Rising to the Surface by Lenny Henry

Author:Lenny Henry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

I relaxed a little as we wrote and hung out. As long as Kim was there, I figured we’d be all right. We had strong building blocks in characters like the Blues Singer, the Preacher and Theophilus P. Wildebeeste, the sexiest soul singer in Christendom. But what I was desperate for – and what was lacking – was some top-quality stand-up. The first night I went on-stage at Catch a Rising Star the words turned to ashes in my mouth. I was exposed: everything I was doing was Pryoresque, and noticeably so. None of the material spoke to being black and British with a Jamaican heritage, which is what I should have been talking about.

We went to all the comedy clubs to give me a taste of how things went down in this new territory. We wrote material every day; I got up and tried it out most nights. We wrote about being black and British in America and being mistaken for hoodlums. ‘People kept saying to me, “When you go to New York, watch out for the big black guys.”’ There was a good opening line: ‘Good evening, my name is Lenny Henry – yes, there are black people in the UK. We’re called “the accused”.’ They liked the whole ‘the cops pulled me over and I opened my mouth and sounded like the Duke of Edinburgh and they let it slide’-type material. It was a genuine blast to be on-stage over there.

We got material from my lived experience. I found twenty dollars on the sidewalk that had been accidentally dropped in front of me by a guy and his girlfriend. As I approached them with the money, they looked back then began walking faster. So I walked faster until, eventually, we were all running. I was shouting, ‘Excuse me, you dropped this.’ The guy’s shouting over his shoulder, ‘No, no, buddy. You keep it!’ (In real life they just sped up and eventually ran like hell.) One day I was profiled and followed around a shop by a security guy with a radio: ‘Check out the black guy … I’m following the black guy.’ That went in the show as well. Everything else was material I was already doing, and it began to gel. The section we cut together of us in NYC really worked. I felt it showed me off to a good advantage. A lot of people saw it, including my mum.

And all the way through that process, Andy kept saying, ‘We should do something else. What do you wanna do? What ideas do you have?’ He was like a runaway train. He wanted to make more content, generate more ideas. I was blown away by his enthusiasm; he was probably one of the first people I’d met with as much energy as me. I mentioned to him that very few British comedians had made a feature film of their show. I could be the first one. So we made Live and Unleashed and, for a moment there, I thought it had changed my life for ever.

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