By Ashley Davies
On holiday in Greece recently, Sir Lenny Henry made use of his PADI qualification by going on a scuba-diving trip. He had a glorious time, but found himself slightly disappointed by the fact that there weren’t any sharks there.
“When I got back to the boat, I thought: ‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it? That’s a good thing there were no flipping sharks,’” he laughs. The year before, he’d taken part in the gripping ITV show, Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters, in which he and a few other famous folks shared Grand Bahamas waters with the sort of predators most of us would pay good money to avoid.
What he describes as “the most extraordinary experience of my life” will be one of the subjects he’ll chat about in his new live show, Lenny Henry – Still at Large, which he’s touring around the UK until November. It’s his first stand-up show in over a decade, and he’s been working on it for around 18 months.
“I haven’t done stand-up for 15 years, but that doesn’t mean I’ve not been doing comedy,” says the man who has more than earned his national treasure status. “I do corporate gigs and I host things. And it’s not like I gave up being funny – it’s just that I gave up doing it for my job. I always thought of stand-up as my job and everything else as my career; I’ve written books, and I’ve been an actor and lots of other things. I’m still doing those things, but this seems to be the right moment to come back to doing stand-up comedy.”
Henry’s career has always encompassed a wide spectrum of entertainment, and that variety seems to suit him, depending on where he is in his life. He started out doing funny impressions (in 1975, as a teenager, he scooped the ITV talent show New Faces with his winning impersonations of characters such as Frank Spencer and Stevie Wonder), and in the 51 years that followed, has done everything from television hosting and sketch comedy to acting, producing and writing. Oh, and helping raise millions for charity.
The breadth of his talents and experience is impressive – as is his work ethic. Among his extensive credits are co-hosting riotous kids’ show Tiswas; starring in sketch show Three of a Kind alongside Tracey Ullman and David Copperfield (no, not that one); fronting The Lenny Henry Show; co-founding Comic Relief; playing the lead in BBC drama Chef! (based on his own idea and made by his own production company), earning plaudits for playing Othello in the Shakespeare tragedy, and appearing in The Lord of the Things: The Rings of Power.
While his early comedy evolved from impressions to telling hilarious stories about his early life and growing up in Dudley to Jamaican immigrants, his new show will deal with the life of “21st-century Lenny”. He’s got a PhD, a knighthood, an impressive career – and he still has funny bones.
“I talk about ageing, about body malfunction, about my partner Lisa (Makin, a producer and casting director) and what it’s like when you get to a certain age and end up spending a lot of time in garden centres.”
The second half of Still at Large takes a different form – though still with the aim of making everyone laugh. He’ll show clips of some of the many shows he’s been in over the years (and, gosh, there have been a lot) and take audience questions.
In forums such as these, he’s used to people asking things such as why he got into Shakespeare and what it was like acting with George Clooney (he played the Hollywood star’s character’s former acting coach in the 2025 movie Jay Kelly). But during a recent appearance on ITV’s The Assembly, in which celebrities take it in turns to be questioned by people with neurodivergence and learning disabilities, he had to field one of the more amusingly personal questions of his career. One young woman asked him about the order in which he washed his body parts – and, in case you’re wondering, it’s armpits first.
As for why he got into the Bard, the spark was ignited when he presented the BBC Radio 4 show, What’s So Great About Shakespeare?, part of a series in which he investigated the value and pleasures of cultural icons.
It coincided with him feeling like he was on a sort of treadmill of stand-up tours – something that was starting to lose its sparkle.
Spending time with Barrie Rutter, founder of the Northern Broadsides theatre company, for the radio show was a life-changing experience. Doing a spot-on impression of the Yorkshireman, Henry says: “He said: ‘My dad was a fisherman, your dad worked in a factory – let’s work.” He came down to London to teach me the last speech from Othello. And it was one of the most extraordinary and electrifying experiences I’ve ever had.”
A year later, in 2009, Rutter offered him the lead in that very play, and something clicked. “You know that saying: when you’ve got your ladder against the wrong building, and you get to the top of it and realise you want to be on that other building over there? It was like that.” Soon after that, he starred in the National Theatre’s The Comedy of Errors.
That’s not to say his love of acting shut down other aspects of his career. It’s really worth reading his two memoirs to get an idea of how much he’s done – and why. Who Am I, Again? covers the early part of his life, growing up in Dudley, navigating racism, friendships and his mother’s desire for him to “hintegrate”, plus making his way into show business, and learning to have more say in the kind of work he did.
The second, Rising to the Surface, goes into a lot of detail about his career. Both books are packed with creative protein about the development of some of his famous characters, such as Theophilus P Wildebeeste and DJ Delbert Wilkins, and both provide fascinating insight into the way show business decisions are made.
He writes about attempts he made to boost diversity in television production – an imbalance he felt sharply, particularly when filming in various parts of Africa for Comic Relief and being the only Black person on the team. He’s candid, too, about the jobs that didn’t work out so well, about hoping to become a singer, about the sacrifices and mistakes he made, and, vitally, about how much he values collaboration with other creatives.
Interestingly, it was while on tour promoting Rising to the Surface that the excitement of live comedy started reawakening in Lenny.
“I was doing these book tours, and I was loving the bit where they asked questions and I could improvise. I just kept thinking: ‘Well, this is like doing stand-up!’ I talked to Alexei Sayle about this, and he said the reason he started doing stand-up again was for a similar reason: he was talking about his books, which led to him doing material, and that got me thinking about my new material too,” says Lenny.
Sir Lenny Henry, who turns 68 in August, hosted the Comic Relief Marathon for the last time in 2024 and, while acknowledging his legacy with the charity, is remarkably modest about it. “I am very proud of it,” he says. “Every aspect of it has made me proud, and there are moments when you wonder where we would have been without it.
“Richard Curtis was the driving force though. The last show raised over £30 million again, and that’s a testament to everybody in the business and everybody in the country who’s put their hand in their pocket to help. It’s been a wonderful thing, and it is a legacy, but it’s our legacy – not just mine.”
Lenny Henry – Still at Large tours the UK until 3 November. For tickets and venues, visit fane.co.uk/lenny-henry. Visit www.atgtickets.com/shows/lenny-henry-still-at-large/grand-opera-house-york/to buy tickets for its York Grand Opera House showing on 23 June.
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