Sir Lenny Henry recalls bold move that changed his life as he receives award

When Sir Lenny Henry started out as a comedian, there was not a single black face making people laugh on British television. But having cracked up his school pals at an open mic night in Dudley a few times, he knew he was funny.

And so Lenny, who this week received the Outstanding Achievement Award at the Edinburgh TV Festival, decided to bunk off school in 1976 and try out at the auditions for New Faces.

“I was very excited to go to ATV Studios in Birmingham because I'd watched Crossroads with my Mum - the Midlands would stop when Crossroads was on,” he remembers now. “Jim Davidson and Showaddywaddy, they’d all won New Faces and so I bunked off school on the Friday and I was there from 10 am til 6pm. I was the last person on. I think I went into this thing of ‘this is it’. This is plan A, there is no plan B or C.

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“So I went on stage, I think I did Tommy Cooper, I did Dave Allen, I did all the white people I've been watching on television for years - the only famous person I could do that was black, was Muhammad Ali. And they’d never seen a black guy do impressions of white people before. Back then it was Mike Yarwood and Freddie Starr, so I used to watch them. And then I just basically mimicked everybody I saw on television.”

At the end of his 10 minute audition he found himself surrounded by people wanting to be his agent. “Six months later I was on TV and saying hello to my mum and she was like, gobsmacked. She was literally, ‘What are you doing on the television?’ And it was fantastic.”

Within a year he’d saved up enough to buy his Jamaican-born mother a fridge. “It was really interesting because my dad worked very, very hard in a factory. And if you were the breadwinner, you got the biggest piece of meat. And when I came home from New Faces, my mum put me at the head of the table and gave me the biggest piece of meat. My dad was like, ‘What's going on here?’”

He’d honed his early impressions, which included Michael Crawford’s character Frank Spencer, at the Queen Mary Ballroom in Dudley where he and his underage peers would drink beer and do their homework at the bar.

“I used to get up on stage and do Elvis and Tommy Cooper and all these impressions. Kids who I went to school with, they’d go, 'Wow, we didn't know you did this.’ And I became a hero at school. It was fantastic. I can't tell you, it was literally like being a superhero. It changed my life.”

Lenny, 66, says he clearly remembers doing his first gig, in Birmingham, specifically aimed at the black community. “Most of the audience were always white and I really loved that they’d come to see me. Then I did the first all black audience I've ever worked for - and it was like a dance, they all came and stood by the stage and just looked at me like that (pulls a menacing stare). “I was scared sh**less,” he laughs. “I said, ‘You're going to have to sit down. Other gigs I do, they don't come and stare at me and try and make me cry’."

He credits many people with having helped and inspired him. They include the writer Kim Fuller, who co-created characters like Delbert and Deakus and Theophilus P Wildebeeste. Having gone to check out the comedy scene in America with Kim, Lenny returned knowing what he wanted to aim for. “I loved Richard Pryor mainly. He did preachers and pimps and hustlers and gamblers and all those kind of things.” “I knew I could probably do characters from my neighbourhood and from my family.”

The inspiration for Deakus came from a man who delivered Jamaican bun to his parents. “He always made me laugh, I liked his voice. We didn't really know about the Windrush then, but we wrote a character who came here in 1953 and lived in London and was racially abused, like my mum, but overcame it. So his story was not just jokes, it was about being a British citizen and becoming old in Britain and drinking Guinness and wearing a cardigan. I just loved that.”

Delbert, it turns out, was based on a wide-boy dancer called Jamie who Lenny had once met in a club. Having seen a furious Paul Boating on TV talking about the Brixton riots, Lenny thought Delbert could help out with a different approach. “I thought it'd be really good to have a youth on television talking about it without foaming in the mouth. Delbert came out of that. Kim just thought he was hilarious - I had a journey with Jamie where he said, ‘You know what I mean?’ about 400 times.”

“What was really interesting was I couldn't do that stuff about the police and about the riots as me, but when I did it as Delbert, they gave me a free pass.”

Tarrant, the main presenter of ITV kids show Tiswas, gave Lenny a big leg-up. “New Faces was big launch, but it took me a while to get my act together,” he told interviewer Ben Bailey Smith (MUST), one of the many younger black comedians, presenters and writers who happily acknowledge they owe Lenny a huge debt of gratitude for the doors he forced open. “Tizwas was where I was allowed to grow on television. Tarrant was a real ally at the time when there wasn't anybody saying to me, ‘Oh go on.’ He allowed me to run around in a silly hat on Saturday morning TV learning how to be funny on camera, learning not to flinch.

“Tarrant was a proper teacher, he was massive.”

It took him eight years of working with the likes of Cannon and Ball and doing summer seasons in Blackpool to hone his craft before he started to get hired regularly on TV.

In the 80s, he landed the role on Three of a Kind for the BBC, alongside Tracey Ullman and David Copperfield. “Tracey said, ‘I want to represent real women. I don't just want to be the dolly bird filing her nails at the bar. I don't want to be the girl with the big boobs who's the butt of the joke. I want to be making the jokes.’ And I said, ‘I want to see people from my neighbourhood and from my family on television and I want to work with people that look like me and talk like me’. And David got up and said, ‘I just want to be funny.’ But it was all right for him. As the black guy and as the woman, we had to get up and state our claim. We didn't want to go backwards, we wanted to go forwards.”

Amid all of this, Lenny famously helped to spearhead Comic Relief, a charity through which he is now credited with having raised £1billion. He says it happened because Richard Curtis needed his contacts. **“**Everybody saw Live Aid and I think somebody like David Bowie said, ‘Comedians couldn't do this.’ And we went, ‘What?’ Richard came to me and said, ‘I don't know anybody, would you write to everybody…’ I was doing The Lenny Henry Show at the time. And so we wrote to everybody in showbiz and said, ‘We're doing this thing called Comic Relief.’ And we both signed it at the bottom.”

They were disheartened to receive many replies from established white comedians who said they didn’t want to be involved because it was political. “I'd never seen anything like the Michael Buerk films, and the people looked like me,” Lenny says, recalling the Ethiopian famine. “I just thought if there's anything I can possibly do to help alleviate that, I want to be part of something that helps.”

Having branched out to play an Irish hobbit in Amazon’s The Rings of Power, Lenny is currently appearing in West End play Every Brilliant Thing. He is involved in initiatives which encourage young writers from diverse backgrounds to produce scripts, arguing that people of colour have a multitude of stories to tell. "We deserve the right to see ourselves on television doing all kinds of weird shit,” he laughs.

And in terms of personal ambitions he says he has plenty of new challenges ahead of him. “I love acting. I love being on stage. I love being front of a camera, I want to do more of that,” he says. “And I want to be in a movie.” See you on the big screen soon!

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