Sir Lenny Henry: A Life on Screen
BBC Two
★★★☆☆
Last Tango in Halifax
BBC One
★★★★☆
There was a period in my childhood when the school playground would echo to the cry of one word: a long, gravelly “Ooookkkaay!” The teachers were presumably baffled, but then they weren’t watching the kids’ show Tiswas every Saturday morning. For that’s where the future knight of the realm, Lenny Henry, was creating bedlam through a variety of guises: a certain bearded botanist, a newsreader named Trevor McDoughnut, the mad reggae-man Algernon Razzmatazz.
The catchphrase belonged to Algernon and the clip of him singing along with a bunch of youngsters to it in Sir Lenny Henry: A Life on Screen was visible proof of just how infectious Henry’s exuberance was back then.
Last night’s tribute programme — the televisual equivalent of a lifetime achievement award — was far more fun when recalling those early years, exhuming clips you don’t often see repeated: Henry’s Frank Spencer on New Faces, his Three of a Kind skits, his lover-man Theophilus P Wildebeeste. After that, the show snoozed into a cursory list of Henry’s latter achievements: his charity work, the thesping, making polished blues music.
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As such, if the whole programme had been about his earlier years it would have worked better, not just for going deeper into the life of the young “comedy jukebox”, but as an interesting perspective on the state of British TV in the racist old 1970s and the alternative-comedy era of the 1980s.
Henry’s shtick was initially based on jokes about his being black, whether by doing impersonations of white personalities or having fun with Caribbean archetypes. This was a source of shame for Henry when it came to starring in The Black and White Minstrel Show, which, as he recalled, he near-unwittingly signed up for (he didn’t go into quite how much it apparently scarred him). Yet embracing colour as a source of comedy empowered him and made him so popular that he paved the way for more diversity on TV.
I admire Henry for “exploring the boundaries of his talent” in recent years (as Michael Grade gushed), but it’s those old characters, the funny stuff, that I wanted to see more of, and which I’ll always recall with fondness.
’Tis indeed the season for such one-off specials, but in the case of popular dramas, these can sometimes feel like stop-gap versions of the real thing with added sentiment. Thanks to Sally Wainwright’s superior brand of earthy realism, there was no tinsel in Last Tango in Halifax, however. Its seasonal streak was instead aligned with the yuletide sense of the numinous. Or, rather, it was full of ghost stories.
Gillian (Nicola Walker) thought she was haunted by her ex-husband because of a squeaky barn door and some sharp machinery apparently turning evil. Later some old bugger regaled the family with the tale of a terrifying haunting.
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Sounds ridiculous and, well, it was rather, but the naturalistic acting on this series makes it believable, burbling along to Wainwright’s ear for bickery, everyday humour. I particularly liked Celia (Anne Reid) explaining the brain-training benefits of doing am-dram in later life: “Learning lines keeps your neurons, er, neuronating.”
james.jackson@thetimes.co.uk