by Lenny Henry
Basically, I stole from everybody. If I saw something that worked, I took it, building up a routine as an impressionist.
The typical comedian’s fodder at the time would go something like this:
Bert and Dave work together. They make a deal that whichever one dies first will contact the living one from the afterlife. So Bert dies. Dave doesn’t hear from him for about a year, figures there is no afterlife. Then one day he hears Bert speaking as if from a distance. Dave’s over the moon. ‘So there is an afterlife! What’s it like?’ he asks Bert, who replies, ‘Well, I sleep very late. I get up, have a big breakfast. Then I have sex, lots of sex. Then I go back to sleep, but I get up for lunch, have a big lunch. Have some more sex, take a nap. Huge dinner. More sex. Go to sleep and wake up the next day.’ ‘Oh my God,’ says Dave. ‘So that’s what heaven is like?’ ‘Oh no,’ says Bert. ‘I’m not in heaven. I’m a bear at Dudley Zoo.’
This type of joke never worked for me because it was a ‘story’ joke. When you’re an impressionist you have to be funny straight away. They laugh at the voice and its accuracy, and then they laugh at the joke. To do an impression of Frank Spencer and then embark on a three-minute joke – probably not a good idea, especially in the clubs. You’ve got to hit them – Pif! Pif! Paf! – otherwise they start talking or heckling, which means you need shorter jokes: set-up, punchline, bang bang bang, one after the other. The subject matter has to suit the character you’re impersonating. Luckily for me, it all came together like lightning in a bottle for my TV debut. But after that, the remainder of my career was rocky as hell.
If you were black and on TV in the 1970s, you were expected to tell jokes against yourself and maybe do gags about other races. This was all about playing to people’s fear, but also disengaging any aggro while you were on stage. The reason Charlie Williams self-deprecated in a broad Yorkshire accent was to stop the audience getting their digs in first: ‘’Ey up, old flower, stop laughin’ – ooh, she’s cryin’. ’Ey, old love, don’t rub your mascara, you’ll be darker than me!’ Jos White would say, ‘I’m browned off, I’m browned off.’ I was subconsciously being schooled in what it might take to get over to a predominantly white audience. Rule number one seemed to be: get all the dodgy racist jokes in before they did.
But I didn’t begin like that. I had no plan at first. My sole joy was simply to make my friends, and whoever else was around, squirt milk or lager from either nostril. There were many ways to do this: I might impersonate someone nearby, the way they stood or talked; I might do an impromptu impression from the cartoons – a Jamaican Scooby-Doo, Barney Rubble swearing, Deputy Dawg from Dudley; or I’d walk behind someone very quietly for a while and suddenly make a big noise – ‘BOH!’ Simplistic routes to laughter, certainly, but my friends seemed to like them.
I’d dance, sing – anything to get a reaction. I could do Elvis, Noddy Holder, Chuck Berry, Tommy Cooper, Max Bygraves, Frank Spencer, Muhammad Ali, Batman, Robin, Clement Freud, Dave Allen. Some of them sounded quite good. When my voice broke, only a few of the voices were affected, although when I sang everything had to be lowered several tones to accommodate the dropping of my meat and two veg.
I was on the highway to fame, with no GPS and absolutely no clue to where I was heading.
MY COMEDY DEBUT
The Queen Mary Ballroom was home turf for me. I had performed my impersonation of Elvis Presley there a couple of times. It was a safe place where I could stretch out and try new material.
One routine involved my dad’s battered brown trilby. I used it for every impression I could think of that involved a hat – John Wayne, James Stewart, Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart. The audience at the Queen Mary were my peers; they soon became new acquaintances, people who were in on this brand-new thing: Lenny Henry, the black kid who got up on stage and did all the voices. I remember several moments when I knew things had changed. The first turning point was me and the rest of the Grazebrook Crew rocking up at The Ship and Rainbow, a pub about three miles from Dudley. It was smaller than the Queen Mary dancefloor-wise but packed to the gills on a Tuesday night and pumping with Motown, soul, funk and northern soul. A guy named Mike Hollis happened to be the DJ that night, and he signalled that I should come to the stage as we walked in. I was literally scared witless. What if they didn’t like me as much here as they did at the Queen Mary?
As it turned out, the audience were even more enthusiastic than my peers at the Mary. They went nuts! I loved it, and the taste of live performance became like a virus for me. I couldn’t wait to get up on stage.
Mac, Greg and Tom supported me throughout, thrilled that we were now gaining free access to clubs that previously were costing us major coin to get in. It was brilliant. Some nights were tough, though. There were places where the crowd just didn’t get it, but the lads made sure I had a drink once I decamped from the stage and they cheered me up immediately: ‘Yow’m alright, chap – they never had any taste this lot …’
I couldn’t believe how confident I was getting. Taking to the stage was never a problem. Somehow it didn’t matter what I was doing, and if I improvised something, they seemed to like it even more. This was something I learnt early on – the audience loved it when you did material about actually being there with them. Of course, they liked the stuff you’d prepared, but they really reacted when you spoke about them, where they lived, the shape of the room, the bar staff, the state of the toilets. They loved the cut and thrust and banter of live performance just as much as I did. I got up and strutted my stuff, with no trace of fear or nervousness. The moment I always loved was the ‘whoosh’ of recognition at the voices – and also the certain knowledge that they had never seen a black person doing impersonations of people they knew from TV.
Although Mike Hollis was my main conduit to performing on stage, there were other DJs with whom I became friendly. Cliff Curry, The General and Johnny Olsen all let me get up and perform, but Mike was my main man, and I tried as hard as I could to be wherever he was playing since that meant stage time.
In many ways this period was the best of times. The constant push of getting up and trying out new material – the improvisations at the Queen Mary, watching a woman almost choke with laughter at The Fox and Goose in Kingswinford … I didn’t realise it at the time, but these were halcyon days.
Unbeknownst to me, what I was doing was ‘woodshedding’ or ‘workshopping’ material. Fifteen-year-old Len was doing what the big-boy comedians did: before an important performance any comic worth their salt is either out on tour or doing work-in-progress shows to get the material up to scratch. I was working my material until it squeaked.
Greg, Mac, Tom and another brother, Knocker, used to have my back at all the clubs. It was fun, and we got free drinks from the owners, DJs and other interested parties. They made me feel special, even though I was still wearing hand-me-down clothes from the Army and Navy Store. For the first time, girls did not dismiss my patched-up appearance. Now they were interested. We were all in heaven. Me especially.
MIKE HOLLIS
Mike Hollis was known in the clubs by his DJ name, Oscar Michael. He was tall, handsome and always smartly turned out. The way he dressed was effortless. He didn’t look like he was trying to be hip, cool and trendy – he actually was those things.
Mike was the one who spotted me. He was a resident DJ at the Queen Mary, and after I’d performed there one Sunday night he came up to me and said, ‘Yow should be on the telly.’ I liked Mike, the music he played and how he held the stage. I think that’s why I trusted his taste and believed him.
In my autobiographical BBC film, Danny and the Human Zoo (2015, dir. Destiny Ekaragha), I portrayed Mike’s character (called the Magnificent Jonesy in the film) as a bit of an opportunist ne’er-do-well. But in truth, without his intervention it might have taken me many, many years to get to a point where anyone was interested in what I was doing. Mike really was the catalyst to my career; he lit the blue touchpaper and watched me take off.
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Check out Jonesy’s scenes in the film, just to see how they capture the spirit of the Queen Mary Ballroom in those days: the Bowie dancers, the Rod Stewart imitators, the funkateers, the mods, the skins, the acrobats. All were consumers of the great music that Mike played. The Queen Mary was the place where you could express yourself, and Mike was our ringmaster.
But it wasn’t just that, because even the best DJs in the world with the best records to hand can have a duff set. Mike had great taste and he could read a room. When things were too hot, he’d cool us down with ‘There’s No Stopping Us Now’ by the Supremes. When they were too cool, he’d switch to ‘Move on Up’ by Curtis Mayfield, and the floor would become packed with movers, groovers and party people. If Mike wanted some kind of show-stopping moment, he’d play ‘There Was a Time’ by James Brown and beckon to the O’Meally brothers, who would take command of the dancefloor, their shirts off and sweat gleaming. The three of them would leap and cavort, roll and rock and flik-flak across the dancefloor.
And when all else failed, Mike would tell jokes – lots of them. He would casually fade a record out, until it was playing quietly, and say something like:
‘Last night I slept like a log. I woke up in the fireplace.’
Or:
‘I got stopped by a copper last night. He looked in my car and he said, “Why’ve you got a bucket of water on the passenger’s seat?” I says, “So I can dip me headlights.”’
These are very trad jokes. We would have heard them on the TV or radio, on programmes like The Tommy Cooper Show or from Frank Carson on The Comedians. But us fifteen- and sixteen-year-old kids, out for the night, drinking underage – we lapped it all up. It was as though Mike understood that this was the only night out we were liable to get this week, so we deserved everything he could throw at us.
There were other crazy-ass DJs around in those days. Barmy Barry (red-headed, moustachioed, jovial) had a record shop in Dudley and also deejayed when he felt like it. He gave away records and cracked gags, but although he was pretty good, he’d been at the game a long time and was due a rest. The General was brilliant: very glam-rock styled, David Bowie/Ziggy trim, red-haired, flowing white clothes, he hopped and skipped while addressing the kids and ran games and competitions. He really put himself out there when he was doing a show, but it wasn’t about the music, it was about him.
Cliff Curry used to have the dopest sound system in the Midlands. He and Mike were good friends and they would sometimes work together at the Queen Mary. Cliff was a tall, hefty guy with blond hair and a moustache. Cliff wasn’t as larky a DJ as Mike Hollis – he mostly preferred to stick to the music – but when I would get up and do my bits on his watch, he would often become infected by the sense of fun and craziness and join in. We would do a strange and chaotic ventriloquism skit, all improvised, with Cliff as the vent and me as the dummy. I have no idea what we were doing, but we made an audience of my peers and some older types roar with laughter.
After Mike saw me perform a few times, he wanted to be my manager. And because I was desperate for some/any attention from anyone, I said yes. I saw he could run things well. The way he manipulated the crowd every week through music and jokes was a sight to behold. I wanted to be part of the Oscar Michael show and followed him everywhere like a big Jamaican puppy. I figured that that way, everyone would be able to see my talent.
Mike wrote out a contract on some foolscap paper in felt-tip pen and knocked on our door at Douglas Road, wanting to meet my mama and papa. He charmed Mama into co-signing a contract with me. Contained in this contract was a section that stated he would get 33.3 per cent of all my earnings. I was so desperate to be in show business that I didn’t question this. There was no Henry lawyer kindly looking over the paperwork in case there were any anomalies; just my family standing around wondering why this smoothly dressed white dude was in our house.
This contract did eventually change once it was shown to a solicitor. Mike would manage my career for ten years, but in the beginning who was I to question his business experience? He was the incredible Oscar Michael, purveyor of funky good times. He could have written that contract in spit on a burning log and I wouldn’t have questioned it. I had already leapt off the cliff here – no coercion necessary.
At that time Mike was my Gandalf. He helped me buy clothes, bolstered my confidence, drove me to shows. He invited me to his home, where I met his mum, dad and grandfather, who kept pigeons. Mike’s parents had a phone, an electric organ and tons of antiques lying around. I remember them being very proud of their son. I was probably the only black person who’d ever visited their house, though everyone pretended that my presence was no big deal.
Mike once told me that I was going to be bigger than Max Bygraves. I didn’t really know who he was. Then I saw Bygraves at work, and I thought, ‘Why him?’ He seemed like someone to impersonate, not emulate. At the time, I’d been listening, at Mike’s behest, to Bill Cosby’s albums. They were funny, made up of two- or three-minute bits of material. Cosby would find a memory and mine it for as many laughs as he could. He didn’t do jokes; instead he told stories. Initially I found this confusing – what was it with all these stories about his childhood? And then I began to wonder, why didn’t I have loads of childhood stories in my material? I loved Cosby’s avuncular, sound effect-laden style, his use of the microphone, his crystallisation and embellishment of past events. I didn’t know how to do that. It didn’t occur to me that at sixteen years of age I was perhaps too close to my childhood to use it as material, but if I was going to aspire to be anyone, it was Cosby, although it would be at least another nine years before I could start talking about my childhood on stage or on TV. No one suspected that America’s favourite dad had a dark underside; sadly, that was to emerge later.
At the time, I envied Cosby’s success and secretly wanted to be like him. I’d listened to his albums and had watched him act with Robert Culp in the TV series I Spy. Here was a black guy holding a central role in a hit TV series. He looked like me and he was a huge, huge success. But Mike understood a basic truth: no obscure mimicry; I was only allowed to impersonate people that Middle England would know.
As a mentor Mike helped me with material. He collected jokes for me, continued to encourage me to listen to comedy albums and watch hit TV comedy shows. If we couldn’t think of a great joke, we’d steal one, or even two, from someone else.
I wasn’t a great impressionist to start with, so I knew that if the recognition factor was limited, then something else had to happen. That’s the problem with impressions: once you’ve done (or attempted to do) the voice, then what? Dudley audiences were tough: they stood there watching, thinking, ‘You better come with the laughs now, kid.’
Mike made me work on new voices. I was listening to tapes, watching television and rehearsing in situ. This pre-New Faces period of woodshedding was vital. However, a small voice inside me was saying, ‘Hang on, this is something I used to do to make me mates laugh. This is like work or summat.’ But I didn’t resent the work ethic; I embraced it. If I was going to make any impact, I had to practise until the entire performance was effortless.
THE NEW FACES AUDITION
In the mid-1970s the UK had two TV talent shows running simultaneously: Thames Television’s warhorse Opportunity Knocks and ATV’s relatively recent ratings-winner New Faces. After my first couple of appearances at the Queen Mary Ballroom, Mike Hollis had written to both of them. They were popular, nationally broadcast talent shows that could easily transform a performer’s career after just one or two appearances. Mike had jumped the gun; he hadn’t asked me whether I wanted to go on these shows or not, but he was ahead of the curve. For a working-class black kid from Dudley show business was a locked door. I’d just been offered two keys.
Opportunity Knocks was a successful, old-school talent show that began on the BBC Light Programme in 1948 and eventually migrated to television in 1956. My family were regular viewers. The show was hosted by all-round e
ntertainer Hughie Green, who was all puns, raised eyebrows and one-liners. He had a natural bonhomie that perhaps masked an ego the size of Brazil. But the audience loved the randomness of the applicants, who, sponsored by friends or family, grabbed their moment in the spotlight as if their lives depended on it. Did they have what it took to make it to the big time or not? There were singing dogs, comedians, a muscleman with dancing pecs, ventriloquists, pop groups and much, much more. A light entertainment pudding of a show.
The voting in the studio was monitored by something called the clap-o-meter, a cardboard circle with a needle which (supposedly) registered the volume of the audience’s applause, moving from zero to one hundred, depending on the level of approval. Paul Daniels, the famed magician, commented that the needle was operated by Hughie Green’s foot. However, the real voting happened via post, with the viewers writing in to say who they thought deserved to win. The Liverpudlian comic Tom O’Connor won for something like six weeks on the trot. By the time he’d finished his run, he was a national star and had secured his own variety show and a game show. Some great people were discovered on that programme: Freddie Starr, Paul Daniels, Mary Hopkin, Bobby Crush (who could reduce a grand piano to matchwood in seconds), Little and Large, Lena Zavaroni, Frank Carson, Max Boyce and Debra Stephenson, to name but a few.
New Faces began when I was about fifteen. The show was markedly different to Opportunity Knocks in format. A precursor of many of the shows we now see on television, the show had a panel of four well-known experts (people like music producers Tony Hatch and Mickie Most, comics Arthur Askey and Ted Ray, DJs Noel Edmonds and Terry Wogan) who sat in judgement as the aspiring superstars strutted their stuff. Marks were given for ‘Presentation’, ‘Entertainment Value’, ‘Star Quality’ and ‘Content’. The only person to get the full 120 marks was a charismatic performer called Patti Boulaye. The talented impressionist Les Dennis got 119.