Lenny Henry prepares to stand up and be counted

Oct 5 2007 by Philip Key, Liverpool Daily Post

Lenny Henry turns the tables on Philip Key as he attempts to talk to the comedian about his new tour

LENNY HENRY was impressed to be talking to the Liverpool Daily Post, having established that it was not one of those free publications. “You have to pay for it?!” he declared with some surprise. “It must be a good one then.”

Having ascertained that it was indeed “a good one”, I was finally able to get on to the subject of our chat, Henry’s latest stand-up tour, which kicks off again on Sunday with a date at Liverpool’s Royal Court.

It was a subject I had raised when we first met, but Henry is one of those people who enjoys a bit of small talk first. “You’re not getting down straight to it, are you?” he responded.

“How about ‘how are you?’” Fine. “Where are you from?” Penge. “How long have you been on the paper?” Some 38 years.

The interview seemed to be going the wrong way until Henry finally got to the point, first declaring his interest in Liverpool – “a fantastic place”.

It was in Liverpool that he made his 1986 TV film, Coast to Coast, in which he played a Liverpool soul disc jockey who finds himself chased across the country by cops and mobsters.

“I had a fantastic time making that, staying in the Adelphi Hotel where my friend, David Knopov, a Frank Sinatra impersonator, more or less lived in my hotel room making sure my accent was right.

“It got a great review in the New York Post from Clive Barnes, who slightly criticised my accent but said it was a great film. But what did he know about the accent?”

Er, yes, but what about the tour?

It seems that this tour, under the title, Where You From?, is a sort of follow-up to his previous tour, Much Things to Say.

“What I love about this new show is that the characters in Much Things to Say still have a lot of things to say, so they are in this show as well.”

They include Lister the shopkeeper who rants against everything, his wife, Rachel, upstairs who thinks she is going to leave him as he is a pain in the posterior, Wolfman, an old man in a nursing home who hates it there, Daniel, Lister’s son fighting in Iraq, and the Rev Carmichael, “a dippy, trendy vicar who has a new parish in the ghetto”.

The new show will, however, include a lot more stand-up which he did not do before.

“I will be talking to the audience, doing routines and messing around, exhorting the wives of bald husbands to lick their husbands’ heads to see if they taste of chicken. I am going to talk about music at great length, as I love music and there is a big surprise at the end which I won't reveal but is very good fun. And there is a lot of joining in for the audience.”

And, yes, he will be singing. “I like a good sing so Lister pays homage to Justin Timberlake, and the Rev Carmichael gets them going with a good funky hymn.”

The tour was Henry’s own idea. There was a time he would enjoy moving from TV to film to stage and so on. “I’m getting too old to be chasing things any more,” he says (he’s 49). “I like touring and it is the easiest, well, more straight-forward, way of working for me.

“The ideas come from me, I choose who I want to work with and then we do it.

“With television, there is a sense of being asked to the ball and I am too reliant on other people. When you are a solo artist, I find you can't rely on anybody. If you want to put food on your table, you have to go out and hustle yourself. I like to go out and do my own thing.”

One thing he has got on this tour (as he did with the previous one) was to use a director. For Where You From? he called on the services of Hamish McColl, best known as half of the performing duo, The Right Size, the couple who created the show, The Play What I Wrote, at the Liverpool Playhouse.

“Having a director for the whole gestation of a show is unusual for comics. We usually put it together ourselves, edit it ourselves and exert quality control ourselves.

“To have a director saying, no you can't do that or that doesn't work is a huge luxury.

“He also helped with all the technical stuff as we have videos and pictures, too.

“A director is your first audience. You want someone there to tell you what isn’t wanted rather than find out when you get to a date. Rehearsals are a godsend.”

Born in Dudley, Henry first came to public attention in 1975 as winner of the New Faces talent show, but it was the anarchic Saturday morning kids’ show, Tiswas, three years later with Chris Tarrant, that gained him cult status.

He recently took part in a TV reunion show with the gang.

“It was a sort of Audience With show but Tarrant would not allow any questions so we put together some clips and had some new stuff in the studio. It was good fun actually, one of the most pleasurable days I have had for a long time.”

Tiswas later did a theatre tour in which I was on stage in Liverpool with them as one of the audience victims and hit with a rubber club which actually hurt quite a lot.

“Don't blame me,” says Henry. “I was not a bucketeer and I only did three of those stage shows and Liverpool was not one of them. I had my own gigs to do.

“But it was quite a phenomenon at the time with queues down the street. It was one of the few times I had been involved with anything culty. If you get cult status for any show and go on the road, it is going to sell out.

“But if you are a working Joe like me, you have to work hard to make sure people know your tour is coming. If it’s a cult show, people will just go to see their favourites.”

Tiswas was a physical show – Bob Carolgees nearly broke his knee – and people would slip in the gunge that was thrown about, says Henry. “The only time I slipped was on the reunion show where there was water everywhere, and I went down like a sack of potatoes and did not get up for some time. All I remember is the Phantom Flan Flinger looking down at me and asking if I was all right.”

He has got into shape for his new tour which runs until the end of the November, and will be followed by an Australian tour. “You have got to resist the temptation to stay in bed until midday and have brunch and get up at 9am for the gym. It’s like being Rocky on tour.”

One problem he did find was that, in three early dates, his voice suffered. “I went to see a voice specialist who stuck a metal rod down my throat to take a picture of my vocal cords. He said I had to take care of them.”

So each night before a show he has to do some steaming. “That’s sticking your head over a bowl of hot water and Friars Balsam and inhaling,” he explains. “The first time I tried to drink it and they had to stop me.

“I am told I don’t drink enough water. The advice is to speak wet, pee pale. You might pass that on to your readers.”

* LENNY HENRY is at the Royal Court, Liverpool, on Sunday.

philkey@dailypost.co.uk