When the comic and actor Lenny Henry attended the first writers’ meeting for his early-1980s sketch series Three of a Kind, he and his co-stars, David Copperfield and Tracey Ullman, were asked to speak about their vision for the show. Copperfield stood up and said he wanted it to be as funny as possible. Ullman said she didn’t want to play a sexy secretary, a nagging wife or any other female stereotypes that were a staple of the era. Henry, who had appeared on The Black and White Minstrel Show in the 70s, stated that he didn’t want his race to be the butt of the jokes: “I wanted the attitude to black performers to change. It was time that we were the maker of the joke, not simply the taker. Enough was enough.”
Rising to the Surface is the second instalment of Henry’s memoirs that began with 2019’s Who Am I, Again? Where that book covered his formative years, beginning with the arrival of his parents in Dudley, in the West Midlands, from Jamaica, and concluding in the late 70s as he began to establish himself in the entertainment business, this covers his rise to fame, starting with the children’s show Tiswas and going mainstream with the BBC’s Three of a Kind. In 1984, he was given his first solo series, The Lenny Henry Show, which ran on and off for 20 years. We learn how, in that time, he also co-founded Comic Relief with Richard Curtis; met and married Dawn French; toured as a standup; was the subject of a South Bank Show; wrote children’s books; and, most unexpectedly, recorded backing vocals for Kate Bush’s album The Red Shoes. There was also a failed attempt to conquer Hollywood with the comedy True Identity, in which Henry plays a crook who disguises himself as a white man to escape the mob. The script was terrible and he loathed the lack of autonomy. “In my mind I felt myself careening downhill towards a large wall in a car with no brakes,” he recalls. The film duly tanked.
