Cecilia Noble press clippings - British Comedy Guide (original) (raw)
In Lenny Henry's Danny and the Human Zoo (BBC One), his thinly veiled autobiographical drama of rising as a black comedy star in the 1970s, the last 20 minutes dealt with the self-disgust our hero felt after performing on the same bill as white men in blackface.
Earlier, we saw Danny and his family watching telly in their Dudley home. Like the rest of the TV nation, they giggled at Brucie on The Generation Game and Michael Crawford's Frank Spencer. And then the Black and White Minstrels came on. Smiles switched to open-mouthed disbelief. Just as, you'd suspect, happened in Henry's family living room.
Much of the appeal of Danny and the Human Zoo was the light it cast on its writer, that outlier for black British entertainers, and the compromises he made as a naive teenager in this racist realm. That wasn't how the Queen put it when she knighted Henry in June, but, you'd like to think, it's one of the reasons he was honoured.
In the drama, Danny blew up his showbiz career by coming on the Blackpool stage naked apart from tribal makeup - and telling his audience a few home truths. As security goons chased Danny, looking like a naked Fela Kuti, around the stage, Benny Hill chase music started up. Nice period touch. I wish they'd let that scene run longer.
There was wish fulfilment in this and the denouement in which, having rebelled, Danny returned, tail between his legs, to Dudley. There, Danny (a pitch perfect performance of innocence from Kascion Franklin, if not quite as disarmingly cheeky as the young Lenny was) got the girl (the sweet stand-up black one, not the fair-weather white one) and reunited with his fond but invertebrate white mates, and with his family. "Jamaicans don't have parents," Danny told his mates. "They have drill sergeants lamping them around the house." Really? In the drama, the love that Danny's endearingly firecracker mom (Cecilia Noble played her superbly as hard as nails and brittle as pressed flowers) had for her son looked unconditional.
And then there was Danny's sad British Leyland drone of a Jamaican stepdad, played with masterful restraint by Henry himself. Nice to see him inhabiting previous generations' ground-down shoes so empathetically. For 90 minutes Henry had a face like a wet weekend in Lower Gornal until, very near his and the drama's end, he gave us an unexpected laugh, sounding as lubricious as Lenny Henry's comic character Theophilus P Wildebeest. It was good to hear.
The truth about Henry is probably more painful than Danny and the Human Zoo suggested. Those photos of the young Lenny from the 70s, giggling amiably while flanked by two Black and White Minstrels with whom he was contractually obliged to appear, make difficult viewing in 2015. But white people like me don't get to call Henry on what he did then, nor, quite possibly, should anyone else.