Lenny Henrys controversial sketches including | UK News
The ebook suggests the massive price needs to be paid back to 14 international locations, not including a determine for black Brits, and argued if the UK pays off reparations over 25 years with an rate of interest of 2.5%, it will equate to around £740billion per 12 months.
But over the years, Lenny has confronted backlash over his own perceived “racism” – admitting to making racist jokes as a “survival technique”.
He said on This Morning in 2024: “I started off as a 16-year-old copying people I’d seen on the television so I told racist jokes about myself and when I watch it now I go I wish I hadn’t done that. But actually if wishes were horses, beggars would ride, so now you’ve got to learn from the mistakes you’ve made and move on into the future and try and get better role models.”
Racism remorse
He said on This Morning in 2024: “I started off as a 16-year-old copying people I’d seen on the television so I told racist jokes about myself and when I watch it now I go I wish I hadn’t done that. But actually if wishes were horses beggars would ride, so now you’ve got to learn from the mistakes you’ve made and move on into the future and try and get better role models.”
In his 2019 autobiography Who Am I, Again?, he wrote: “If you were black and on TV in the 1970s, the jokes told tended to be against yourself rather than about any other subject.
(Image: Getty)
Shrunken head
In 2004 film Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Lenny played a shrunken head, Dre Head, who was hung at the front of the Knight Bus when Harry uses it to escape to Diagon Alley.
The character had a Jamaican accent and wasn’t actually included in JK Rowling’s novels – instead being created for the films.
Shrunken heads – otherwise known as tsantsa – were recently removed from Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum due to “leading people to think in stereotypical and racist ways about Shuar culture”, instead reiterating racist stereotypes.
(Image: Warner Bros)
Black and White Minstrel Show
The vastly controversial BBC programme The Black and White Minstrel Show noticed Lenny seem alongside white singers carrying blackface, with exaggerated white make-up around their eyes and mouth.
The sequence aired from 1958 until 1978 and was criticised for its racist content, with the Campaign Against Racial unequal treatment submitting a petition for it to be axed in 1967. A stage model of the show continued to air around the world until 1989.
Lenny claimed he “needed therapy” after showing on the programme, explaining: “I was 16 and didn’t realise what I was doing. I have had several times when I needed help. Many lows, even at 16 doing the Minstrel Show.”
He added to The Times: “People used to say Lenny was the only one who didn’t need make-up. It was half funny once, but to hear that every day for five years was a bit of a p**ser.”
(Image: BBC)
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