Review of the second volume of the comedian's memoirs

Lenny Henry’s first biography, Who Am I Again? was a cracking read: a social history of a Jamaican immigrant family in a Britain that rarely made them feel welcome and a fascinating account of how the youngster escaped expectations to make it as an entertainer, even if it was via the dubious route of The Black And White Minstrel Show,

But in Rising To The Surface – which covers the years 1980 to 2000 – he has made it, and even though there are vertiginous ups and downs professionally, the book often has the tone of a man just going through his CV. Should you want the lowdown on how he collaborated with cast and crew on the 1980s and 1990s variations of the Lenny Henry Show or long-forgotten projects such as Coast To Coast, Bernard And The Genie or The Suicide Club, it’s all here.

It’s hard to see who would care about much of this. For example, on the latter, a 1988 film with two stars on IMDB, he reels off the credits: ‘I got to work with Mariel Hemingway, Michael O’Donoghue (one of the originators of Saturday Night Live) and Robert Joy, who featured in a Woody Allen’s Radio Days and a whole bunch more. I met a very charming southern costume designer caller McKinley Kirby (we called him Kinlo) He’d done some voice work (ADR) on a film called The Silence Of The Lambs…’

More significant for his career were his co-writers – Jon Canter, Kim Fuller and Geoff Posner – all of whom he praises fulsomely. But is there something telling that as a stand-up, he’s never entirely written his own material?

Through all the showbiz platitudes what emerges is a man suffering chronic imposter syndrome, but grafting like a mofo – sometimes at the expense of his family life – to prove himself and learn new tricks. Whatever personal toll, it worked. The man who could have been a flash in the pan with the cheesy impressionist act that won him ITV’s New Faces talent hunt at 15 is now a knight of the realm, a respected actor and a force for change in broadcasting.

In an eye-opening epilogue, he reveals the insecurities that have driven him, writing of having ‘no real ability' – at least in those early days: ‘I couldn’t really sing or dance. I’d forget the middle bits of jokes. I’d fall over or knock props over… I kept going, because what was the alternative?’

Throwing himself into his work hasn’t always brought the satisfaction he sought, either. He acutely feels a failure as a son for not always being there for his difficult, larger-than-life mother as her health failed.

That he’s been hard on himself over his career may be because of the burden he had to bear as one of the few black people on TV during these decades, Trevor McDonald and Floella Benjamin aside. He felt he had to represent his people in the way that Billy Connolly never had to be a totem for all Scots.

Further contributing to the feeling of being an outsider, he

never fitted in with either the working men’s club circuit he started on or the alternative comedians he would come to hang out with. Tiswas and its adult incarnation OTT might have been a perfect overlap of these two worlds, but when they divided again, his contemporaries starred in Comic Strip or the Young Ones while he was in the mainstream Three Of A Kind. Although the sketch show deserves credit for pushing against some of the cliches of the time, such as Henry’s ethnicity never being the punchline.

His dream was to emulate his heroes Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy, but he came a cropper in Hollywood, chewed up by the Disney machine in making the flop True Identity. It made him want to take more control of his work and he formed the production company Crucial, which also aimed to give a leg-up to other black talent. It’s both admirable that he’s still fighting that fight, and an indictment that he still has to.

Even more of a legacy comes from his work with Comic Relief, covered here but in no great depth. It’s peculiar how Henry sometimes skips over big things – Dawn French, his wife of 25 years makes only cameo appearances – while he goes into great depths on the technical challenges of shooting his sitcom Chef on film rather than video.

Yet Rising To The Surface is an easy read, and although the tone is lightly self-deprecating, the takeaway is that Henry has too much baggage to ever quite enjoy all he’s achieved, even if he often has fun doing it at the time.

• Rising To The Surface is also available from Amazon, priced £10 in hardback, £5.99 on Kindle.

Published: 13 Oct 2022