Who Am I, Again

by Lenny Henry

  I had this crazy idea that maybe once he’d realised that I could work any kind of audience, he’d move me out of the Minstrels and put me in some other show. This was not to be. Whenever I talked to Mr Luff about this, he would laugh it off and say that the experience I was getting on the show was indispensable. In many respects he was right – I was playing the biggest performance spaces in the country. However, after the first tour I wanted out and felt that everything I’d gained during my luck-filled run on New Faces was draining out of me by the day.

  Mr Luff was tough, though. I imagine he wanted me to stay in the show because I was a novelty, and the more I was associated with the show, the more he and his staff could point at me and say, ‘How can we be racist? Look – we’ve got Lenny Henry in the show.’ I was vaguely aware that there had been some kind of ruckus with the Race Relations Board. I had become a political football and was being kicked hither and yon. My way through all of this was to bury my head in the sand and let any controversy wash over me.

  I managed to get through five years of working with the Black and White Minstrels. Five years of struggling with my identity, learning my craft but also worrying about what my family and friends thought of me and my association with the show. I worked with some lovely people: the Television Toppers were fantastic and friendly to a woman; the Minstrels, underneath all that boot black, were sensitive, hard-working and kind; the four principal performers were always available for chats and advice. Interestingly, whenever they asked Mr Luff for a raise, he would say, ‘Well, no one knows who you are under the make-up, so do what you want. I can get someone else.’ So they always stayed on, despite feeling undervalued and underpaid.

  In the 1980s, when I was no longer represented by Mike Hollis, Mr Luff became my full-time manager. Gillian and Rhonda ran my diary and organised all my dates, while Mr Luff would meet me and talk about overall career issues and offers that had come in. When we dealt with the BBC or ITV, Mr Luff always knew everyone’s dad. All the executives we met had massive respect for him. He was someone who had been a part of their parents’ lives. He was also incredibly forceful. If he said, ‘Maybe there should just be three of them in this show,’ the BBC listened. He wasn’t scared of putting forward his opinion, and he was rarely wrong. He was also hugely protective of my intellectual property, making sure that I was remunerated for anything I’d invented or made up as part of a team of writers. His belief was that if I’d contributed my energy and improv, then I deserved to get paid too.

  Mr Luff may have presided over one of the most mentally bruising periods of my life, but he was also responsible for all my career movements from the end of the 1970s and into the ’80s. Whatever he did before that, I have to give him props for his handling of things like The Lenny Henry Show, Lenny Henry Tonite, The Delbert Wilkins Show and Disney’s True Identity (1991, dir. Charles Lane). He rocked them like it was no big thing. He taught me a lot about the business and also showed me how to behave in a meeting and when to keep my mouth shut.

  When I was in the New Faces winners’ show at the Palladium, he sent his vintage Rolls-Royce to pick up my mother from Euston Station. Mama sat in the back like an original gangsta, waving at all and sundry and having the time of her life. When I was asked to perform at the Royal Variety Show, Mr Luff once again organised for my mama to be collected in a posh car, but he also managed to fix it so that she could be sat on the same level as the Royal Box. Mama was literally feet away from the Queen. I asked Mama what it had felt like to be that near to her, and she replied that she had waved and offered toffees, but Liz had studiously ignored her. She had a good time anyway.

  Mama used to say that Mr Luff cared about people and was a gentleman. I think that’s about right.

  THE FOSTERS

  Shortly after signing with the Black and White Minstrels, I was invited down to London to meet with Michael Grade, who at the time was the deputy controller of programming at London Weekend Television. What I didn’t know was that he’d just purchased the ‘change of format’ rights to an American series called Good Times. This was an earthy African American situation comedy set in a housing project in a black inner-city neighbourhood in Chicago. The series was all about a black family’s struggles to overcome poverty. LWT intended to create a British version of the show with an Afro-Caribbean cast.

  I sat and drank tea, as Grade fiddled with the massive video recorder underneath his TV. I watched an episode called ‘Black Jesus’ and was captivated by a character called JJ, a lanky, goofy, wise-cracking teenager. I laughed a lot and enjoyed his capering and wordplay. He said things like, ‘I am … Kid Dyno-mite!’ and cracked gags such as, ‘I’m gonna make like a tree and leave.’ I was still a teenager and thought, ‘I think I can do that.’ And so I said yes to this new series, which was to be called The Fosters – the first all-black situation comedy on British television.

  I was invited down to London for rehearsals and to tape the first show in the series, which, to all intents and purposes, was a pilot. (Former Crackerjack star and my future mentor Don Maclean would often say that pilot was an acronym for Produced In Little ’Ope of Transmission.)

  For the first few days I stayed at the Grosvenor Victoria, a huge hotel near Victoria Station. This was a forbidding place in which you could absolutely lose yourself, a massive block of a building, dirty and imposing. I found myself wandering the floors every night when I got in. Lonely and scared of what was to follow, thoughts kept galloping through my mind. Would I be any good in this show? What did people think of me?

  I travelled to work every day by black cab. I was running up a considerable tab but didn’t know any better. After four days of rehearsals, I was starting to lose my mind. I was working from ten till six every day, and then returning to my hotel room to learn my lines and take in what I’d been taught that day.

  Norman Beaton was playing the dad, Samuel Foster. I had seen him play Nanki-Poo six times in The Black Mikado at the Cambridge Theatre in London. He and his co-star Derek Griffiths had me in stitches each time. I loved the way Norman drove the plot with his wordplay and singing. Griffiths was impressively improvisational in his role: if someone arrived late, he’d castigate them from the stage or raise his eyebrows. The crowd would roar their approval.

  Once I knew Norman was going to play my dad, I made a point of going round to the stage door to say hi. I was shown up to his dressing room and was greeted by a handwritten note on his mirror in big letters: ‘Whoever keeps taking my mother-fucking sunglasses from this room could they leave them where they are!’ Really scary.

  Despite this, Norman treated me with respect. I’d had no idea who he was before seeing him in The Black Mikado, but as the weeks and the rehearsals went by, I realised that he was a bit of a don: he’d sung calypso, he’d been a teacher, he’d acted in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, he’d helped to establish the Black Theatre of Brixton … In short, he was black theatre royalty. I learnt so much just from watching him during rehearsals.

  I remember going round to Norman’s house one day. He had a statuesque blonde wife and loads of kids. He also had a library containing hundreds of books. He was incredibly generous and would talk to me about culturally significant books like Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man or Alex Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm X, and many more. He invited me to come and check him out at the Royal Court in Mustapha Matura’s Playboy of the West Indies. I was aware of a restlessness within Norman, although I wouldn’t dare question him about it. He was fiercely intelligent but also rebellious. He wasn’t scared of telling the producer or director off or taking issue with some aspect of the writing. But working with a powerhouse can be testing too. Norman would sometimes show up hungover or still drunk from the night before. This could be irritating, but very funny in retrospect.

  The other cast members of The Fosters included Canadian-born Isabelle Lucas, who played Pearl Foster, the mum. Isabelle was a lovely, sensitive person with a trilling, almost operatic laugh. She was always incredib
ly kind to me and helped to steer me through each episode with a quiet authority that I perhaps wasn’t aware of at the time. British Guyana-born Carmen Munroe played the sexy next-door neighbour with aplomb and a sharp wit. Carmen also took me under her wing throughout shooting and gave me lots of advice, some of which I took, most of which I ignored. Every so often she would sit me down and read me the riot act: ‘Lenny, you’re out every night in the clubs, drinking and dancing and carrying on. You should be learning your lines. Why aren’t you taking movement and acting and voice lessons? You need training if you’re going to survive in this industry.’

  Of course, I would just laugh and tease her about being a grumpy grown-up, but she was right. This was the perfect time for an aspirant actor to undertake a period of training, but the trouble was, I was seventeen and in London without parental guidance. Whatever learning I was doing was at the behest of Norman, Isabelle, Carmen and whomever I saw on stage or in the studio. I have no regrets about my time in London making The Fosters, but I do know that if I was able to talk to my seventeen-year-old self now, I’d say, ‘Yu shoulda listen to Carmen, yu blouse an’ skirt eediat!’

  There was so much to learn, and I was having to do it all by experience rather than through education, training and reflection. There was a lot of denial going on here. Throughout the entire series I just would not admit how out of my depth I was. This wasn’t entirely my fault. There were infrastructural issues that lay at the heart of the show’s problems.

  We were an Afro-Caribbean family that had its roots in Jamaica, living in Peckham in south-east London. That’s what we were meant to be, but Norman and Carmen were from Guyana, Isabelle from Canada, I was from Dudley in the West Midlands, Sharon Rosita (Shirley Foster) was a Barbara Speake-trained, beautifully spoken actress of note, and Lawrie Mark, as my little brother, was a naturally cheeky, funny cockney. We all got on like a house on fire, but it was clear from the moment we appeared on the screen that we were not a real family. We all spoke and behaved differently, there wasn’t a coherent family dynamic, but this was the mid-1970s, and although some advances had been made in getting people of colour onto our screens, the executives in charge had no real experience of casting black and brown people. We were all bundled together and basically told to work it out for ourselves. Unless diverse gatekeepers, commissioners and writers are working on a film or television project, you are unlikely to get a truly diverse group of people portrayed accurately on screen or employed gainfully behind the camera. From our vantage point here in the twenty-first century we can observe that there has been some improvement since 1976, but there’s still a long, long way to go.

  On the basis of the pilot, The Fosters was commissioned – thirteen episodes! When it was transmitted, the response was extraordinary. Even though the family were (to my mind) incorrectly cast, even though we were treading in our American predecessor’s footsteps, the first episode of the show got 21 million viewers, a figure that remained more or less constant for the rest of the run. The second series was watched by around 10 to 12 million a week – a considerable drop, but you’d kill for those numbers now. We made twenty-seven episodes, the show continuing for two years before running out of steam.

  REFLECTION: THE END OF PRIVACY

  I often wonder if there is a habitual journey for all children in show business. You’ve seen these guys on TV, their talent and genius trapped like an exotic bug in a bottle: performers like Mark Lester, Jack Wild, Shirley Temple, Macaulay Culkin – the list goes on and on – all captured at a moment when their precocious, prodigious talents were deemed worthy of adult consumption. Judy Garland, by all accounts, was so in demand in ‘little girl’ mode that while filming the role of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, the studio executives strapped her breasts down and made her wear a special corset that flattened her curves to make her look younger. Her life as an MGM star was intolerable:

  They had us working days and nights on end. They’d give us pills to keep us on our feet long after we were exhausted. Then they’d take us to the studio hospital and knock us out with sleeping pills – Mickey [Rooney] sprawled out on one bed and me on another. Then after four hours they’d wake us up and give us the pep pills again so we could work 72 hours in a row. Half the time we were hanging from the ceiling but it was a way of life for us.

  (QUOTED IN ‘DARK SIDE OF OZ’ BY NEIL NORMAN, Daily Express, 5 APRIL 2010)

  It sounds horrific, and my life from 1975 onwards bears no relation to what Judy Garland and others went through back in the day. But I do sympathise. I was thrust into a completely adult world in which I could sell out a room of club-goers eager to see whether the sixteen-year-old black kid from Dudley could do longer than three minutes. For quite a long time during this period the answer was: no. I probably had a good four minutes in me, but after that things would go terribly wrong. I’m sure many people were surprised at the hodge-podge, higgledy-piggledy, back-of-a-fag-packet, jokes-off-the-telly/from-the-back-of-the-Beano nature of my act.

  But the blinding glare of publicity and public attention meant that I couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without people following me, asking for autographs and reciting my performances back at me. Strangely, I was mostly able to deal with it. I spent a lot of time doing requests for people – impressions of Tommy Cooper, Max Bygraves or Choo Choo from the Boss Cat cartoon. I enjoyed the public adulation. I’d never experienced anything like it, and although young and very green, I was determined to squeeze every last morsel from the whole enchilada.

  Later, however, sustaining relationships of any kind would become problematic due to interventions by the public. I loved the punters; after all, they had voted for me on New Faces. But some of them were very intrusive: just as you were about to snog someone, some hairy-arsed bloke would interject, asking for an autograph, or his girlfriend would ask for a hug, or his mate would ask if I wanted a drink, or two drinks, by which time the person I was trying to snog was invariably snogging someone else.

  LIVING WITH JOE CHARLES

  In episode one of The Fosters, Joseph Charles played a middle-class college professor who was dating my sister, Shirley, while also writing a dissertation entitled ‘Sexual Behaviour in the Black Community’. Joe saw that I was having a hard time staying at the Grosvenor Victoria and offered me a bed at his place in Wembley for a very reasonable rate. It was clear to me that it was much better to be living with someone you knew rather than in a large, faceless hotel, where you could die and they might not find you for days. So from that day forward I resided in Wembley.

  Joe lived with a lovely woman called Lou, and they both made me feel incredibly welcome in their tiny house on Lancelot Road. I slept on their daybed most of the time. Sometimes I was in the spare room, but for the most part I was under the stairs like Harry Potter, with my belongings – records, cassettes, books – stored underneath the bed.

  Joe was a handsome devil, perhaps the best-looking dude I had ever met. He was tall and had abs upon which you could bounce a sixpence. He had trained with the Royal Shakespeare Company and so had an opinion about everything I did on the stage. In many respects, Joe became a sort of mentor to me just by dint of being around all the time. He’d hear me moaning about work, writers, transport, learning lines, and offer much needed guidance. He was a good guy in a pinch and, as usual, I gravitated towards his paternal nature.

  Like most black actors, Joe’s employment rate was spotty, to say the least. He would rage about which white actor got what part, and why not him? He was very, very, very funny, but he didn’t realise it. Every middle-class twazzock I ever played in a sketch on Three of a Kind (1981–3, an award-winning BBC sketch show produced and directed by Paul Jackson) or The Lenny Henry Show was usually based on Joe. He was a great person to study. He had a sonorous, resonant, received pronunciation-style voice, but he also had a mockney thing as well. He behaved as though he was a movie star, even when we were walking up Wembley High Street.

  Joe would come to the studio to watch Th
e Fosters being recorded, and later when I was on Three of a Kind he’d come and see that as well. He was a critical friend: if he didn’t like a performance, sketch or stand-up bit, he would say so very loudly in the Indian/Greek/Chinese restaurant after the show.

  We had many ups and downs, mainly because I wouldn’t listen. Joe had a ton of experience of trying to get ahead in the film, TV and theatre industries in the UK and had found every step of the way difficult and strewn with obstacles. Because I was young and always working, I didn’t understand what the problem was. I’d ask dumb questions like, ‘Why is it so difficult?’, ‘Why don’t you just start your own theatre company?’ or ‘Why don’t you just write and perform your own plays?’ Watching Joe get through each day of being out of work was a real lesson. He occasionally worked on a market stall and he cleaned the house a lot. I remember he would smoke certain weird-smelling cigarettes and then embark on an epic amount of hoovering and washing-up and clearing away. He would hector me throughout all of this activity, making me get up and join in, even though I’d arrived at four in the morning after doing Keighley Variety Club or Jollees in Stoke. Joe didn’t care, and because I usually slept under the stairs, the incessant vacuuming would wake me up anyway.

  THE LOCKSHEN GANG

  Joe used to teach drama at a Jewish youth club in north London called Maccabee. When he introduced me to some of his students, I quickly became involved with this new London-based friendship circle. I christened them the Lockshen Gang, after the delicious soup.

  Our first meeting was legendary. I had crawled into my below-stairs sleeping station, and at around midnight I was awoken by Joe and a whole bunch of people who immediately began demanding beers, cups of tea, sandwiches and certain magical cigarettes. Soon the place was full of banging and clacking and frying and smoking. I was a bit pissed off at first, but soon began to enjoy the company of his noisy house guests. There was Neil and Jude and Jackie and Jem and Mike and Ian and Lesley and Netty. They were a mostly friendly bunch and invited me to be a part of their group. I grew particularly close to Neil, Jude, Netty and Mike, and began inviting them to studio recordings and shows whenever I was in London. They, in turn, invited me into their homes.