Zadie Smith

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?

Benji Wilson, The Telegraph, 4th September 2015

Heard the one about Zadie Smith's brother, Doc Brown

As the dust settles on this year's Edinburgh Fringe, one of the most exciting breakthrough stars of the Festival has mixed feelings about his August adventure being over.

Bruce Dessau, Evening Standard, 31st August 2010