Sir Lenny Henry(1958–)

Lenworth George Henry was born at the Russells Hall Hospital in Dudley, in the south-west Black Country, on 29 August 1958, fourth of seven children of Winston Henry, a Caribbean-born small-foundry worker at the Round Oak Steel Works at Brierley Hill, and Winifred (Winnie) Henry, a domestic cleaner at the Dudley Guest Hospital. The parents had emigrated from the small parishes of St Mary and St Catherine in Jamaica to the Black Country in 1957 on the Caribbean-immigration generation that the post-1948 British Nationality Act had opened the working-and-residence rights of the United Kingdom to. The household was lower-working-class West-Midlands-Caribbean-immigrant of the post-Notting-Hill-Riots decade: the family lived in the two-up two-down terraced house at the Wellington Road, Dudley, the father at the Round Oak foundry on continuous-shift work, the mother on the Dudley Hospital cleaning rota, and the seven children at the Dudley parish schools across the period. Henry was schooled at the Dudley Bluecoat Junior School and then at the W. R. Tuson Secondary Modern School in Preston, where the family had moved in 1971 on the father's transfer to the Preston foundry post.

He auditioned at the ATV regional Birmingham-and-West-Midlands studio for the ATV Saturday-evening talent-show *New Faces* in early 1975 at sixteen, made the first-round audition through to the national-final round on the strength of a five-minute stand-up comedy routine, and won the *New Faces* national final at the ATV studios in London on the Christmas-week broadcast of 27 December 1975. He was sixteen years old; he was the youngest *New Faces* winner across the first decade of the ATV programme's run. The small national-television-debut launched the next four decades of his career.

He moved into the Saturday-morning ATV children's-programme slot at *Tiswas* (1978 to 1982) under the David McMahon-and-Chris Tarrant-and-Sally James-and-John Gorman ensemble of the ATV-Centre Birmingham working-team. *Tiswas* (the *Today Is Saturday, Watch and Smile* acronym of the ATV programme that had been running since 1974) was the foundational anarchic Saturday-morning ITV children's programme of the late-1970s-and-early-1980s British television generation; Henry, as the ensemble-cast comedian, was the Black-British-televised-comedy figure of his generation. He moved to the BBC-1 platform in 1981 on the *Three of a Kind* sketch-show with David Copperfield and Tracey Ullman (the BBC weekly-prime-time comedy-sketch series that ran 1981 to 1983) and to *The Lenny Henry Show* on BBC-1 in 1984 (the weekly-Friday-evening prime-time comedy-show that ran across nine series to 2004 and was the platform of his mid-career working register).

He co-founded Comic Relief with the screenwriter Richard Curtis at a late-1984 dinner at the Notting Hill restaurant Sugar Reef, after Curtis had returned from a Christmas-1984 Ethiopia famine-reporting trip on the BBC News-and-Current-Affairs commission. The small Comic Relief organisation (the charitable-broadcaster-network British comedy-and-celebrity-fundraising platform) ran the first Red Nose Day on BBC-1 on the Friday-evening 5 February 1988 broadcast, raised £15 million across the evening-broadcast, and has across the subsequent thirty-seven Red Nose Days (running every two years on the BBC-1 prime-time platform) raised a cumulative £1.5 billion for the charitable-causes that the organisation distributes the proceeds to. Henry has co-presented every Red Nose Day across the 1988 to 2025 period as the founder-and-public-face of the organisation.

He took the Open University BA in English in 2007 at forty-nine, then the MA in Screenwriting at Royal Holloway in 2010, and finally the PhD in English at the Royal Holloway University of London in 2018 at fifty-nine (a doctoral thesis on representations of Black-British-Caribbean-immigrant identity in twentieth-century English literature). He was knighted in the 2015 New Year Honours on the Comic Relief-and-broadcasting-and-charitable-work recommendation, and has across the post-2020 period been the public-platform figure of the British-television-industry diversity-reform campaign. The small 2021 *Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity* at Birmingham City University (named on the University Board recommendation of the post-2020 small Black-Lives-Matter response) is the academic-research arm of his diversity-campaign work. He married the comedian Dawn French at a north-London register-office in 1984; they divorced in 2010 after twenty-six years of marriage. He has been with the small theatre-producer Lisa Makin since 2012. The Henry name in the English-side catalogue is the Norman-French royal-Christian patronymic of Henri (the Frankish *Heimirich*, home-ruler), the Norman-and-Plantagenet royal name of the post-Conquest English Crown that compressed into the surname-of-baptismal-patronymic through the late medieval English parish records; he carried the Jamaican-Caribbean-immigrant-family West-Midlands variant of it into the senior post-war British televised-comedy tradition.