Imagine: Lenny Henry: Young, Gifted and Black, review: a remarkable – and occasionally uncomfortable – look at the many faces Lenny Henry
Everything on the BBC these days stands accused of being “woke”. A same-sex dance in Strictly? An invented heroine for The War of the Worlds? A black Mrs Cratchit in A Christmas Carol? Pass the smelling salts! But perhaps all of this is one long act of atonement for a programme that will forever blot the BBC’s copy book: The Black and White Minstrel Show.
Looked at from the 21st century, it is quite astonishing to think that a show featuring white men in blackface remained on air – on the BBC! – until 1978. How to explain its 20-year existence now to those of us who remember it, let alone millennials who have never heard of it? And there each week, smiling out at the viewing millions, was a sole black performer: Lenny Henry.
The show is a painful memory for the star, as we learned in Imagine: Lenny Henry: Young, Gifted and Black (BBC One). Only 15 when he successfully auditioned for New Faces, wearing his Sunday best because they were the only clothes he had beside his school uniform, Henry was signed up to the Minstrel Show as an unworldly 16-year-old. His recollections of that time, he said, are “a duvet of sadness”.
The Lenny Henry you know is probably that eager kid doing Frank Spencer impressions on New Faces, the zany team member from Tiswas, or the comedian who regularly popped up in the Eighties as the leather-trousered Lothario Theophilus P Wildebeeste. All of those incarnations featured in this documentary, but they felt a world away from the Henry of today.
It is not just that his career has progressed – a successful transition to serious acting, with the Telegraph’s Charles Spencer hailing Henry’s Othello as “one of the most astonishing debuts in Shakespeare I have ever seen” – or that he has become a university chancellor, doctor of philosophy and champion of diversity. But he also cut a sober, reflective figure who no longer feels the need to please by making jokes about his skin colour before someone else gets there first. At times it made for an uncomfortable discussion, for the viewer and for Henry, as the programme confronted Britain’s attitudes towards black artists.
This insightful film delved into his early years in a tight-knit family with a mother he adored but who would administer brutal beatings for the most minor infraction (on one occasion, Henry recalled, she hit him because he had fallen off a wall and hurt himself). But this was not just a personal history; it was also a social history of race relations in post-war Britain. Against that background, Henry’s rise to something approaching national treasure status is a remarkable one.
