Lenny Henry

End of 25-year double act for comedy couple

Comedy couple Dawn French and Lenny Henry's 25-year marriage seemed one of the strongest in show business.

Lenny Henry hotel advertisement 'too scary'

An advert starring Lenny Henry and parodying horror film The Shining has been banned during children's programming on the grounds that it is too scary.

Stephen K Amos: Murder, he wrote

He once joked that British TV couldn't cope with more than one black comedian at a time - now Stephen K Amos is getting his own BBC series. And he hasn't even had to kill Lenny Henry, he explains.

Tonight's guests, Mutya Buena, Lenny Henry and Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, are squired through the surrealist miasma by Vic in an RAF uniform and Bob with an inflated head. Treats include a dolly production of the Elephant Man, Angelos Epithemiou's rendition of The Cat Crept In (brilliant) and Mutya touching a pie through a wall. You won't get that anywhere else. Curious in that it's exactly as great as it was 16 (aieee!) years ago. No worse and no better.

Meanwhile, another new comedy on Radio 4: Rudy's Rare Records. This is a patchy comedy starring Lenny Henry, about a son who goes to Birmingham to take over his hated father's record shop while the latter recovers from a supposed heart attack. (The father, it turns out, is dissembling about this.) In it, we are asked to believe that Henry's character is a geeky weed who likes nothing better than filing records in alphabetical order.

The problem is that everyone in this country knows that Henry is actually built like a brick shithouse, and has little of the geek about him. Not that this is the show's greatest problem. That would be the overall lack of really good jokes. It's not bad - but that's because it's the situation that's interesting, not the comedy.

Lenny Henry is back on radio and on familiar territory - comedy, music and Birmingham. Unusually, though, this time he's the straight man as the classical music-loving son, Adam Sharpe, of the eponymous Rudy, the owner of a specialist record shop. This doesn't mean, though, that Henry doesn't get a few laughs along the way, which is only fair since the script by Danny Robins and Dan Tetsell is absolutely stuffed with them. The set-up can be briefly explained - father and son are estranged, father suffers slight heart murmur which becomes a full-blown heart attack so son will return to Brum to run record shop for nothing. But you'll go a long way to find better and more consistent one-liners and, as a bonus, some fine vintage ska and reggae music used to link the scenes. A joy - and there are three more episodes to follow.