Who Am I, Again

by Lenny Henry

  aaaaaaaaaaaaaay!’ The longer you could make it last, the better. Days after the character debuted on the programme, kids began approaching me in the street and challenging me to an ‘Okay-off’. They’d stand there, with their parents waiting patiently, and look up at me, squeaking out an ‘Okay’ for as long as they could, till they were blue in the face.

  Algernon also ate condensed-milk sandwiches, like my papa. Winston’s recipe of buttered hard-dough bread with as much condensed milk as you fancied in the middle went down a storm, and soon children from diverse backgrounds all over the country were trying B&C sandwiches. Algernon was a hit. Having McKellar on board meant that now there were specially written recurring vehicles, such as ‘Rural Retreats’, where Chris and I, as David Bellamy, would go out and about and act the goat. We pre-filmed in the sea at Blackpool and in the amusement park; I played Trevor McDonut rising from the waves. Suddenly I was being given more to do. McKellar wrote a long-form sketch called ‘Pulsebeat’ for Trevor, and there were quiz-type formats where Trevor had so many rules to get through that by the time he got to the end of them, the programme was over. We did the Reverend Nathaniel Westminster (‘but you can call me Nat West’), the Samurai double act and many other things, all interspersed with buckets of water and custard pies … rinse and repeat.

  The studio floor was a health-and safety-nightmare: you could cut yourself on the sharp edge of a desk or the cage, you could slip on soapy water, you could accidentally inhale shaving foam (happened to me twice), which would leave you gasping for air. You could have passed out, but everyone would just laugh and throw more water at you. Utter chaos.

  Who Am I #16

  This is an early Tiswas gang shot. At the front is John Gorman as PC Plod, wearing a loose tie and police uniform (strangely laid-back). Sally James and Chris Tarrant take centre spot. I’m on the left at the back (as if you couldn’t guess), with my mouth as wide as I can get it, à la Animal in The Muppet Show. Next to me is future Doctor Who Sylvester McCoy, ATV continuity announcer Peter Tomlinson, and then the legend in his own mind, Frank ‘That’s a cracker/It’s the way I tell ’em’ Carson.

  This is very similar to almost every picture taken of me during this period. I’m either laughing or shrieking with a kind of unalloyed pleasure; there are children around (mostly white) and Tarrant is mid-broadcast. The common theme is chaos, laughter and naughtiness – Tiswas was all about transgressing the boundaries of what was generally allowed on a Saturday-morning kids’ show.

  My journeys to Birmingham from 1978 to 1981 always seemed to involve a momentary dropping of whatever mask I was wearing at the time. The process of generating the chaos that was Tiswas involved a bit of work, to say the least, but it was fun. And I was desperate to stay in it and be one of the gang.

  Not only was it fun, but everybody seemed to watch it! There were some programmes that I did – like The Ronnie Corbett Show, Crackerjack or Blankety Blank – which people didn’t talk about much. But if I did some stupid half-joke on Tiswas on a Saturday morning, all manner of people would quote it back to me the following week. If I’d realised then how good Tiswas was, I would have tried to be better earlier. It had such a wide-ranging effect on its target audience that even now taxi drivers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, firemen, police officers all stop me and make a point of saying, ‘That bit on Tiswas where you sawed Sally in half was genius.’

  The thing I liked most about being on the show was the idea of being in a gang. Like the Grazebrook Crew in Dudley, the fact that I had back-up was irreplaceable. I could get a second opinion about something – a bit, a joke, a voice. Unlike being in the clubs, when I worked with the Tiswas posse I wasn’t alone. My colleagues were around me, encouraging me to do the best I could, and if it wasn’t going well, taking the piss out of me as I struggled with the material. Live on air.

  Working for Tarrant – alongside Bob Carolgees, Sally, Gormo and the rest – was a welcome release from the trials and tribulations of being in the Minstrels’ show, and I’ll always be grateful to him.

  MAMA

  My mama did not disappear from my life altogether once I was on television – sometimes she was on there with me! She appeared on Tiswas: there was a fake This Is Your Life skit in which Chris Tarrant stuck what looked like a dead ferret on his head, spoke in a terrible Irish accent (in homage to Eamonn Andrews) and made up really bad jokes about his guest. He’d done it for John Gorman and Spit the Dog, so it had to be my turn at some point. And suddenly, here he was, popping out from behind a bush and surprising me (I had no idea this was going to happen):

  ‘Lenny Henry, man of mystery, star of stage, screen and telephone, you first appeared on television’s New Faces, and God knows how, but you managed to win, to eke out a pathetic career and to carve out a place in the nation’s hearts … You had no idea, but this mornin’, Lenny Henry, THIS IS YER LOIFE!’

  There’d be loads of jokes about how crap I was, about my clumsiness on camera, about me nearly choking from shaving foam and passing out, and then coming to with the Nolan Sisters looking down on me with great pity in their eyes …

  And then Tarrant looks at me and says:

  ‘And here to tell us more about him is … Lenny’s mum!’

  We’re live on TV, and I’m looking at him as if to say, ‘This is a joke, right? Is Frank Carson going to come out here with an Afro wig or something?’

  Suddenly, my mama walks out onto the Tiswas set, takes a seat and starts talking about me, with Tarrant guiding her through the questions. I don’t remember what she said. All I could think was, ‘MY MUM’S ON LIVE TV!’

  This wasn’t the real This Is Your Life show, so there was no real danger of Mama revealing anything too embarrassing. However, my heart did flutter throughout, as I prayed that she wouldn’t bring up hitting me in the face with a frying pan or throwing a chair at me …

  I was relieved when it was over. I think she enjoyed herself; it was as if appearing on live television was the most natural thing in the world. That’s probably where I got the whole ‘Don’t mind being on live telly’ attitude. The mango doesn’t fall very far from the tree.

  Later on, she would go to various shows and come backstage, though she didn’t enjoy seeing me in the clubs because of the cigarette smoke and the proximity of liquor. Her Christianity took precedence, and she would politely decline invitations to Blazers in Windsor or Caesar’s Palace in Luton.

  She did show up when I performed at the Night Out in Birmingham. The Night Out was one of the country’s foremost cabaret venues, a massive cavern of a place with a thousand tables, each one carrying a tiny pink lampshade. Meals were provided in a basket, and there was a live band and a glitzy compère. Mama loved coming to watch me there; in her mind, it felt like I’d arrived in show business. It didn’t matter that we’d come from just down the road in Dudley; the Night Out was a proper show business venue, not some disco or working men’s club.

  That night I had to step in for Tommy Cooper, who had gone AWOL. I did a terrible show. It was too daunting, too far out of my comfort zone. You couldn’t see the audience, just all these little pink lampshades. To all intents and purposes, this was the big league, but for me it was way too early. I needed more experience, more stage time, more direction …

  THE FOUR BUCKETEERS

  By the time Tiswas ended in 1982, we knew that a new show was in the offing. Tarrant had been doing solo gigs for a while, cashing in on the programme’s popularity with students by doing shows filled with party games involving pies, nudity and buckets of water. During the final series, he began touting the idea of a group version of his solo outings, calling his gang the Four Bucketeers – Chris, Bob Carolgees and Spit the dog, John Gorman and Sally James. I was an honorary bucketeer and would show up whenever I could. They made an album that featured ‘The Bucket of Water Song’ (‘This is the song we lovers of water sing’) and ‘Water Is Wonderful’.

  John’s experience in the chart-topping group the Scaffold gave him au
thority in the studio, and he wrote the songs’ melodies and showed us how to sing them. ‘The Bucket of Water Song’ charted, and the guys got to be on Top of the Pops. However, the BBC’s health-and-safety rules being what they were meant that they couldn’t throw real water at each other or the audience.

  Rock-concert promoter Phil McIntyre came up with the idea of a ‘Tiswas Live’ experience, featuring the Four Bucketeers and special guests. Chris and co. began slipping off at weekends to do ‘golden wheelbarrow’-type gigs, where they needed said wheelbarrow to carry all the money home. I was invited to Bishop’s Stortford to do a gig. I don’t think I’d quite realised just how big Tiswas had become. We were in a venue that could safely hold about five hundred people, yet there were at least eight hundred punters crammed in and more than three hundred dissatisfied wannabes milling around outside. The stage was a hastily assembled affair made up of two big tables and some crates – an accident waiting to happen. The show itself was a hodge-podge of party games and the hit record, ‘The Bucket of Water Song’. It was brilliant. I made an appearance as Algernon and performed the ‘Algernon Wants You to Say “Okay!”’ song. Trevor McDonut was in the house too. It was absolutely superb being on stage with the Tiswas posse. It was like being in a band, but covered in shaving foam – genius!

  Bishop’s Stortford was a triumph, but Stockport was the revelation. As we drove up to the venue, we saw a long line of people queuing up outside. There were kids, of course, running around like hyperactive doppelgangers demanding entry, but there were also lots and lots of grown-ups: students, nurses, teachers, Hell’s Angels, heavy-metal fans, mods, rockers, Teds – you name it, they were there. When we got inside, we were surprised to learn that the house was full and the majority of the punters stacked up outside would not be able to get a seat. Phil McIntyre later told me that it was that show that convinced him that comedy was about to become more profitable than rock ’n’ roll. I had never had a reaction like it. It was akin to my first appearance on New Faces. The audience were fanatical, maniacal, screaming, yelling and shouting. I think it was this response that finally gave me the courage to quit the Black and White Minstrels. Why would I stay with them when you could get reactions like this?

  My experience on Tiswas was glorious and would prepare me for the next stage in my career – and it was all thanks to Frank Carson. So I jumped.

  SIX AND THEN THREE OF A KIND

  My time on Tiswas encompassed my transition away from the Black and White Minstrels’ summer season and winter shows, as well as the move from working men’s clubs to the big cabaret venues and theatres like the Wolverhampton Grand and the Colston Hall in Bristol. I was growing up fast and taking some knocks along the way, but finally things were panning out.

  I had told Robert Luff that I no longer wanted to be connected with the Minstrels. After the Bournemouth shows and any remaining one-night stands, I was out. He was saddened that I wanted to jump ship, but once he heard my reasons, he totally understood. Our arrangement, although not contractually binding, was based on a handshake and could be terminated at any point. It was only by becoming more mature that I saw that I needed to get the hell out of Dodge.

  Meanwhile, back in Birmingham at the Cheapest Show on the Telly, we ploughed through two series that did reasonably well when shown on BBC Midlands, triggering a response from the BBC’s main HQ, where the commissioners who had seen it decided they wanted to co-opt Don Maclean and me for a new show called Six of a Kind.

  This was a huge opportunity. The BBC gave us a pilot, with Ernest Maxin in the hot seat as producer and inspirational centre. Ernest was a live-wire producer with a pugnacious, boxer-like appearance and a low-centre-of-gravity swagger to his walk. He displayed a Gene Kelly-style confidence and could sing, dance, sell a punchline … the works. He knew how to make light entertainment for television, having been the producer of The Morecambe and Wise Show, where he was responsible for all those wonderful moments – the ‘Singing in the Rain’ sketch, the ‘There Is Nothing Like a Dame’ parody, the stripper routine in the kitchen. He was the light entertainment golden boy at the BBC, and now he was in charge of creating a brand-new variety show for the main channel, with a cast of up-and-coming talent.

  My feeling now is that the show was too much, too late. There were six of us: the gorgeous black chanteuse Pearly Gates; the northern powerhouse Leah Bell, who was like a late-twentieth-century Gracie Fields; Karen Kay (Jamiroquai’s mother), a superb impressionist with perfect pitch who could sing and dance and who did a brilliant Barbra Streisand, Cleo Laine and many more; Don Maclean, our principal comedian; David Copperfield, from Doncaster, our resident knockabout comic, but also a talented musician and singer. And me.

  Although it was lovely to be all lumped together like this, we knew we were doomed before we’d even started. They didn’t consult us on what we actually wanted to do in the show; there was no sense of collaboration. Ernest had big ideas for numbers, dance routines and so on, but the comedy was of the ‘six old people on holiday and they argue’ variety. There was no room for stand-up or character comedy, so the comics (Don, David, Karen and I) all felt a little diminished.

  In the meantime, Ernest was getting us to sing six-part harmonies and perform tributes to the American South with ‘I Wish I Was in Dixie’. Pearly Gates and I cracked gags about how ‘If we was in Dixie, we’d be swinging from a tree or some shit.’ Ernest didn’t mind the odd joke (he had worked with Morecambe and Wise after all), but he would get grumpy if we were having too much fun and not applying ourselves. David and I did a boxing sketch in which the rhythm of me doing bag work became an excuse for me to bust moves in a Fred Astaire style. Ernest made us sit on six tall stools and sing ‘Feelings’. David was so funny during this that I just could not keep a straight face. Ernest was cross with us sometimes. Why couldn’t we take things seriously?

  In the end a BBC strike did for us. We came into work one day and there was a picket line. None of us would cross it, so we all went home. That was that. The next thing, Robert Luff was being called in to Television Centre to discuss the future of Six of a Kind, and what they might do instead. He and the BBC’s head of entertainment, Robin Nash, discussed the idea of me and David working together, possibly alongside a female talent, on a show called Three of a Kind. It was no reflection on anyone in Six of a Kind, but the general consensus was that a cast of six performers, no matter how talented individually, felt too cumbersome and not really representative of what was going on in comedy at that particular moment.

  THE ZEITGEIST

  While I was transitioning from Tiswas to Three of a Kind, the Comedy Store opened in May 1979, offering more anarchic, left-leaning performers and material. A turf war was being fought between younger, more anarchic comics and their more conservative predecessors. It was an important transition. The old-school comics had been mining the same old seam – mother-in-law jokes, stories where minorities were the butt of the joke. Alternative comedy, in this first instance, was an attempt to create humour that was more inward-looking. Alexei Sayle was the Comedy Store’s first MC, and he would take the piss out of the middle class and the dope-smoking left. He had various characters: a cockney mod, for example, or a journalist for What’s On in Stoke Newington (basically a big piece of paper with ‘F*ck all’ written on it).

  Alexei was the first superstar of alternative comedy. You only have to watch his performance on the Amnesty International film The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball to see the influence he had on other emerging comedians. The jokes were no longer about minorities, wives and girlfriends, travelling salesmen or landladies; they were about growing up in Wales, being a student, not being able to maintain an erection, not losing your virginity and not being very good at activism.

  People created a new language and new characters. Pauline Melville was brilliant at this, as was Rik Mayall. He could make you laugh just by raising an eyebrow and saying, ‘What?’ Adrian Edmondson was energy on legs. He made self-harming on stage
look really easy to do.

  What I didn’t know was that I was about to be hurled into this world of alternative comedy, which brought with it new relationships, a new TV series and a new life. Who would I be now? It was all to come, and I couldn’t wait. I leapt.

  Who Am I #17

  This is me and my mama. It’s early on in my career. Mama seems very relaxed with it all. I’m showing my teeth and my hair’s every which way. One of the reasons I look confused is because at this point our relationship was changing. From the moment I began to get attention from the media, I think she realised, quite cleverly, that from now on she would have to treat me differently. She did not interfere with my contracts or choice of shows. She was broadly encouraging and was available to take lots of pictures and talk to the press when called upon to do so. In my brain, when she walked on Tiswas and took part in a spoof This Is Your Life, to much hilarity amid the caged and uncaged members of the audience, I kept having flashbacks of Mama hitting me in the face with a frying pan.

  It took a while for me to accept this new version, and of course in the end, when she was prepared to talk about her struggle to leave Jamaica, set up home here and raise a family in a hostile environment, I began to understand her predicament. This is a nice photo. I wish we’d been like that for longer. (Getty)

  Afterword

  And so it ends – but there’s more of my story to come. I didn’t intend to finish at that particular point, but it just felt like it was the right moment to hit the ‘Pause’ button before going off on another 100,000-word jam session on the life and times of Lenny Henry, c.1980 to the present day. Writing a memoir plunges you back into places you may not want to revisit, smack dab into the past, where all those monsters and ghouls still lurk, ready to scour your soul with emotional Brillo Pads.