Rock or Bernie Mac; that he goes the way of the British
heavyweight and is the Bruno to their Tyson. But there he still is, still
standing. It’s hardly his fault if there aren’t many black British comedians
about. “I still don’t see many blacks on TV,” he says. “You get little
upsurges, like The Kumars, or Goodness Gracious Me, or 3
Non-Blondes. And there was The Real McCoy, but when that was
taken off [in 1996], nothing replaced it.”
From his own description that doggedness has been there since childhood. The
family lived near Paradise Park, and it was in there that he first ran into
the grammar-school boys while he was a pupil at Bluecoat Secondary Modern.
“It was they who encouraged me to be funny,” he says. “They were all witty.
They were all white guys and they said to me, ‘You’re really funny, you
should be doing this.’ They encouraged me not to go for the easy joke, and
challenged me to do things I’d never dreamed of doing.” And it was important
to him to get their approval? “Yes. I was like a younger brother. They did
stuff that, to me at 15, was quite transgressive. It’s because of hanging
out with them that I found myself in a disco, at 15, with the DJ saying,
‘Does anyone want to come up?’ and them encouraging me to get up and give it
a go.” He gradually developed a routine which he honed down from ten minutes,
to four, to three, and performed at discos.
We come to The Black and White Minstrel Show. The mention of this makes
him go, “Oh, shit,” and cover his face with his hands. He shakes his head
from side to side. Because his mouth is muffled I can’t quite make out the
words, but they sound like self-reproaching questions. He was doing spots
for the show for five years, and it was evidently an even more bizarre
experience than he realised at the time: there he was, a young black kid,
waiting in the wings while white men with blacked-up faces were singing Oh,
Dem Golden Slippers and doing fluttery Al Jolson hand-waves. The show’s
cast didn’t think it strange, and that, in retrospect, was the strangest
thing of all. “They were nice people,” says Henry, “but then at five in the
evening there’d be this werewolf change. I said, ‘Can’t you do the show
without make-up?’ and they said, ‘It’s tradition.’ It was an odd period, and
it took a long time for the penny to drop.”
He met Dawn French in 1982. They fell for each other, although she had her
criticisms of him as a comic. She still gives him notes after she has seen
him in a show. Like him, she was the ambitious daughter of working-class
parents and for years the marriage looked like one of the most solid in the
business. Hence the hysteria when in 1999 his behaviour bore the symptoms of
a fling. It involved a 26-year-old Australian fan called Merri Cheyne, who
reportedly spent the night with him at a hotel in York while he was on tour.
Henry claimed he never cheated on his wife, and that he and the young woman
did nothing more than chat. She was reported as saying that he behaved like
a “very married” man, never tried to sell a kiss-and-tell story, and the
thing blew over as quickly. He was pictured heading home contritely for a
reconciliation with the wife, and she was pictured rebuffing paparazzi with
a face like thunder at their Berkshire home. Timeless stuff.
Then, a few months ago, up crops a story about how she wants to go away and
die. What does her husband make of this? “Is that what she said? I think
that one’s been slightly misrepresented.” One headline in August said: “Dawn
French Moves to Cornwall to Die”, which was technically true in that she
said that Cornwall was where she would like to spend her last days. She also
said she never thought she would live to be very old (she turned 50 in
October). Perhaps it’s pushing it to construct a suicide note from these
details. “I think it might have been jiggled with,” says Henry with the
mildness of someone who’s had worse rumours to endure. “Dawn is from
Plymouth. Her mother lives there. She loves the sea. She wants to live by
the sea, which is why we have a house in Cornwall. I think she meant she
wanted to live the rest of her life down by the sea.”
Their daughter, Billie, is now 16. Asked if she takes after her parents, he
replies, “I wouldn't say that. She’s quite shy.” Did they ever think about
having more children? “We did, and when Billie was four we went, ‘This is
really hard; let’s not have any more. This is the little triangle we have.’
We’ve had to cope with the front seat/back seat thing of one working and the
other one not. It can be difficult.” And stressful? “Yes, but we love our
daughter so much. We are not a normal family, but it was worth it. It still
is.”
He has, as ever, a new TV show to promote. It’s called Lenny Henry.TV,
and it’s a mish-mash – a funny one – of fairly classy gaffes which viewers
have sent in from YouTube and other online sources. It’s a better, less
self-conscious version of Auntie’s Bloomers. Henry's pitch runs
like this: “Old lady hitting car and airbag coming out. Monkey on branch in
zoo, sticks finger up bum, smells finger, falls off branch. Tiny child
break-dancing. Group of people in prison re-enacting a Michael Jackson
video. Very Noughties.”
If you find it hard to tell quite what his constituency is, he has the same
difficulty, holding up his palms in uncertainty; mostly fans of The Lenny
Henry Show, he reckons, and Live and Unleashed and TV shows too numerous to
mention. “I look at them and I don’t know,” he says. On the evidence of
Dudley and Worcester, there’s a serious core of Tiswas survivors. Whoever
they are, “They expect a lot of me,” he says, “and it’s my job not to let
them down.” There’s an irony in his situation. He’s a serious, big-hearted,
sorted man, who would probably appease his critics by seeming less in
control of himself and his act; more publicly prey to trouble. But then he
says the performers he admires are the ones who are never fazed when
something goes wrong. He mentions Robin Williams, Jo Brand, the Mighty
Boosh, “Oh, and Dawn and Jennifer [Saunders]. The wife’s wonderful onstage.
She’s wonderful offstage, too.”
Would he work with her? “I love the wife, but she’s got a partner.
She works with Jennifer Saunders.” Don’t be surprised, however,
if he does stray into an unexpected partnership; he and Barry Rutter,
director of the theatre company Northern Broadsides, have been talking about Othello.
Lenny Henry as the Moor of Venice? You must be joking. Well, he’s not. He’s
serious.
Lenny Henry.TV starts on BBC One on Monday at 10.35pm
