Lenny Henry A Life on Screen

Lenny Henry started off as being a comic...

"Get up! It's time for Sunday school!"

You'd go, "God!"

And she'd go, "Yes, he's going to be there as well!"

..and has transformed himself, by a lot of hard work,

into one of the most brilliant actors.

Oh, my fair warrior!

Oh, my dear Othello.

And he's a man of many, many talents.

And it's amazing how he does it.

He makes it look so easy.

He's tried all sorts of things.

But unlike most people who try lots of things

and fall flat on their face,

the sickening thing about Lenny,

he can actually do most of them as well.

He actually can do just about everything.

Are you enjoying this?

I can think of few people in TV

who have used their fame more brilliantly.

I mean, in his case, for the diversity issue

and for Comic Relief.

Welcome to Comic Relief!

The BAFTA Special Award goes to a man I am proud to call a friend.

Please make some noise for Sir Lenny Henry.

I was born in Dudley in the West Midlands in 1958.

My parents had come over previously

to find work and to start a new life.

My mum came over first.

Because my Uncle Clifton said you can earn money here,

up to 30 shillings a week.

There was a sense of disconnect because my dad was still in Jamaica.

She fell in love with somebody while she was here.

And I'm the result of that.

So when my dad came over from Jamaica,

negotiations had to be negotiated.

Otherwise, things weren't going to work.

So...

What was amazing was my father raised me as his child.

But I always felt weird. I always felt a bit different.

And I always, kind of, felt odd.

I went to the Bluecoat Secondary Modern,

which is just up the road from our house.

Parents nowadays do research and look at league tables

and talk to people at Ofsted,

and personally go around all the schools in the area

to look at what school might be suitable for their children.

My mum looked out the window, and said,

"There's a school up there, that's where you're going.

"It's got a fence around it so you can't get out."

There were, like, over 30 children in most of the classes.

It was quite a diverse school.

There was a lot of racism flying around.

It was quite tough and working-class.

So I was a bit lost, and didn't really know

where I fit in for quite a long time, and...

Mr Brooks was the one, though, who recognised that I was...funny.

I was also the, kind of, comedy jukebox.

I was the one that entertained everybody else.

I killed my friends with jokes.

They thought I was hilarious.

Anything I did, I was the guy.

When I first started, I did Top Cat.

Which is sort of...

"OK, man, let's move, move, move!"

There was Top Cat.

"OK, Top Cat. OK, TC."

People would poke me and I'd just come out with a voice.

So that was my teens, really.

That's how I got to talk to girls. I had no conversation.

But could do Frank Spencer at the drop of a hat!

We're going to hear the patter

of tiny little feet.

Oh, no, no, no, no, Betty.

I'm not having another cat in this house.

AS FRANK: "Hello, would you like me to buy you a drink?

"I've got no money or anything, but I'll buy you a pony."

You know, ridiculous.

I got up at the Queen Mary Ballroom when I was 15.

I wasn't supposed to be in there, but we all snuck in.

It was just full of 14-year-olds.

I don't know what the management thought they were doing.

You'd probably get closed down now, wouldn't you?

But there were all these kids in there pretending to be over 18!

All trying to do their science homework

before Curtis Mayfield came on, you know.

There was a DJ there called Oscar Michael,

and he did a talent competition every week.

This one week, Greg and Max said,

"Why don't you get up and do that stuff that you do? It's funny."

And I was always a bit scared

and worried about doing it for the general public.

I just thought it was for us, you know?

And they said, "Oh, get up and do Elvis."

And Elvis was one thing I could do.

# Warden threw a party in the county jail... #

And I knew all the words.

# The warden threw a party in the county jail... #

So I got up and I did Jailhouse Rock.

And, oh, my God...

..for the first time,

I saw over 100 people all looking this way, at me,

with a spotlight on me, with a mic in my hand, sort of,

pretending to be Elvis - "Thank you."

# ..dancing to the Jailhouse Rock... #

And it was somehow entertaining.

And I just thought, "I'll have some of this! This is great!"

MUSIC: You Sexy Thing by Hot Chocolate

Enjoying yourselves, are you?

I'll soon change that.

A man walked into a bar.

Oops, was an iron bar!

# I believe in miracles

# Where you from

# You sexy thing? #

I went to this club in Birmingham to do an audition.

Bunked off school. My parents didn't know where I was.

This was the day where I thought,

"Oh, if this is show business, I'm in!"

I just thought, "This is fantastic! What a great world!

"You get to wear sparkly costumes, and you get to have props,

"and you get to sing songs and do jokes.

"This is a great world. I want to be in this world."

And so when they called my name, and it was about six o'clock,

I'd had all day to be scared.

And I don't know what was happening.

I think the gods just went like this...

And it just went... And I walked on stage,

and I put my Tommy Cooper hat on,

and I walked up to the mic and said...

AS TOMMY COOPER: "You may have seen some of these impressions before,

"ladies and gentlemen, but not in colour."

And the whole audience did this thing

where it wasn't just a laugh,

it was, kind of, a recognition of something.

And it was...

..extraordinary.

Extraordinary moment where the stars aligned and suddenly, I had them.

I had them there. And that was it.

I went on television in the January of 1975.

My life changed for ever.

# You're a star, you're a star

# A lame suit and a new guitar

# And I know that you'll go far Cos you're a star... #

OK, Paul.

He's a really new exciting face to television. Just 16 years old.

Enough from me - let him express himself in three minutes,

as we bring on Mr Lenny Henry.

APPLAUSE

THEME MUSIC TO SOME MOTHERS DO 'AVE 'EM

Everybody did Frank Spencer.

And this figure with a mac and a beret, we were going,

"Oh, no, it's going to be another Frank Spencer."

And this very young, bony, black face turned around going,

"Mm, Betty." And we went, "This is extraordinary!"

We saw the Queen on Christmas Day, didn't we, my darling?

That's my baby, Jessica, that is.

Oh! There's a lot of people out there.

We were in a transition

from never seeing a black face on television

to beginning to see people trying to break through.

And you had to acknowledge the fact, in a way,

which Lenny was very smart at doing,

that this was a surprise for the audience.

So, it's a comment about the period,

and the fact that he had to do that to get across to the audience

rather than, "He shouldn't have been doing that material," you know.

AS CLIFF RICHARD: # Got myself a cryin', talkin'

# Sleepin', walkin'

# Living doll... #

What was great about the New Faces thing was that,

as a Caribbean family growing up in the UK,

there weren't any representations of us on TV.

So for us, it was like, you definitely watched TV

when he was on - the whole house was watching it.

I'm Lenny Henry, and I'm on the New Faces winners show

a week on Saturday.

It's time you old faces moved over

a bit and let us new ones get in.

Old faces?

And I knew I was famous cos I was in Leicester

a few weeks afterwards.

And the bus driver stopped the traffic in the middle of the...

"Lenny Henry! I saw you on television!

"You were brilliant on New Faces!

"Thank you, my son! Keep going!"

This guy stopped traffic,

left his bus in the middle of the street,

got out, you know,

all the passengers like this, going...

"I'd really like to get to my destination.

"But the Jamaican bus driver seems to be talking to a celebrity."

# We wish you a merry Christmas

# We wish you a merry Christmas... #

I got signed up to do The Black And White Minstrel Show,

famously because I was at the Portman Hotel with Robert Luff,

who eventually became my manager, who was the entrepreneur

who owned the rights to The Black And White Minstrel Show

and they were having a philosophical conversation,

the grown-ups, about what kind of show should Lenny do.

And what I didn't know at the time, and I know this now,

is that the Race Relations Board had been giving Robert Luff stick

about The Black And White Minstrel Show.

No matter how beautiful the costumes were,

no matter how great the songs were, it was based on a racist premise

and you don't employ any black people.

It's wrong.

I didn't know any of that.

I just knew it was this old bloke who was talking about show business,

and I was slightly drifting off, and looking at the sweet trolley.

And then, 45 minutes later,

I'd signed away my whole career

to be in The Black And White Minstrel Show

for the next five years.

# We're dreaming of a white Christmas... #

You've got no chance!

It's very controversial, isn't it?

Because the whole business of, you know,

people blacking up or whatever.

But I mean, Lenny would have thought very carefully

about what he wanted to do.

I could have said, "No, I'm not going to do it."

But there was a childlike element in me that just thought,

"If I don't do what I'm told, I'll get in trouble,

"and they'll take show business away!"

So...

"They'll take all of show business away if I say no to this!"

So basically, I said yes, cos I was scared.

MUSIC: London Calling by The Clash

Then Michael Grade, in 1976, must have seen me,

because he asked me to come to London,

to London Weekend Television studios.

I'd seen him on New Faces, but more importantly,

I'd seen him on stage when, believe it or not,

he was in The Black And White Minstrel Show's stage show.

He sat me down

and he said, "Watch this."

And for half an hour, we watched this show called Good Times.

# Good times

-# Any time you meet a payment

-Good times

-# Any time you meet a friend

-Good times... #

It was extremely funny.

It wasn't about race.

It was about an ordinary family, having the same problems

that a white, working-class, blue-collar family would be having.

Hey, Junior, what you doing home so early?

-It ain't but eight o'clock.

-It was a bad scene, man.

I knocked on the girl's door.

Her father answered the door,

smelled the mouthwash on my breath...

..saw the gleam in my eye...

..and slammed the door right in my face.

And Michael Grade said, "Would you like to play the eldest son

"in a British version of this?"

And so I saw this fantastic episode of Good Times

and went, "Yeah."

Hello, gorgeous people.

Pretty sister. Lovely mother. Handsome father.

Get your wallet out, Samuel.

That's a real, "Could you lend me a couple of quid?" greeting

if ever I heard one!

I know. Forget it, sonny.

My wallet is so empty, boy, it would make a mugger cry.

Dad, Mum,

how could you even think I had anything on my mind

other than pure niceness?

And we got a fantastic cast.

Everybody said we wouldn't be able to cast it.

Carmen Munroe and Norman Beaton, who became a big star in Desmond's.

Norman Beaton was brilliant.

And Norman Beaton taught me as much about acting as anybody.

And Lenny was wonderful in it.

I mean, if he'd said no,

the show would never have happened cos I couldn't imagine

how else we would have cast the lead character.

Hello!

This is the Casanova of the Caribbean.

Otherwise known as Dial-a-Thrill.

Speak first, it's your tuppence that...

What? Who?

McDonald who? Oh, at the chip shop.

We could have been any family, really.

But the fact we were a black family

made us different to everything else.

So for two years, it did very well.

I was in a, kind of, a weird place as a performer,

doing the clubs and panto, and stuff,

and then Chris Tarrant came to see me in Great Yarmouth,

at the behest of Frank Carson.

AS CARSON: "You should go and see Lenny. He's funny."

There's a young black guy.

That black guy who did New Faces, Lenny Henry.

I went, "Oh, where is he?" He said, "He's down in Yarmouth."

I went to see him. The only thing I remember, really,

apart from him being just a big amiable guy,

was that his flies burst onstage.

I was improvising and messing around,

cos I didn't have enough material, really.

But I was messing around a lot.

And Tarrant was in that night.

I remember in the dressing room afterwards, we were chatting,

and he said, "That's not supposed to happen."

I said, "I thought that was part of the act. It's very clever."

He said, "No, that's the first time it's happened.

"Hope it never happens again!"

And afterwards he said, "I don't know what you're doing in this show,

"but that was pretty funny - do you want to be in Tiswas?"

# Saturday, Saturday

# Saturday is Tiswas day... #

What I thought he wanted from me was,

AS FRANK SPENCER: "Hello, Betty!" AS COOPER: "Thank you very much."

I thought he wanted me to do my act every week. But he didn't.

Thank you very much. I was driving past a farmhouse the other day,

and I saw the farm on the doorstep.

I said, "Hey! Six of your hens have just stopped laying."

He said, "How do you know?

I said, "I've just run them over!"

At the end of the very first series of Tiswas, we almost got rid of him.

We loved him - as a guy, he was brilliant,

brilliant fun, and we all looked after him as one of our gang.

But he then came up with this...

He said, "I think I'd like to do David Bellamy",

and we're going, "But, you know, David Bellamy's sort of big,

"and old and has got a beard.

"You're young and black look nothing like him."

He said, "No, but I could do the voice and whatever."

And that kind of changed everything.

AS BELLAMY: Well, it's really wonderful to be back here

-on Compost Corner..

-Compost Corner!

..with my wonderful friend, pig manure.

Now, what you need to do...

You found a thing to talk about every week

and you found a way to get jokes in.

And that meant you weren't doing your act all the time.

And that, kind of, saved my life.

Because it was live and it was very much made up, you know,

on the back of a beer mat,

he thrived on it.

And he enjoyed... He was able to do anything.

It meant I could improvise.

It meant I could mess around.

And I learned how to be on live telly,

because I was watching Tarrant,

who was a master of being relaxed on television.

# Saturday is Tiswas day... #

I suddenly had grown into this quite experienced performer.

It was nice to be back.

I think I've just changed my outlook on the whole situation.

And there was a record called...

# OK Fred...

# Now I'm a yaga yaga... #

# OK Fred

# Now you're a yaga yaga... #

And I thought, "Well, I should do a Rastafarian who says 'OK...'"

That was, like, I mean, really basic.

Comedy 101.

# I do not want you to say OK

# O-O-O-K... #

'My dad used to take bread and condensed milk sandwiches to work.'

I thought, "This guy should eat bread and condensed milk sandwiches."

The good thing about bread and condensed milk sandwiches

is you can really get into the dunking.

Oh, that's revolting!

It's really great. In fact, I'm dunking for Jamaica!

We did a thing called This Is Your Life,

where I was Eamonn Andrews with a silly wig on, and...

Lenny Henry, you thought you were here

to do an unconvincing impression of a well-known newscaster

and get a bucket of water thrown over your head.

In fact, Lenny Henry, comedian catastrophic,

This Is Your Life.

"THIS IS YOUR LIFE THEME" PLAYS

And one week, it was my joke This Is Your Life,

and then my mum walked on!

CHEERING

My mum is usually wrestling a whole sheep to the ground,

and cooking mutton soup on a Saturday.

Why is she here, in a TV studio,

where there are people in the cage being covered in water

every five minutes?

Why is my mum here?

Why aren't you at bingo with Bernie?

He was terribly protective about his mum,

who was a wonderful woman,

who made me the best Christmas cake of my life, every Christmas.

95% rum, the first Christmas, 96 the second.

It was the most wonderful cake.

I just had this silly idea that I didn't think would happen.

And I just said, quietly to my director, I said,

"Wouldn't it be good if we could get the real Trevor McDonald on,

"the real Trevor McDoughnut?

Chris Tarrant, I think, is the person who called me.

And I thought it was great fun.

THEME MUSIC TO "THE PROFESSIONALS"

There had to be great subterfuge

and I remember Chris Tarrant took me around the side of the building

and went in through a side entrance under a blanket.

Now it might surprise you to hear me say

that that's the first time I'd ever been made to enter a building

under such a disguise.

Walked him in. Took the blanket off his head.

And I remember vividly putting him right beside Lenny,

who was doing his Trevor McDoughnut impression,

and just sort of tapped him on the shoulder.

In Oxford Street today, a suicidal Japanese fighter pilot...

-Len...

-Pardon?

Argh...!

He was absolutely shocked.

Well, good morning, Daddy.

There he was, next to me.

And it was like this homage.

I suddenly... It was like...

You know, he was my hero.

-You listen carefully now.

-Can I throw some water?

No. No water. No water.

It would have been rather churlish not to, I felt,

and unstylish and uncool.

So I decided to allow myself to be doused with water

by Lenny Henry and his friends.

A doctor has tied a rope around his ankles and says he's certain

that the man will pull through.

It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

# Stand by me... #

I was a fan, and he was my fan.

And suddenly, we were each other's fan.

I was responsible for helping him to buy his first car.

It made my day. It made my year.

People still talk it to this day.

# Yeah, it's such a thrill

# Yeah, he's your little Bill

# Please tell me who's the dad

# It's you, Ron, Ron, Ron

# No, you, John, John... #

Paul Jackson had seen me.

He was the producer of Three Of A Kind,

and he found me and David Copperfield from clubland

and Tracey Ullman from a Les Blair play,

and he put the three of us together.

# I think I know the one

# It's you Ron, Ron

# It's you Ron, Ron... #

Paul Jackson was brilliant,

cos he allowed us to be the arbiters of our own show.

We got to choose. It was our show. We chose the characters.

We chose the sketches.

And I said, "Well, I want to do jokes that aren't about

"the fact that I'm black.

"I want to do jokes that support who I am,

"where I can espouse my community and my culture

"without having to apologise for it all the time."

All the writers went, "Yeah, OK, we've got you, Len."

The idea of Three Of A Kind was we weren't going to do

anything that was specifically ethnically defined, in a way.

So if we wanted a policeman,

it didn't matter if it was Lenny, or if it was Tracey, or whatever.

And the fact that Lenny was a policeman in some of the sketches,

it wasn't that he was a black policeman.

He was a policeman.

-Any clues?

-Well, we found the body here, ma'am.

He had a rope around his neck, a gun by his side,

and he was holding a knife.

So what do you think?

I think he were poisoned.

For the characters, I was encouraged by Tracey Ullman, who just said,

"You know, base it on members of your family, base it on anybody."

And because she'd done a kind of Mike Leigh, Les Blair,

improv-type acting stuff,

watching her peel the layers of a character, like an onion,

and really getting into it,

it made me want to do that too.

Christ, Chrissy, when are you going to get a job?

I don't know, Angie, I don't know.

We've had nothing to eat for months. All we had to eat is black stuff.

We've had boiled black stuff, grilled black stuff,

black stuff pudding. black stuff in their jackets...

The kids are sick of it.

They've got black stuff coming out of their ears.

What kids?

What do you mean, what kids?

We've got two kids.

-Since when?

-Since about 12 years ago.

Well, that's bloody great, that is.

On top of everything else, I've got two kids.

Nobody tells me anything!

He would have the physicality of the character,

and he'd know how the character walked,

how the characters spoke.

And then I'd think,

"He's doing that bit, so let's try and find the style."

My name is Dermot Wilkins, and I'm from Brixton.

Hub of the universe.

Brixton. That well-known South London resort.

Well, the last resort, anyway!

HE CACKLES

Delbert came from a guy called Kev,

who was a dancer I spent some time with.

I hung out with him one day and Kev had this, kind of, weird,

kind of, very, sort of, nice thing going on with his voice,

quite camp, but, kind of, absolutely in your face

about everything.

Very vehement about the way he talked about things.

He'd say, "You know what I mean?" at the end of everything.

"You know what they mean? You get me? you understand?"

You're a well crucial audience, you know what I mean?

HE CACKLES

And we did Fred Dredd.

Good evening. When this government came into power,

we promised to defeat inflation.

# Terrible and wicked inflation

# Caused by the last administration

# An economic dour situation

# All around us fists are waving in the air

# But what do we care? #

He was getting political attitudes

that he was able to express in a comic setting,

and with the, kind of, buffer of a comic character.

It was kind of alternative-lite, if you like.

So it had all the appearance of alternative comedy,

but with none of the calories.

# You know it causes me distress when I read in the press

# The stories of nuclear destruction

# How it would mean a population reduction

# And lower my chance of seduction

# But I don't want a bomb on my house... #

It's funny. He made fun of his culture,

but he did it in a way that was endearing.

It brought a lot of attention to Caribbean culture, you know,

in a really positive way, even though he was taking the mick,

and that's clever.

# I been hanging around for eternity

# Waiting for you to turn on to me

# But now you're here there's no turning back

# Prepare yourself for a laugh attack... #

When I got my own show, I had no idea

what I was going to do on the show.

I just, sort of, hoped it would be a bit like Three Of A Kind,

but just with me.

You're into Dermot Wilkins

on the Brixton Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC.

-Are you feeling totally spondicious? CROWD:

-Yes!

Well, I'm not, because my one and only two-litre Ford Wicked

has been stolen.

Yeah, that's right,

Vorsprung Durch Nicked!

And I migrated some of my characters from Three Of A Kind,

but I also was allowed to do different stuff.

My name is Deakus.

I come from, um...

..Jamaica.

Deakus - "Good evening!" -

was based on a man called Earl.

We called him Early, and he was the bread man.

He delivered bread and Jamaican Bun, he had a van,

and every time he came in, he'd go "Hello, hello, hello."

When I first come here,

people told me the only way to get a job in Hengland,

was with the old school tie.

So I wore my old school tie for three years.

Not a damn thing happened!

What made it more funny for us

is that you knew someone in your family who was like that.

That was the thing.

So watching him was just like watching your uncle,

or someone who'd come round on a Sunday for dinner.

And you'd all, you know... He was that guy.

He'd draw on everything. He's like a magpie, really.

If he sees any influences, if he sees anything he likes,

he'll internalise it and it'll come out somewhere,

in a sketch, or when we're writing.

My name is Theophilus P Wildebeeste.

They call me that because I'm a wild beast.

I shed hair all over your carpet.

And tonight, I'm going to sing a song for all the ladies out there.

If you look at the first Teddy Pendergass album cover,

it's pretty much what Theo ended up looking like.

# As I lay here next to you... #

But the music and the talking, that was all about Barry White.

I've heard people say that...

..too much of anything is not good for you, baby...

"My name is Theophilus P Wildebeeste."

It just, kind of, was my idea of what a soul singer talked like.

"Take your panties off." You know, it was all of that.

He was... Oh, man, he was just hilarious.

I was creasing up with laughter. I couldn't even cope. He was funny.

# I want you here with me, babe

# I want to look into your little

# Greeny, bluey, pinky eyes... #

He came along with the look, with the voice,

with the mannerisms and with the general attitude.

It was all there. So, for me, it was a question of, well,

let's just carve this into some comic material, then.

# Sit down and I'll show you

# Just what to do

# I'll show you how much I care

# Tell her about the rabbit

I will...

# I used to have a rabbit

# But he ran away

# So you'll have to run your fingers through my hair... #

I did Michael Jackson's Thriller

and that was another game-changer.

Because who knew I could do that?

I had no idea I could do that.

# I'm getting thinner

# Thinner now

# They say I'm anorexic

# And that would explain why I can't eat my

# Dinner... #

The other thing is his physicality -

for a big man, he's incredibly pliable

and he's a great dancer.

# I'm getting shriller

# Shriller now

# These guys are really frightening

# And they look as if they're fans

# Of Aston Villa

# They don't really like me

# I wish my mum was here Don't want to grow up

# Grow up... #

In those parodies,

he gets the movement, he copies what they do.

That, I can't do it, but that Michael Jackson, dum-dum...

..and the hand on the crotch thing.

# Need a girl

# It ain't no use... #

And he just perfects that.

And all you need is a few of those signposts in a song,

for an audience to go,

"God, it really does look like Michael Jackson."

# Don't get on with humans

# Best friend's a chimpanzee

# Not just a little crazy

# I'm completely off my tree

# I'm mad, I'm mad

# Three bricks short of a load... #

We then just, kind of, mined that scene with Lenny, you know.

All the great black entertainers, singers, you know,

Prince, Tina Turner.

We thought, "Right, we'll just go for it. We'll just do it."

# When I was a little girl

# I had a rag doll... #

We did Beyonce years later.

I mean, even years later, we did Beyonce.

And he looked ridiculous.

# Here I am, coming out of nowhere

# A girl with big ass, boobs and hair

# Not many people knew who I was before

# How I got rich, baby I'm not really sure

# The press all seem to gang up on me

# All day I'm hounded by the paparazzi

# Trying to get shots of me sitting on the can

# There's even rumours that I might be a man... #

What was great was I was allowed to belong,

I was welcomed as part of a gang,

which was, basically, primetime BBC One,

and I was given the resources to do it.

How many times, lad.

You'll never earn brass down t'pit.

It's plays, point work and pas de deux

that pay bills and put food on't table.

Now, get on with it.

But coal mining's the only thing that's ever made me feel...

really alive.

Get home and get in front of that mirror.

I want pirouettes until tea-time.

Go on!

All these great collaborators, Robbie Coltrane, Rik Mayall...

-Everybody...

-Action!

..Nigel Planer...

We can't go to Paris looking like this.

French and Saunders. All these amazing performers.

HE YELLS

I have to admit, I'm a bit upset now.

And it was amazing. I loved it. I loved doing it.

MUSIC: Do They Know It's Christmas by Band Aid

A percentage of all the money

from the calls that we receive today

will be donated by British Telecom to a new charity

called Comic Relief.

First of all, it was this initiative that began in the Sudan,

Helen Fielding did a live broadcast on The Late, Late Breakfast Show.

The sites opened up about a year ago

and they're full of refugees from Ethiopia.

It's full of happy children, life is starting up again.

They're well fed. It's organised.

And the point is that the money does work.

If you send money, it achieves results.

It was in response to Live Aid

and Michael Buerk's brilliant film footage

of what was going on out there with the refugees,

and with the famine and stuff.

Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill overnight

on the plain outside Korem,

it lights up a biblical famine.

Now, in the 20th century.

We all wanted to do something.

Everybody wanted to help, but nobody knew how.

I got back from a trip to Ethiopia.

I got in touch with anyone I knew in the business and said,

"Let's do a show like The Secret Policeman's Ball."

Richard contacted us and said, "I'm doing this show,

"a night of comic relief, at the Shaftesbury's Theatre,

"come and hang out."

So I said, "I'll do stand-up, and I'm going to do Theo."

"OK, cool."

My name is Lenny Henry, and as you can see,

I've had a tragic disaster with my hair.

So let's do all the jokes now before it gets boring.

Yes, I do look like a black aircraft carrier.

Yes, I do look like Grace Jones.

Theophilus P Wildebeeste sketch with someone who turned out to be Hugh Laurie's wife.

Jo, tonight is your night,

I'm going to let you have my body. All of it.

Even the long, wobbly, floppy dangly bits.

Jo was the best person to get on stage to do Theo

at that particular moment in time.

And she was as funny as I was. She was hilarious.

It was very, very funny.

You see, Jo, these nipples are yours tonight...

..to do with as you will,

because I feel so sexy tonight.

'And literally the night that show was over'

Lenny and me were sitting round and he said,

"Why do we always do stuff on stage when we're really TV people?"

"I think it should be a night on the telly."

And so he was absolutely crucial.

In that first year, Lenny and I together, as it were,

wrote 150 letters.

Letters used to exist then.

And Richard was very shy and just said, you know,

"I'll write the letters, and you sign them."

So that's what we did.

And I'd say to Lenny,

"When was the last time you bumped into Jimmy Tarbuck,"

and then we write, "Oh, dear Jim... So and so and so..."

It was his enthusiasm which was absolutely key.

So now on BBC One,

here we go with eight hours of entertainment

as we don our red noses

and hand over to Comic Relief.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

And welcome to a night of Comic Relief.

Yes, my name is Griff Rhys Jones.

And my name is Mel Smith.

And then he presented the show with Jonathan and Griff,

seven hours of almost disastrous TV.

Remember, whenever you laugh, ring.

And if you're thinking of laughing, then switch off...

What?

Whenever you laugh, ring.

And whenever you ring, laugh.

And wherever you're thinking about ringing, then laugh.

What do you think, Griff?

Forget me. I'm just doing what I'm told, all right?

It was incredibly chaotic.

Entirely unrehearsed.

We didn't know what quite they were going to say.

We were writing their script during the pre-recorded bits.

We're doing the plates now.

-Are we doing the plates now?

-We are, yeah.

And as we'd be talking,

things would come up on the autocue

which we had never seen before.

I believe we're coming live in here...

-Get on with it!

-Sorry!

I didn't know how to produce a TV show.

No-one had done a seven-hour one before.

But I think some of the optimism, enthusiasm and chaos

actually were quite...appealing.

And I...I kind of miss that now.

We're very slick now.

He was one of the greatest-ever comedian presenters.

There are a lot of lively presenters,

and there are lots of quite sorted comedians.

Lenny was actually able to be live, chaotic, and seriously,

a great comedian at the same time.

Does my bum look big in this?

-No, not at all.

-Ooh!

There was a fantastic moment in that first Comic Relief.

We were shooting links about why people should give money.

And we filmed with this young girl who we'd seen fetching water

from a well that was ten miles away.

You first.

And now a word from our sponsor.

And I just started to giggle, because I'd got my lines wrong.

And this girl started to laugh.

And they used that clip a lot.

Well, there you are.

THEY CHUCKLE

It was another image of Africa.

It was a way of saying, "Oh, we can equate this with Africa.

"We don't have to equate the emaciated child all the time."

What it comes down to is this.

To immunise Mohammed against the six preventable diseases costs just 50p.

50p.

One of the things he's also done is spoken from his heart after films

and put the script aside and said, you know, just as human to human,

"Surely there's something, you know, you want to do now?"

What we do know is this -

if this was happening to a neighbour of yours, you'd bust a gut to help.

If you knew somebody, you know, on your doorstep,

who'd walked 11 days cos they were starving

and they needed a quid for food,

you'd say, "Have a bloody quid," you know?

"Actually, here, have five."

The point is, forget geography.

These ARE your neighbours.

This IS your doorstep.

Please help.

Lenny was always sincere and honest in his reactions.

Kibera was a properly steep learning curve for me.

Lenny will be sharing his new home with a family of five orphans.

I spent one night in a horrible room

that was airless, that was next to three toilets

with an open sewer running down the middle.

It was really tough.

And I don't really know how we survived it.

It literally changed my life.

It changed my... I cried on telly. I've never cried on telly before.

HE SOBS

Oh, Jesus Christ!

He never feels he's doing enough

and he's always trying to go at it with truth.

So the... In the slums thing,

he just decided he would really try and experience life for real.

And the rawness of his emotions there,

and the sense that he still wasn't prepared for it...

He wasn't prepared for the conditions the kids were in.

He wasn't prepared to leave

this kid, Bernard, and his family all alone.

I wanted those kids out of that house now.

I was prepared to stop the documentary

and do something about it.

It was the first time that's ever happened.

Usually I'd have been, "Come on, we've got to keep filming,"

but I just thought, "This isn't right.

"We've got to do something." And so we did something.

So you're talking about buying a house, a small house.

-Yes.

-That they could live in. That's £1,200.

I can do that.

-This is your new home.

-This is our new home? Wow!

This is your home now. This is where you're going to sleep.

For me, it's a change in my life.

That's good.

We couldn't have done Comic Relief initially without Lenny,

and he's been responsible for many of the best serious moments

in our long enterprise.

When somebody from our industry makes a connection like that,

it's important to keep it going,

and it's not just a thing for five minutes

while you're on the telly -

it's something that'll stick with you for your whole life.

BOTH: Let the noses blow!

With Len, it's a sort of continuum.

I've been here for 27 years.

From the very first moment of putting a pie in someone's face,

to the extraordinary moment of him saying "We've reached a billion".

The total raised by Comic Relief and Sport Relief

since we first started is...

over £1 billion!

We announced £1 billion on this stage.

And that was...

Still, unbelievable, really.

Since 1988, over £1 billion has been raised.

It's an extraordinary achievement.

It's a billion

and that sort of money can really make a difference

to real people, to people.

This was a brilliant thing that the public have done

and I was just honoured and privileged to be a part of it.

# What I did for love... #

# Hollywood

# Hollywood swinging... #

Disney had this film that Eddie Murphy had sort of passed on

and they figured, "Who can we get that's cheaper than Eddie Murphy?

"Get that English guy who does all the voices."

And they got me to do it.

And suddenly I'm in America, sort of,

desperately trying to lose weight

and having this script that wasn't very good but thinking,

"I'm in a film! I'm in a film in America! Arrrrrgh!"

# Hollywood

# Hollywood swinging... #

And how weird is this - I'm playing a film

where I'm a white guy for most of the film.

So it's like shades of the Minstrels again!

I've gone from people blacking up to me whiting up!

What the hell is that, God?

Thanks a lot!

All right? You can open your eyes now.

Keep an open mind...

HE SCREAMS

You made me into a white guy? I can't believe this.

What's the matter with you? I wanted to look like Prince.

You made me look like Wayne Newton.

For a brief five seconds,

my name is above the title in a Touchstone movie.

And then, it was in the Indian shop, in the bargain bin,

before the plane touched down...

LAUGHING: ..when I got back.

I was really cross.

But luckily, I'd started to think about Chef while I was in LA,

cos I was so frustrated at the lack of control over there.

And my family were sending me magazines from, you know,

the Observer Magazine, Times Magazine

and I was reading about all these superstar chefs,

behaving outrageously.

I thought, "There's something in this",

and I formed a production company called Crucial Films.

-Well, I think...

-And we started to develop Chef,

and many other things.

Do you any idea of how many highly skilled man hours,

over a three-day period, have gone into producing this dish

which has brought to your table at the zenith of its powers,

its taste, flavour, textures,

temperature at the peak of perfection,

and without tasting it, you call for salt?

Your salt, sir.

I hate you with a passion you can only dream of.

And it was difficult.

It was me, and I was inexperienced,

so it did feel a bit like me yelling at people a lot.

But there was a sweet spot there where I thought,

"This is...this is great." I loved it.

OK, lads, over and under. You know what to do. Go!

Come on! Come on!

'Alive And Kicking came about

'because I was reading the newspapers'

and there was this article about a football team in Glasgow,

and they were all recovering junkies or alcoholics or something.

It was an initiative run by a man called Davie Bryce,

who'd been a convict, and an addict, and he'd come out of jail,

and he wanted to get better, and recover,

and so he'd started this football team

where if you were straight...you could play.

I spent five years trying to keep one drug addict out of this place,

now you send me a whole bloody teamful!

Think of it as a challenge.

And so I played the gangster guy, and Robbie Coltrane played Liam,

the guy who ran the rehab centre.

And Robbie and I were both known for comedy,

and suddenly, there we were,

on the front of the Radio Times

in this very serious drama.

Are you enjoying this?

They pay you to help people like me, and so far, you've done bugger all!

I think were finally seeing some channelled aggression, Stevie.

It was fantastic, directed by a man called Robert Young,

who was a very good director, he directed GBH.

He'd say things like, "I'm not quite believing this, Len.

"It's a bit jokey. Try and find a way to make this more realistic."

And he didn't say that to Robbie, because Robbie would've chinned him.

Oi! You do not walk away from me, woman.

Get your hands off me!

You don't touch me, right?

You're like a disease, you are.

And you're so bleeding pure, are you?

Get your stuff, you're coming home with me now.

You really want me back with you, you get clean,

then I might think about it.

Between us, we enjoyed the thing of being regarded as proper actors,

and so we sort of performed out of our skins,

because we wanted it to be good and we wanted to honour the material.

Occupy my time, right.

I want to occupy my time running a football team -

no poetry, no bloody games, no stupid confessions, just this.

I'll see what I can do.

Thank you ever so bleeding much!

David Thompson, who produced that film,

because of my contribution,

coming up with the story and the idea,

gave Crucial Films a credit,

and I'll always be grateful to him for that,

because it made me start to think that I should be someone

who comes up with stories as well as being a performer too.

I just kept thinking, "There's got to be another way of doing this."

And acting was the way forward.

My mum passed away, but it was like somebody

had pulled the rug away from your entire world,

and so I was just a bit off-piste,

thinking, "What am I going to do?"

And I decided to go back to school.

So I did an Open University college degree.

And I got a BA Honours in English Literature.

The penultimate year of that was a year of Shakespeare,

which I really did not enjoy.

But, by the end of it,

I just started to develop this thing of,

"I know what these plays are like."

And I'd kind of listen to the plays -

I'd drive into London, listen to the first half,

and drive back home to Reading and listen to part two.

I was listening to a play a day, every day, for a year.

Till he unseamed him from the nave to th' chaps,

And fixed his head upon our battlements.

And suddenly, inculcated within me, was this thing of...

It was like Neo, in The Matrix, you know?

Suddenly, it was like... "I know kung fu."

Suddenly, I knew Shakespeare.

Me and Shakespeare.

Shakespeare?

You've got to be joking!

You see, I had this strange allergy to Shakespeare.

'I did a radio show called Lenny And Will'

about how it felt like a very middle-class, Oxbridge thing,

it didn't feel like my kind of thing.

It was always people going, "How, fee, thy foe, thy filleth."

You know, it always felt like that to me.

People with lisps, with a cabbage down their front.

When I met Barry Rutter, who said to me,

"Shakespeare's for everybody. We're both working-class lads.

"Shakespeare's for us as well as them."

And he did, "O, for a muse of fire" from Henry V.

He did the chorus speech for me.

But he did it in a broad, unadorned Northern accent.

O for a muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention,

A kingdom for a stage.

And he blew my socks off, and I went, "I want to do that."

Oh, my fair warrior!

Oh, my dear Othello.

It gives me wonder great as my content

To see you here before me.

O, my soul's joy!

If after every tempest come such calms...

We've all been offered parts in A Midsummer's Nights Dream

and said, "Oh, yeah, maybe I'll have a go at Bottom", all that stuff.

But the first Shakespeare he did was Othello.

To pick it up and take on

a gigantic, major, dramatic role like that would require,

I suppose, that you opened yourself up

and said, "How do I do this?

For him to, you know, be known as a comedian

and then, suddenly, he's Othello, everyone was like,

"Really? Are you having a laugh?" But he was so good.

And then you suddenly just go, "Actually...

"I'll just have to shut up, really, because he's actually quite good."

If more thou dost perceive, let me know more.

Set thy wife on to observe.

Leave me, Iago.

My lord, I take my leave.

'I keep thinking of, you know,

'myself as a 16-year-old kid, you know.'

Going, "Shakespeare's rubbish!"

HE LAUGHS

So to be here now is extraordinary, you know?

This is the National Theatre.

We are in the Olivier, which is the biggest arena.

For the last three months, I've been doing Comedy Of Errors here.

He that commends me to mine own content

Commends me to the thing I cannot get.

'There's going to be a global telecast'

and I'm going to be performing on this stage,

with my fellow cast members

to an audience of potentially thousands, maybe millions.

You know, he could have made a very good living the rest of his life

doing stand-up and sketches and a bit of this and a bit of that.

But he's a restless boy

who is always exploring his own talent,

the boundaries of his own talent.

Many people who've been through the whole university background,

one of the things that distinguishes them all, God bless them,

is they're all know-it-alls before they start.

And whenever I've met Lenny,

he's been working at learning about something.

He was just an actor. You know, for us,

he was just one of the actors.

But you forget that he was probably being very heavily judged.

But it didn't feel like that.

Everybody, in all my acting experiences,

nobody has once said,

-"Yeah, but you're just that

-BLEEP

-comedian."

They all, kind of, go, "Come on, then, let's play."

Which of you two did dine with me today?

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

I, gentle mistress.

And you not my husband?

No, I say nay to that.

And so do I. Yet she did call me so.

And this fair gentlewoman, her sister here,

did call me brother.

What I told you then, I hope I shall have leisure to make good.

I felt like he was living a dream, performing.

Because he had...

He was so excited and had so much energy.

And it was, he was like a kid.

EXCITED LAUGHTER

I love acting. I want to be an actor.

So if anybody's out there, who has a job,

I'm on lennypleasegivemeajob.com.

Danny And The Human Zoo was a big thing for me.

The film ended up being about something real

but it was refracted through memory, magic realism and name-changing.

So I did all of those things and was able to tell my story,

but without it being MY story.

The stuff about my mum was true,

which was...tricky,

cos my family had to make a decision

about whether this was all right to do.

I think there's still things to be worked out about that.

You know, not everybody likes their business chatted about in public.

The bloke you were dancing with is the spitting image of me.

What are you...?

What are you talking about?

I'd known about my upbringing for a very long time

and I just thought it was time, you know?

I'm over 50.

If I can't say that my birth father

is different to the person that raised me,

then, you know, what good is being an adult?

Me fall pregnant with you in the autumn.

And me have to write and tell him the situation.

Calvin wouldn't break up his family and I didn't want that either.

And Kascion Franklin,

you've got to fall in love with that boy's face.

He was fantastic. He'd never done impressions before.

-AS TOMMY COOPER:

-Ladies and gentlemen.

You may have seen some of these impressions before.

But not in colour.

THEY LAUGH

He'd acted a lot, but he literally didn't know who Tommy Cooper was.

I had to...

AS TOMMY COOPER: I had to sit in this hotel room...

It was very funny - we were both in the hotel room

going, "Hello, Betty." "Is it like that?"

"No... Hello, Betty.

"A bit more..."

I said to my mum, I'm going to marry Betty from next door.

She said, "What about if babies come? What then?"

I said, "Well, we talked about it and if she lays any eggs

"then I'll just stamp on them."

We had a premiere in a cinema in Dudley.

People from Dudley, who were probably in that story,

were able to watch it unfold on a big screen

like they were watching On Golden Pond or something.

It was a...

That was a major moment.

I made a very low-budget, very lo-fi album with some friends,

and it became a thing, it was fantastic.

I made a record called The Cops Don't Know.

# If black lives matter

# Then how come the cops don't know?

# The cops don't know... #

'I wanted people to know that'

there was a solidarity there.

I'd seen the news about Trayvon and all these terrible shootings

and I'd read Gary Younge's reports from America

about all of these people being shot by the police.

And I wrote a song about it.

# If black lives matter

# Then how come the cops don't know?

# How come the cops don't know? #

I'm under no illusions that I can sing,

but I do love singing.

Jools Holland lets me sing with him sometimes.

# You got me begging

# You got me begging

# You got me begging

# You got me begging... #

Lenny Henry.

It's very much a fan singing.

And I love the blues, I've recently discovered the blues,

and I found that I can sing the blues.

# 21st century

# I'm just a bit confused

# Now you got me singing

# New millennium blues... #

# New millennium blues... # Yeah.

It really suits him when he sings the blues.

He looks great. He puts his suit on

and he's got the little Blues Brother thing going on. I love it.

I think it really, really works for him.

# A man walked past

# Just trying to stare me down

# And when I looked at you

# You would look at the ground... #

When he asked me to collaborate a couple of times with him

on his shows, I was jumping at the chance.

# Got my mojo working

# Got my mojo working

# Got my mojo working

# Got my mojo working... #

And after singing all night my voice was going,

so you could hear me going, HOARSE: # I've got my mojo... #

It was literally like Les Dawson.

# Got my mojo working

# Got my mojo working

# Got my mojo working

# Got my mojo working

# Got my mojo working. #

You've been fantastic. Thank you very much.

Goodnight, we love you.

It was an amazing night. And I loved it.

He's a very multi-talented individual.

And to have a career that spanned so many years, like, I mean,

consistently evolving into different aspects of himself -

that takes a lot of guts and courage.

And also, being really good at those things, too.

That's really very special.

Everything he touches, actually,

it seems that he makes a success out of it.

Because his heart is 100% in it.

-How old are you, Bernard?

-I'm 16.

-You're 16?

-Yeah.

-OK.

I'm 26.

I do think that his...

taking leadership of the diversity issue has been an amazing thing.

The speeches he's given, in the forums in which he's done so,

shows that he's really, really concerned about it.

If it feels like I'm banging on a bit about diversity all the time

it's because I believe in increasing it,

so that we truly reflect our fantastic nation,

ensuring that all those 14-year-olds out there,

superglued to their phones,

who hope to work in TV irrespective of their race, gender, sexuality,

class, disability,

can realise that ambition, as I was able to realise mine.

I bump into him occasionally now and the nice thing is,

he hasn't forgotten me.

And my part in his downfall!

No, my part in his career, which I'm very proud of.

AS FRANK SPENCER: Well, it wasn't a complete waste of time.

Some of these skills have come in quite handy!

He is a national treasure.

I know national treasure is a bit of a cliche, but he is.

You know, people love him.

And I don't know how he keeps managing to do it, to be honest.

People of Britain, give big phone.

But now... I've always wanted to say that.

I can't get you at the moment, I'm on the phone.

People respect what Lenny Henry does.

And they like what Lenny Henry does.

That's... You've scooped the pool if you can get all that.