Rising to the Surface: 'Moving and honest' OBSERVER

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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. Rising to the Surface is the 2nd volume of Lenny Henry's autobiography following on from where the first one ended. This volume starts in about 1980 and goes through to about 2000. It follows his continued rise to fame looking at his role in the children's TV show Tiswas through to getting his own comedy shows on TV.

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. In between trips to the hospital for various treatments, Mum was becoming a very capable advocate for her church. She'd go out collecting donations at local pubs and clubs with fellow parishioners. I had all the rationalisations for my weight: "Yeah, it's cool, my family are Caribbean; we're all big. We eat big food, we wear big clothes and we're proud of our appetites." To date, Henry has won the prestigious TV award the Golden Rose of Montreux, helped raise more than a billion pounds for good causes, diversified his industry and grown into a beloved elder statesman of television. Yet what shall it profit a man? The book’s lasting impression is a sad one: the dutiful son unable to forgive himself for being too busy to take his mother on a final trip to Jamaica.When Henry wrote this up in a first volume of memoir, 2019’s Who Am I Again?, it was “like ripping off a plaster”, he says. “I felt like I was being truthful about myself for the first time, where before I’d had to be economical. And now I can talk about my birth father without feeling like …” He does an impression of a tortured superhero in pain. He grits his teeth and groans. Then he drops the performance, Lenny again, and says: “They’re all dead now. I can’t hurt them.” 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? Lenny was interviewed on the green sofa by Alex Jones and Ronan Keating on the day of the book publication date. The episode can be watched here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001bn7q BBC Radio Two, Zoe Ball

My weight was yo-yoing not just because I was a greedy pig. I had been hard-wired by the gods to have this sugar intolerance. However, upon listening to his sequel to Who Am I? I think I now understand why he was so miserable - perhaps he was grieving? It couldn't be because we approached him to say hello, as we were respectful that his daughter was ice skating and the whole encounter lasted, what 20 seconds? Either way, Lenny obviously didn't care because he never so much as looked at us sideways, just blanked us. Dawn didn't. She was lovely. That said, now I've listened to what he was going through at the time. I understand. It’s easy to forget he became a household name at just 16, after a breakthrough performance on New Faces in 1975. His early gigs were in the now vanished world of variety shows and seaside summer seasons; soon, he was working alongside the rising stars of a new generation. As a working-class youth from Dudley with Jamaican heritage, Henry was never fully adopted by either the working men’s club circuit or the middle-class alternative scene. The book’s early sections are its most engaging: his struggle to find his niche doubling as an account of the landmark shift in comedy itself in the 80s, as acts such as Alexei Sayle, Ben Elton and French and Saunders moved the genre’s goalposts. Henry turns over a few answers in his whirring brain, perhaps trying to decide whether to take the question seriously or to treat it as a joke. He settles on something in between. “I want a special medal,” he decides. “It wouldn’t be a gold one. Not a silver one. What comes after bronze? Pewter? I want a pewter medal. And I want it to be engraved with the words: ‘He fell over in the race. But he participated.’” which my sister & I had mistaken as rude) when we met him decades ago, when Torvill & Dean appeared at Wembley Stadium. Lenny was with Dawn French then and during the break, their daughter Billie had the privilege of skating with Torvill & Dean. My sister & I worked as stewards (begrudgingly for extra money) and at my insistence, we approached a downright miserable Lenny and a very friendly and lovely Dawn, obviously over compensating for Lenny's silence. It must have been clear to all at the time that we wanted to speak to Lenny but as he was mute, the very lovely Dawn stepped in.

Finding my mum and then losing her

She was ordained as a lay preacher, and the photographs of her on that momentous day are joyous. She's got a big smile on her face and is wearing her church crown - we were all very proud. Towards the end of Rising to the Surface (which breaks off before his turn to academia, theatre acting and novel writing), Henry considers Winifred’s advice about life being a garden needing tending. He concludes with melancholy frankness that working within the entertainment industry can “make you the most neglectful gardener on Earth”. He was introduced to Shakespeare when he made the 2006 Radio 4 series Lenny and Will. Which saw him going "in search of the magic of Shakespeare in performance." In February 2009 Henry appeared in the Northern Broadsides production of Othello. He received widespread critical acclaim in the role.