Who Am I, Again

by Lenny Henry

  So this was my job from the end of 1975 into 1976 – the Minstrels’ club tour. We schlepped all over England. I really liked almost everyone in the show, and I’m pretty sure I was in love with nearly all the dancers at some point or other. I was a hormonal teenager with spots and enthusiasm in abundance. The social side of things was great. We’d go out for curries, Chinese food and fish and chips. We’d have parties and dance till we dropped. However, all our youthful moxie and attitude would drop off us in chunks once we got to the stage door of the club or theatre and were reabsorbed into this odd institution that demanded that its male performers wore shoe black on their faces and the women fishnets, high heels and feathers.

  It was a show steeped in vaudeville and music hall; the jokes were old, but the songs were older. The principal singers sang anything, from the Great American Songbook to light opera; from musical westerns to middle-of-the-road fare from the days before rock ’n’ roll. Les Want was a fantastic performer and would perform a show-stopping sequence in the style of Al Jolson, Jimmy Cagney or Gene Kelly that would bring the house down every night. I used to sit in his dressing room some nights, and he’d tell me about his days in the business. Although I was just a kid, he was incredibly frank about things. He didn’t really dig being in a minstrel show, but it paid the bills. He wished he was paid more for what he was doing but realised that – as Mr Luff had pointed out – because he was blacked up all the time, no one knew who he was and therefore his currency as a performer was diminished. I never saw him work at his performances; he told me this was all stuff he knew through instinct and from previous shows.

  The Television Toppers were a group of young female dancers who had either been in the show before or had been recently cast from other troupes, such as the Second Generation. They were all pretty much in their late teens/early twenties and were treating this tour and subsequent shows as an adventure or rite of passage. They seemed incredibly grown up to me, smoking and drinking shorts with mixers. You couldn’t get near them, which was probably for the best. One of my friends in the male minstrels was a boisterous and funny Liverpudlian called Pete. He’d fallen in love with a statuesque dancer called Penny. After a few weeks, he became frustrated by her inability to commit and wound up putting his fist through a window at a party. All boisterousness and amusement melted away like a ‘99’ ice cream during a heatwave.

  Don continued to give me advice throughout this period, and I somehow managed to get through without too much egg on my face. Being in the Minstrels was an issue, though. I noticed that my family didn’t talk about it much. Seymour stayed out of the way, and Kay didn’t have much to say about it either. I wasn’t a pariah, but no one spoke about it when I went home. What had I done?

  REFLECTION: WHY IS EVERYONE SO UNHAPPY?

  I don’t know if it struck me then, but in retrospect very few of the adult entertainers whom I was trying to mirror on stage seemed happy. They all arrived at venues with their game face on – a tough veneer of ‘Don’t fuck with me’ that only softened once they knew they could trust you or realised that you could actually do your job. Nobody was impressed by the fact that I’d won New Faces. They all seemed to treat TV talent shows with disdain: ‘They’re all fixed. If you’re prepared to shag Hughie Green, you could be on Opportunity Knocks for weeks.’

  There was a frustration that pervaded the atmosphere backstage. Soundchecks were fraught with braggadocio, mainly from the male acts. ‘I stormed it last night, I annihilated ’em.’ ‘Well, I murdered ’em. I tore the bollocks off ’em!’ This didn’t feel like entertainment to me; it was more like a kind of torture. I would often sit on my own and wonder what it would be like to be in an audience and have a comedian come on and attempt to rip off your testicles. As a seventeen-year-old it all felt a bit transgressive, weird, alien. But I used to nod and smile and laugh as if I knew what they were talking about. It would be years before I understood what they actually meant: just that they’d put on a good show and the audience had laughed a lot.

  Staying in digs was interesting because you’d see a lot of these people off duty, at breakfast, in a jumper and pants, eating beans on toast, drinking endless cups of tea, talking about doing three shows the night before, dying on their arse at two of them, getting a stander at the last one and being paid in readies in the car park. Older performers – guitar vocalists, impressionists, comedians, instrumentalists and magicians – were akin to vagabonds, mountebanks and felons, constantly moving from town to town, wreaking havoc and then skipping town before daybreak to avoid hostile landlords or irate husbands.

  I regularly shared dressing rooms with odd combinations of performers – usually a comedian, a girl singer and a speciality act. The comedian would nearly always be trying to get off with the girl singer. The speciality act would be practising constantly. Because of my New Faces status, I would normally be top of the bill. The comedian, usually a white bloke of a certain age, would almost always be pissed off with this and would slip in some disparaging or racist remark. This was a tough experience for a young kid, difficult to overcome. Actually, I’m not sure I ever have overcome it, even now.

  I met a lot of forty-something comics who were either about to be or had just been divorced, or were just about to embark on their second or third marriage. Of course, there were the guys who were happily married or in stable relationships, but truth be told, this was the 1970s, and most guys in the business chased women relentlessly and made no bones about it. As a young single guy, I found this incredibly confusing. I was a teenager, and I felt I was permitted to have adolescent crushes and go all googly-eyed and soppy whenever I was at a disco or enjoying post-show drinks. I didn’t expect to see grown-ups behaving in the same way too.

  But it was fun. There was a sense of ‘what happens on the road, stays on the road’. This wayward behaviour became a topsy-turvy norm that would prove problematic in later years. It certainly didn’t lead to happiness, and in retrospect I feel sorry for a lot of the older comedians I met. And I feel sorry for myself. There’s a strong argument that says a teenage boy shouldn’t have been allowed into this deeply confused and transgressive world unchaperoned. Why was no one watching out for me? Mike Hollis would pop in sometimes and attend certain shows, but he was a ghostly presence. It became clear to me that I would have to seek that mentorship elsewhere or else sink slowly to the bottom, never to return to the surface. That was one thing about the older acts: all of them were prepared to dispense pearls of wisdom, and I would listen hard – and it was hard to take sometimes:

  ‘You’re a good lad, you’ve got a lot of potential, but you’re unseasoned.’

  ‘You’re not that funny, but you’ve got something.’

  ‘Look, lad, there’s no sense being miserable. You were shite tonight, you’ll be shite tomorrow and, lookin’ at yer act, you’re gonna be shite for a few years to come. But it’s gonna get better, trust me.’

  I took this to heart. Club audiences were a tough crowd, every performance a battlefield. Authority had to be established immediately or they would steamroller you, and that was you done. Opening with appropriate jokes was essential, otherwise you’d just get murdered, shamed or humiliated, and all because you didn’t have the right opening gags. I used to say:

  ‘Good evening. Enoch Powell says he wants to give me a thousand pounds to go back where I came from. Which is great, because it’s only twenty pence for me to get on the bus from here to Dudley.’

  I used to open with ‘That Old Black Magic’, singing the first two lines and then saying, ‘Black magic – that’s got to be me doing Tommy Cooper.’ And then, as Tommy, ‘I walked into a bar. I said, “Ouch.” It was an iron bar. A skeleton walked in behind me and said, “Can I have a pint of bitter, please, and a mop?”’

  Sometimes I’d be in Charlie Williams mode: ‘You’d better laugh, or I’ll come and move in next door to you. That’ll bring your rent down.’

  I toggled between several openings over the first few years. A
nd I don’t think I was happy with any of them. In those early days, for me there was a sense of ‘Just get on, just get on, just get on.’ I knew that somewhere there’d be something that they’d laugh at, because they’d laughed on telly. And if they’d liked that kid who’d done the impressions, well, I was going to do those impressions now.

  I struggled a lot during this period, but the great constant was my enjoyment of actually being on stage. That never went away. It was just the content that was the problem. But as I travelled around, watching these older comics and learning all their tricks, the experience I gained from performing in working men’s clubs, military bases, leisure centres and broken-down cinemas started to accrue. The more hours I put in, the better I got. But only in the sense of survival. The first five or six years in the business were all about scrabbling to the shore without being eaten by the sharks. It wasn’t about being excellent or thinking carefully about ideas, surprises, narrative, musical interpolations and characterisations. All of that would come much, much later. In the meantime, I was swimming with the grumpy comedians, speciality acts and girl singers, and kind of enjoying it, in a miserable sort of way.

  MORE MINSTRELS AND KEN DODD

  Once the Minstrels’ club tour was over, I was back in London prepping for the first series of The Fosters. But later in 1976 I was booked once more for the Minstrels in Blackpool. This part of my journey was difficult. From the end of 1975 to 1981 I was contractually obliged to appear in the Minstrels’ show. Six years of ‘Oh, Dem Golden Slippers’, ‘Paddlin’ Madelin’ Home’ and ‘Ballin’ the Jack’. Apart from short interludes in pantomime, clubland and Felixstowe (in the John Hanson summer show, where no one wore black shoe polish on their faces) my life now was one of creeping dread.

  From this point on the Minstrels scenario was, for the most part, a duvet of sadness. I was not forced to wear blackface like the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century minstrel acts in the US. Bert Williams was one such performer. He wore blackface at a time when his African American audience was questioning why anyone would choose to do so.

  I was fortunate not to have to wear shoe polish on my face. I only ever had to do my twelve-minute act in the first half of the show. But I was in a strangely split mental condition for most of the time. On the one hand, I was working with the loveliest of people: the dancers, the singers and the crew were very kind and nurturing. On the other, I was a seventeen-year-old black guy performing in a minstrel show for what seemed like forever. Having begun my journey so triumphantly, I was suddenly in the doldrums, adrift, lost. I would arrive at the theatre and know that I would be the only black person in the building, perhaps the only black person within a fifty-mile radius. The dislocation I felt as I walked out, looked at the audience and saw no one who looked like me was palpable. But somehow I managed to supress these feelings. After all, I was contributing to my mother’s housekeeping bills, and I would eventually buy her a house, a phone, a colour TV and the rest. I was told that my responsibility was to use this wonderful opportunity to improve as a performer. The whole thing stretched out in front of me like Plastic Man and Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four having a tug-of-war.

  I took to staying in bed for most of the day, leaving my digs at four to get to the theatre in time for the half-hour call. I overate, gained weight, then desperately embarked on an insane bout of keep-fit activity. I was down, way, way down, and only a change would break the spell. There were moments when I wished my brothers, Seymour and Hylton, would smash down the doors and come and rescue me from yet another interminable summer season. It never happened.

  C. S. Lewis said:

  Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say ‘My tooth is aching’ than to say ‘My heart is broken.’

  I think the most painful aspect is the fear of ridicule, job loss, failure. I was a teenager when all this was happening to me. But I had to stick at it, no matter what.

  Because I was away from Greg and Mac – and the Lockshen Gang as well – I was isolated. I had to make new friends all the time. I could do that, but it wasn’t the same as having a consistent circle of friends. I had no entourage living with me, nurturing and supporting me. It was just me.

  There was a major event during the season at Blackpool that taught me a lesson I will never forget. Don Maclean was doing a sterling job of warming the audience up, compèring and finally delivering a killer set at the end that left the punters happy and geared up for the big finale. I watched his performances every night and knew every line off by heart. One Friday night at teatime we got the message that Don would not be coming in to do the show because his father-in-law was gravely ill. Don said, ‘Len will stand in for me till I get back.’ I was told this as I walked in at 5.30 p.m. for the first show. This was a shock to me – especially as I had only twenty minutes of stage-ready material. What was I going to do?

  Here’s what I did: I went on and opened the show as I’d seen Don do over two hundred times. I then went on and closed part one, as I’d seen Don do, and finally I slammed them at the end. I got big laughs and many applause breaks. At the end of it all I noticed that the backstage staff, and the stage managers in particular, were ashen-faced as I left the stage. What had I done wrong? Well … it turns out that when you’re asked to fill in for someone, they don’t mean for you to use their material. My mimicry gene had kicked in and I’d repeated, parrot fashion, all the pieces that I had taken in from watching Don over and over again.

  When I arrived the next day I was stood down by the stage manager, who had contacted Keith Harris to come and stand in for Don while he was away on compassionate leave. I was told very firmly that you don’t do what I had done. You use your own material at all times. I hung my head for two weeks, until people started telling me how well I’d done.

  Keith, on the other hand, was a revelation. He was a slick ventriloquist; he wore all the hip gear – tight trousers and bolero jackets – and had a mullet haircut (later a bubble perm). He was full-on show business: he knew all the dance steps, the silly voices, the gags, the tricks. When he stood in for Don, he marmalised the audiences.

  One of the upsides of the summer season experience was you got to meet everyone, whether you wanted to or not. I saw Ken Dodd perform one Sunday at the Blackpool Opera House. He came on in a big red furry coat, with a ten-foot tickling stick, accompanied by his theme music, ‘Love Is Like a Violin’. He riffed and joked and gagged us for forty minutes, then introduced someone else and disappeared. Someone sang. We all went to the loo. Doddy came back and did another forty-five minutes. He had a big bass drum, which he said was useful for telling the time if you don’t have a watch because when you pummel it late at night, people always stick their head out of the upstairs window and say, ‘Who’s playing the drums at four o’clock in the bloody morning?’

  When I looked around the audience I recognised lots of young comics dotted around, all of them with a notepad and pencil, trying to write down whatever they could. One of the gags that went round the circuit was about a young comic wishing he’d shouted out, ‘Could you slow down, Doddy? I’ve dropped me pencil.’

  I always imagined Ken Dodd’s brain to be like a huge library full of jokes, with a custodian on roller skates zooming from subject to subject, locating the correct joke for each moment and plugging one into Doddy every forty-five seconds. It certainly felt that the maestro plied his craft so expertly that there was no way he could fail on stage. He had a ton of jokes – and the delivery to match. There was a point in the show, about two and a half hours in, when he looked at us, making that buck-toothed face, and said:

  ‘D’you give in?’

  And then:

  ‘If, in a minute, a bunch of soaked, angry people come in and sit on your laps, don’t worry – it’s just the second house!’

  Then he did another hour.

  What I didn’t know was t
hat Doddy worked with writers. Eddie Braben, who went on to work for Morecambe and Wise and many others, was one of those who grafted and worked and stressed and strained to produce the mountain of material that someone of Doddy’s stature required on a monthly basis – routines, patter, one-liners, musical numbers. Doddy did them all and demanded the highest of standards.

  The northern comedian Nicky Martyn was a huge fan, and I think Victoria Wood was too – I always noticed that she held her fingers aloft in a similar way to Doddy. I found out that he used to write jokes on his fingers – fingers as autocue. It works. When I met Doddy backstage, he always talked about the burden of being top of the bill and how the management only came in when the theatre wasn’t full. Then he’d offer you a brown ale and, half joking, tell you, ‘That’ll be three and sixpence, sir …’

  Then, suddenly, my first Black and White Minstrels summer season at the Blackpool Opera House was over. The performers and backstage crew had been my family for that entire summer. Apart from the drudgery of performing for twelve minutes and then having to twiddle my thumbs for the rest of the night, the actual experience of being away from home (again) for a whole summer had been a process of maturation for me. I had lived through thirteen episodes of a situation comedy with Norman Beaton and co., and then endured a summer season in Blackpool without killing my career – or myself.

  In the autumn of 1976 I was back in the working men’s clubs and doing the odd TV performance, earning my living from show business, but all that energy, all that excitement at being halfway decent at something, all that stardust and glitter was as nothing until I could establish who I was. If I was going to survive in this industry, something had to happen in order for me to achieve the potential promised by my initial appearance.