Lenny Henry

"So, uh, we've got a young cullah'd fellah coming on next. I don't think it's fair to laugh at the afflicted, but... you know the reason their palms are all pink? It's the way they stack 'em before spraying..." For most of us it took about 10 seconds of watching Danny and the Human Zoo, though I'll accept 20 if you're from outwith the M25, or a full 40 minutes if you happen to live in Sunningdale or Midwich, to suss that this was not an utterly valid depiction of Britain today.

And we'd have been right. Early 70s. Early 70s Dudley, in fact, and Mark Benton playing, albeit terrifically, a sweatily odious nimrod (as they said in the 70s). Here he was playing to the woeful gallery (near-empty, chain-smoking, and the beer were as flat as the stomachs weren't) and introducing a 15-year-old Danny Fearon to the stage. Danny was, as some may know, a lightly fictionalised Lenny Henry.

Mr Henry, Sir Lenworth Henry as now is, has been a stout heart in the business they call show for as long now as the stalwarts - Tommy Cooper, Michael Crawford - he first set out (aged 14) to impersonate. As with those troupers, his act has not always satisfied all humours. In fact, there are some (me) who say he might have sideswiped the comedy altogether and gone straight to straight acting, apparently his natural metier, according to the many garlands for his Othello; and earlier this telly year, as Godfrey in The Syndicate, he waltzed off with the show.

But that wasn't going to be an option, was it, for the lad from Dudley. Rada would have been as closed to him as would running through the Garrick naked. His only way ahead, other than dying a daily death in the British Leyland shop, was to refine and sculpt a natural gift for mimicry, and (at least as portrayed here by Kascion Franklin, avowedly another big star in the finding), a graceful mix of ebullient anger. And then get on dirty stages in trodden towns - as one teen pal says, "I'm white, and even I'm scared for yow" - and then get gothically shafted by sleazy managers and agents, and sleazy white girlfriends, all in it for the goldbricking. And then, as happened back then, sell out: Danny's/Lenny's minstrel show segments made for incredibly queasy viewing, not least for their portrayal of the all-white audiences ponying along to blacked-up ruffed-up chintzery. In my, in your, lifetime.

Written by Lenny Henry himself, this was a beautiful and a valuable programme, which is to make it sound less fun than the huge fun it was. (And not least because of the soundtracking: ironies wholly lost on Dudley, they were still dancing then to James Brown, Stevie W, Curtis Mayfield, Shirley & Co.) Many scenes, particularly those between young Danny and his father - "What do you know about happiness? You never laugh..." - resonated with bittersweet pith. It may have been hard for the real Henry, here portraying Danny's (ie his own) father, to bear, given the story's arc of a mother's infidelity and a compromised marriage, but bear it he did, acting with style and two grumpy smiles throughout. I will never again underestimate Mr Henry. I retain the right to find him a glowing actor and a less than funny comedian. But nor, after this programme, will I gaze with my old demeanour upon those who excuse 70s racism as "accidental". We were all culpable.

Funnier than Baker, funnier than Henry, have always been Enfield and Whitehouse, who had an hour to look back on themselves with the savage glee of hindsight in An Evening With Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse. They didn't have much to bemoan. The posho stuff (lovely skit about upmarket novelties) balanced all, I think, the prole-scum stuff. They even took the rip, and even a bit nastily at that, out of a couple of our saints, Lenny Henry and Stephen Hawking. Lenny was played as blacked-up, possessed of an impenetrable Dudley accent and stuck in a Travelodge bed. Ouch. Stevey-boy lolled with lipstick on, and swore energetically. Satire, despite the sainted Tom Lehrer's pronouncement, is not dead. It is, as long as Enfield and Whitehouse (and Punt, Dennis, Iannucci, Jupp) survive, not even smelling that bad.

Danny and The Human Zoo had a big named attached to it in the form of Lenny Henry who served as both writer and supporting actor. The ninety minute feature focused on Henry's first flushes of fame and his attempts to the rather racist landscape of 1970s Dudley. Danny (Kascion Franklin), is the dramatic version of the young Henry; who was regularly abused for the colour of his skin but found his voice by impersonating other people. At some points Danny and The Human Zoo resembled the stereotypical biopic as we saw Danny's struggles with his family, the bullies and the unscrupulous entertainment industry. However the fact Henry was writing the script meant that everything felt authentic and he made you sympathise with several of the key characters. The latter part of the drama painted Danny in an incredibly sympathetic light as he was forced to be part of a touring version of The Black and White Minstrel Show something that he hated doing. Danny's lowest moments were excellently scripted and ended with a rather poignant moment in which Henry got to write the conversation that he never had with his own father. The only element of the drama which I felt was a little weak were the moments that dealt with Danny's love life namely his relationship with a possessive Irish barmaid (Evanna Lynch) and the potential romance he could have with his neighbour Cherry (Leonie Elliot). While he wrote an enjoyable script I think that Henry's best contribution to the piece was his performance as his own father Samson. His turn as the quietly stoic patriarch of the Fearon clan was possibly the drama's best and made me hope that we see Henry in more serious roles in the future. Also worthy of praise is Franklin who perfectly anchored the drama with a performance that allowed the audience to sympathise with Danny's various personal traumas. Although there was very little new about it, I really enjoyed Danny and The Human Zoo and felt it was perfectly scheduled on Bank Holiday Monday. Ultimately this was a biographical drama that was full of heart, humour and one that was bolstered by a well-paced script and a fantastic central turn.

Danny and the Human Zoo was Lenny Henry being granted an hour and a half of prime time to cement his own myth. I mean myth as in idealised conception - given his first gig as a TV writer, Henry chose to cloak the story of his life growing up in Seventies Dudley in a veil of fiction ("Almost every single event in this story is... kinda true. Honest", read the opening caption).

Lenny thus became Danny, and unsurprisingly Danny came out of the whole thing rather well. The black country in the Seventies, the drama made clear, was a pretty horrible place, full of casual racism and terrible haircuts, but dear Danny was an irresistible talent. He only had to do his Frank Spencer impression and women fawned, the world laughed, and fame of the sort that would one day allow him to embellish his own story on BBC One beckoned.

Loose autobiography is generally bad biography. A combination of selective memory and latent narcissism means that given the option to be only vaguely honest about their past, few authors can resist the temptation to make themselves look better. That's not to say that playing fast and loose with the truth can't be fun, but if they're going to be "kinda true" stories, they had better be darned good ones. Danny and the Human Zoo was simply not that good a story, predictably told and unsure when to be serious, when to be funny. It trod similar sociocultural turf to Zadie Smith's White Teeth, both the novel and the subsequent Channel 4 adaptation, and it suffered by comparison.

Dare I say it, given that national treasure Henry wrote it, but I think the problem was in the script - it veered alarmingly from some quite brutal, prolonged fight scenes to a lot of plodding, sentimental schlock. The dialogue was workaday, and the supporting characters - Danny's close childhood mates, in particular - were barely fleshed out at all. The young actor Kascion Franklin made a good fist of playing the young Lenny Henry, doing passable impressions of people like Muhammad Ali and Elvis whom he can only have seen on YouTube. Yet he was being asked to play a character who, to all intents and purposes, was brilliant, unimpeachable, irrepressible, attractive and hilarious. That person doesn't exist, or if he does he's not a very interesting character to watch for 90 minutes. Then again, what did the BBC expect by asking Henry to write a drama all about himself: a self-administered hatchet job?

Cradle to Grave was, in comparison to Danny and the Human Zoo, a similarly refractive concoction, a picaresque of the young life of the DJ and celebrity Danny Baker, written in part by Baker and based on his own memoir. Once again we were thrust in to the so-bad-they-were-good Seventies, as the Chopper bike tootling past in the background made plain, but we'd shifted from Dudley to east London and from one wide-eyed Danny boy to another. Sensibly, Baker and his co-writer Jeff Pope used this young Danny as the window on the world, not as a protagonist - he existed mainly as a voice-over setting the scene for the various travails of the Baker family. Instead, the main character was Danny's father Fred, played by Peter Kay as part Arthur Daley, part Del Boy. Mostly, though, he was Peter Kay, barely bothering with a cockney accent but still blessed with the single funniest face on television, one of the few men who can make me laugh with the sound off.

Cradle to Grave was funnier than Danny and the Human Zoo, and it managed to achieve the crucial balance of being fond of its characters without ever worshipping them. Yet just as with Danny and the Human Zoo, and its association with Lenny Henry, I found the fact that Cradle to Grave was based on the life of Danny Baker a distraction. Essentially, both of these shows were self-congratulatory because they all came from the perspective of the viewer knowing that, ultimately, both of these Lenny/Dannys have done pretty good. Self-congratulation is what humour should be mocking, not the stuff of humour itself.

Review: Danny and the Human Zoo, Harry & Paul

Yes, they were being satirical, but Enfield and Whitehouse's blackface was a mistake - as Lenny Henry's complex autobiographical drama makes clear.

Lenny Henry interview

Sir Lenny Henry on the lack of diversity on TV, how Comic Relief changed his life - and not being "everybody's cup of tea".

While BBC1 aired Lenny Henry's Danny And The Human Zoo, it can only be coincidence that simultaneously on BBC2 Harry Enfield was himself blacking up as a black-and-white minstrel and reaching for his best Brummie accent briefly to play Henry himself in An Evening with Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse.

This was a long-overdue satire on the celebrity audience, planted-question-filled "Evening With" format, even if it was also a vehicle for a 25-year retrospective, hosted by the men themselves.

Dressing up as Melvyn Bragg in order to offer intellectual justification for some of your more questionable comedic decisions, not least blacking up to play Nelson Mandela, doesn't actually make them any more intellectually justified, especially when, on the other channel, Lenny Henry's childhood is being dramatised as an exercise in positive discrimination. But the impressions were, of course, hilarious. Ian Hislop, if he saw it, might never have the courage to sneer again.

Lenny Henry interview

Sir Lenny Henry on the lack of diversity on TV, how Comic Relief changed his life - and not being "everybody's cup of tea".

Review: Danny And The Human Zoo

It was full of bitterness and self-reproach, as if Lenny Henry still can't forgive himself for stupid things he said and did, and nuances he failed to understand.