Sir Lenny Henry: 'I haven’t done stand-up for 15 years but it's not like I gave up being funny'

The year before, he’d taken part in the ITV show, Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters, in which he and 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, with dates in Yorkshire.

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.”

His career has always encompassed a wide spectrum of entertainment, and that variety seems to suit him. 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 have followed has done everything from television hosting and sketch comedy to acting, producing and writing. Oh, and helping raise millions for charity through his co-founding of Comic Relief.

While his early comedy evolved from impressions to telling hilarious stories about 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 the Still at Large takes a different form. He’ll show clips of some of the many shows he’s been in over the years and take audience questions. In forums such as these he’s used to people asking things such as why he got into Shakespeare. 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. 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 though. His two memoirs show quite how much he’s done – and why. Who Am I, Again? covers the early part of his life, growing up in Dudley, navigating racism, making his way into showbusiness, 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 and provides fascinating insight into the way showbusiness decisions are made.

Henry also 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.

It was while on tour promoting Rising to the Surface that the excitement of live comedy started reawakening in Henry. “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!’" he says.

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. “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 is at Grand Opera House, York on June 23 and Leeds Grand Theatre on September 27. Visit fane.co.uk/lenny-henry