A couple of years ago, Lenny Henry discovered that Bob Monkhouse had kept a VHS tape of Henry’s TV debut on the entertainment show New Faces. He was just 16. He had begun his routine, wearing a floppy bowtie and a beret, impersonating Michael Crawford’s Frank Spencer. “The impact of starting with my back to the cameras became clear as I turned to face everyone . . . and the audience discovered I wasn’t just another impressionist. I was black. And they hadn’t known.”
He won, and has gone on to become a British national treasure, co-founder of Comic Relief and a sir. In this memoir of his early years, Who Am I, Again? Henry writes that he sat in tears after that video, “watching that kid, and wondering where did that come from? Now everyone knew who I was. But did I?”
As it turns out, he didn’t. While family life was chaotic but warm, there were secrets under the surface. Mama – the Alpha in the family – ruled the roost, dispensing giant Caribbean dinners and occasional belts of the frying pan. She was the first to arrive from Jamaica, in the post-Windrush era.
In the years that followed, she sent for Lenny’s father and siblings, but in the meantime Lenny was conceived and born in Dudley in the Black Country. He only discovered who his birth father was in his teens: the memoir tells that part of the story in cartoon form, perhaps a way of detaching that experience from the rest of his life.
Humour as armour
Henry was obsessed with 1970s television, and often did impressions at home to take the edge off Mama’s rough discipline. Humour was his armour on the street and in school, and he learned to deploy it to combat the constant racism he experienced.
Within the family, Mama launched what Henry called the “H’Integration project”. The message was, don’t rise to abuse – ignore it. Back then mimicry was a pathway: “It was integration writ large. You’re sending out the message, I talk like you, watch the same TV. Please like me.” He began doing the local circuit of discos and workingmen’s clubs, trying to get folk onside by getting the jokes about race in before they did. “Enoch Powell wants to give me £1,000 to go back to where I came from. Which is great, because it’s only 20p for me to get the bus from here to Dudley.”
Everything changed when a DJ put him forward for that audition for the ITV show New Faces, the Britain’s Got Talent of its day. Not long afterwards he found himself signed up to the Black and White Minstrels club tour, an offshoot of that deeply racist staple of 1970s telly. At a press photocall he was positioned between two blackface dancers wearing shoe polish. He was the only black person among fakes. But after the death of his father, he was also the main breadwinner.
While sometimes lonely and depressed, Henry made friends and discovered mentors on the road, learning his trade, of endurance, timing, memory, structure and improvisation. In his Notes to a Young Comic at the end of the book, he reminds them that it’s a grind that goes on and on til the break of dawn. It’s all about the work. But he had fun along the way too, dancing, drinking and hanging out with the colourful casts of panto, vaudeville and TV schedule fillers.
Minstrels vs Tiswas
A part in The Fosters, the first all-black sitcom on British TV, took his mind off the Minstrels, and eventually he escaped them for good. Henry explodes into life when he describes working on Tiswas, the anarchic Saturday morning show anchored by Chris Tarrant, where he was a parody newsreader, Trevor McDoughnut (McDonald returned the compliment by coming on set to interrupt one of his sketches). He had found his tribe. He was ready to leave behind the conservative comedy of his predecessors, with their mother-in-law jokes and putdowns of minorities like his own.
The book only covers his early years, but in his reflections on racism he recalls that after his marriage to fellow comedian Dawn French, the National Front smeared their front door with excrement. Maybe he should have stood up more to racism, he says now. Maybe it’s time to stand up and be counted. Instead his strategy was to blend in, fit in, and as Mama would say, h’integrate.
He did the hard yards in the clubs and the summer specials, and found his way to the top. And it’s probably not a stretch to think that Stormzy headlining Glastonbury in 2019 would probably never have happened, if the likes of Henry hadn’t cleared a path through British TV and entertainment in the 1970s and 1980s.
Raw, direct, and straight from the heart, Who Am I Again? also has a reflective quality, as Henry ponders racism, assimilation and how we find a way to belong. He doesn’t answer the question in the title, and suggests that there may be a sequel to come. The next instalment is unlikely to have the same childhood vulnerability that draws in the reader, but the performer in him still wants to leave the audience wanting more.
