As a child Lenny Henry discovered jokes were his superpower — but after 50 years at the top, he says there’s more to life than being funny
You had to try not to get on her bad side,” Lenny Henry recalls. “My mum could punch you through a brick wall like Popeye.” It is lunchtime in London, and the comedian/actor/writer is thinking about his childhood in a break from rehearsals for his new play, Every Brilliant Thing, which tackles a difficult relationship between a mother and son. Henry says his mother, Winifred, could get angry: she had come to England from Jamaica as part of the Windrush generation and found her expectations unmet.
“People said horrible things to her in the street,” he says. “So she had to cope with a lot. She gave you a good hiding if she thought you’d crossed the line. But when you are a kid all you know is, this woman’s hitting you.” He smiles. “But then she supported me. If I got bullied at school or hit by a teacher, she would sort it out. She was very tough, and I respect that.”…
Henry was allowed to add his own brilliant things to the script. “Lieutenant Uhura [from Star Trek] is me,” he says, beaming. “So was Saturday soup.” Come again? “My mum would make ‘Saturday soup’, with red peas, mutton, yam and sweet potato. I took it for granted as a kid, but she died in 1998 so, whenever I go to a Jamaican restaurant and they’ve got that soup, it usually makes me cry. That’s a brilliant thing. Every morning you should be thinking what you are grateful for: shoes, food, telly. It’s like that great record, Be Thankful for What You Got.”….