When it comes to Britain’s rocky history of race relations, 1975 was a significant year for two reasons. The Commons Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration published a highly influential report – and Lenny Henry became the first black performer on The Black And White Minstrel Show.
The first of these is now regarded as a landmark development in British race relations law, while the other went on to plunge Britain’s most celebrated black TV comic into what he later (much, much later) called ‘a wormhole of depression’.
That Sir Lenny waited 40 years before making this shocking claim in a 2015 newspaper interview – after decades in which he had achieved towering success in a TV career that often heavily relied on stereotyping his fellow black Britons – is a mystery he has yet to elucidate.
However, he’s been more than happy to make clear, again and again, that his stance on race has hardened sharply in the intervening years. And how the entertainer who became perhaps Britain’s first black ‘national treasure’, and who once claimed that he’d ‘do anything to make an audience laugh’, is now a tireless – some might say tiring – champion of wokery and social justice.
His latest fashionable cause is ‘reparations’ for slavery, and the multi-millionaire actor and comic is certainly not shy in his demands.
In a new book, The Big Payback, co-authored with TV executive and charity boss Marcus Ryder, Sir Lenny claims that an £18 trillion donation – yes, trillion – in financial restitution is the ‘only way’ for Great Britain to address its historic crime of slavery.
The man whose personal fortune has been estimated at just under £7 million believes that ‘all’ black Britons ‘need’ such reparations regardless of their ancestry, adding with some chutzpah: ‘We personally deserve money for the effects of slavery.’
The authors skate over the inconvenient fact that most of Britain’s 2.4 million-strong black population are of direct African rather than Caribbean descent, and so do not descend from slaves.
In 1975 comedian Sir Lenny Henry became the first black performer on The Black And White Minstrel Show
Sir Lenny presenting Jamie Lloyd with the Sir Peter Hall Award for Best Director on stage during The Olivier Awards in 2024
Instead, they argue that racism today, including high levels of black incarceration and unemployment in Britain, is actually a direct consequence of the Transatlantic slave trade – which was ended across the British Empire almost 200 years ago, costing the lives of 1,500 sailors in combat and from disease – rather than any number of more recent factors.
In an interview with, naturally, the Guardian to promote his new tome, the 67-year-old (whose marriage to ebullient comedienne and Vicar Of Dibley star Dawn French ended in 2010) claims that reparations are not merely a ‘cash refund for slavery’ but instead make good on ‘hundreds of years of being oppressed and downtrodden…it’s about society being rigged against you’.
Well, if society is truly rigged against Lenny Henry, it can sometimes be tricky to understand how.
Knighted in the Queen’s 2015 Birthday Honours List, he was made a CBE as far back as 1999 and received a Lifetime Achievement gong at the British Comedy Awards in 2003. A former Chancellor of Birmingham City University, he is also a Fellow of the Royal Television Society, a Freeman of the City of London, the author of at least nine books and the star of TV shows with names such as Legends Of Comedy With Lenny Henry, Lenny Henry: One Of A Kind and seven series of his eponymous Lenny Henry show (plus two Christmas specials) which ran between 1984 and 2005.
Critics, especially those who’ve long carped that he’s not actually very funny, have noted that Sir Lenny has done very well indeed out of being such a ubiquitous presence on British television, especially with the BBC, which has platformed him ceaselessly for decades.
However, after years of silence on such serious matters, Sir Lenny – born in Dudley, Worcestershire in 1958 to Jamaican parents – has been at pains in his later years to insist that he, too, has suffered racism during his life, including being bullied at school.
Understandably, he regrets appearing in The Black And White Minstrel Show during the 1970s, that once-popular light entertainment programme that relied mainly on white performers in blackface, and which critics decried as racially offensive even half a century ago.
In a 2019 memoir, Henry insisted he was used as a ‘political football’ by the show’s producers, who told the Race Relations Board that the format couldn’t be racist if this young and talented black performer appeared in it. He claimed he had to have therapy for the ‘trauma’ he suffered on it – although he gave a rather different account when he was asked about it as a guest on Desert Island Discs in 1989. ‘Interesting,’ was his then verdict. ‘Nice people.’
Sir Lenny’s latest fashionable cause is ‘reparations’ for slavery, and the multi-millionaire actor and comic is certainly not shy in his demands, writes Tom Leonard
He has blamed his family for failing to stop him joining the TV show’s spin-off live tour when he was an ambitious teenager with showbiz dreams.
But he can hardly blame them for the string of unflattering – some would say racially offensive – caricatures he created later in his career, from the Rastafarian Algernon Razzmatazz to Brixton pirate-radio DJ Delbert Wilkins, amorous R&B singer and ‘one-man sex machine’ Theophilus P. Wildebeeste, or the permanently randy West Indian pensioner Donovan Bogarde.
So how, his critics wonder, did this pampered star go from being a much-loved comedian to sanctimonious and self-appointed social justice warrior?
He has admitted the transformation has been ‘a slow burn’. But he’s certainly been making up for lost time.
In 2008, the same year he lucratively became the face of budget hotel empire Premier Inn, he modestly compared himself to Othello, who he was playing on stage. ‘I’m used to being the only black person wherever I go,’ he complained – like Shakespeare’s ‘Moor of Venice’ himself.
‘There was never a black or Asian director when I went to the BBC… I spent a lot of time on my own,’ he added.
He subsequently became an outspoken critic of what he insists is British television’s lack of ethnic diversity. During a speech at Bafta in 2014, he called the absence of minorities on screen ‘appalling’, and has regulary repeated similar criticisms ever since.
In 2017 he was a prominent signatory of a letter berating the BBC for having censured its notoriously frosty breakfast TV presenter Naga Munchetty after she had attacked Donald Trump over race. ‘Racism is not a valid opinion on which an “impartial” stance can or should be maintained,’ Henry’s letter intoned.
In 2021 he co-edited an anthology of essays titled Black British Lives Matter, and a year later he complained that the Glastonbury music festival was too white, saying: ‘I’m always surprised by the lack of black and brown faces at festivals. I think: “Wow, that’s still very much a dominant culture thing.” ’
The same year, after Amazon had provoked a backlash among J.R.R. Tolkien purists by casting black hobbits in its critically panned and woke Lord of the Rings prequel The Rings Of Power, Henry – who played one of said hobbits – was outraged. ‘It’s not for some man in his pants in his room eating Hobnobs to say bad things about it,’ he spluttered.
He continues to speak out whenever he gets the chance. In May, he publicly called on ‘brave allies’ to help tackle racial inequality, claiming that diversity was ‘under real threat’ and complaining that white, male and non-disabled people were calling all the shots in British broadcasting.
Viewers must decide for themselves whether British TV is, as Henry implies, still appallingly white – although it may be worth pointing out that even in 2020, before the Black Lives Matter protests turbocharged sensitivity over race, a comprehensive survey by the Creative Diversity Network found that black and ethnic minority people secured 23 per cent of on-screen roles on British TV, despite making up just 18 per cent of the population. (The figures were even higher in drama, children’s TV and comedy.)
As for his latest eye-watering reparations demands, many will wonder whether the country that gave this son of Dudley so many opportunities and advantages truly owes him anything else at all.
