Back in (Funny) Business

For more than five decades, actor, writer and comedian Sir Lenny Henry has been telling stories – on stage, on screen and through a host of characters etched into our collective memory.

His new live show, his first in 16 years, sees Lenny return to the experiences that shaped him while exploring the ideas, challenges and creative sparks driving him today.

As Still at Large heads to the Playhouse, the comedy legend talks swimming with sharks, Ken Dodd, Comic Relief and why Liverpool is always more than just another stop on the tour

ON HOLIDAY in Greece recently, Sir Lenny Henry made use of his PADI qualification by going on a scuba-diving trip. He had a glorious time but found himself slightly disappointed by the fact that there weren’t any sharks there.

“When I got back to the boat, I thought: ‘Well that’s good, isn’t it? That’s a good thing there were no flipping sharks’,” he laughs. The year before, he’d taken part in the gripping ITV show, Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters, in which he and a few 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” is one of the subjects he chats about in his new live show, Lenny Henry: Still at Large. It is his first stand-up show in 16 years, and one he worked on for around 18 months. The show is touring the UK now and arrives at Liverpool Playhouse in October.

The Liverpool stop is more than just another date on the tour, though; the city holds plenty of memories for Lenny. “When people ask me about Liverpool, I always think of the Adelphi Hotel”, he says. “If you were filming or on tour in the city back then, that’s where you stayed. I’ve got other loyalties now, but I still have a soft spot for it.”

What he remembers most about the oft-maligned Liverpool hotel, though, is its fire alarm. “We were filming Coast to Coast, and after a long day, we’d finally got to sleep – only for the alarm to go off at three in the morning,” he recalls. “Before long, half the British acting profession would be standing outside in the car park in their pyjamas. It happened so often that we started joking that someone was sneaking into our rooms and trying on our clothes. Whatever the reason, we always went back. The Adelphi had that effect on people.”

Liverpool, unsurprisingly, was also where Lenny had a go at learning a Scouse accent. During Coast to Coast, local actor and Frank Sinatra impersonator David Knopov took him under his wing.
“He’d patiently coach me between filming sessions, and I spent weeks wandering around saying, ‘Alright there, laaaar?’ to anyone who’d listen,” he laughs. “Whether I ever got it right is another matter.”

One of Lenny’s most meaningful experiences in the city came later, when he made Colour Blind, inspired by the tragic murder of Anthony Walker. “It was a comedy-drama, which might sound unusual, but I felt that difficult subjects can sometimes reach people more effectively when approached in an unexpected way,” he says. Working with Liverpool writer Tony Lindsay, Lenny explored prejudice, identity and racism through both humour and drama.

“The goal was never to make light of a tragedy, but to get people talking and thinking differently,” he says. The film featured a strong local cast, including Cathy Tyson, Louis Emerick and Neil Fitzmaurice, and Lenny says he loved filming in the city. He is also grateful to the Anthony Walker Foundation and Liverpool Football Club for supporting the film and helping it reach schools, where it sparked important conversations about racism.

 

 

“That’s what I’ve always loved about Liverpool,” he says. “It’s funny, warm and resilient, but it also cares deeply about people. Every time I visit, I’m reminded why I enjoy coming back.” Perhaps his fondest Liverpool memory, though, is a comic one: seeing Ken Dodd live for the first time. “He did so many gags, so fast, all the comics upstairs were yelling, ‘‘Are hey Doddy, slow down, I just dropped me pencil!!’”

That memory of Dodd’s relentless comic energy feels especially fitting now, as Lenny returns to Liverpool with Still at Large – and to stand-up itself – after more than a decade away from the form. “I haven’t done stand-up for 16 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; I’ve written books and I’ve been an actor and lots of other things. I’m still doing those things, but this seems to be the right moment to come back to doing stand-up comedy.”

Lenny’s career has always encompassed a wide spectrum of entertainment, and that variety seems to suit him, depending on where he is in his life. 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 followed has done everything from television hosting and sketch comedy to acting, producing and writing. Oh, and helping raise millions for charity.

The breadth of his talents and experience is impressive – as is his work ethic. Among his extensive credits are co-hosting riotous kids’ show Tiswas; starring in sketch show Three of a Kind alongside Tracey Ullman and David Copperfield (no, not that one); fronting The Lenny Henry Show; co-founding Comic Relief; playing the lead in BBC drama Chef! (based on his own idea and made by his own production company), earning plaudits for playing Othello in the Shakespeare tragedy and appearing in The Lord of the Things: The Rings of Power.

While his early comedy evolved from impressions to telling hilarious stories about his early life and growing up in Dudley to Jamaican immigrants, his new show deals 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 – though still with the aim of making everyone laugh. He shows clips of some of the many shows he’s been in over the years (and, gosh, there have been a lot) and takes audience questions.

In forums such as these he’s used to people asking things such as why he got into Shakespeare and what it was like acting with George Clooney (he played the Hollywood star’s character’s former acting coach in the 2025 movie Jay Kelly).

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, Lenny 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. “You know that saying: when you’ve got your ladder against the wrong building, and you get to the top of it and realise you want to be on that other building over there? It was like that.” 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. It’s really worth reading his two memoirs to get an idea of how much he’s done – and why. Who Am I, Again? covers the early part of his life, growing up in Dudley, navigating racism, friendships and his mother’s desire for him to “hintegrate”, plus 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. Both books are packed with creative protein about the development of some of his famous characters, such as Theophilus P Wildebeeste and DJ Delbert Wilkins, and both provide fascinating insight into the way showbusiness decisions are made. He 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.

Interestingly, it was while on tour promoting Rising to the Surface that the excitement of live comedy started reawakening in Lenny. “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!’ I talked to Alexei Sayle about this, and he said the reason he started doing stand-up again was for a similar reason: he was talking about his books, which led to him doing material, and that got me thinking about my new material too,” says Lenny.

Sir Lenny, 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 about it. “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: Still at Large is at the Playhouse on 10 October 2026

Main image © Andy Hollingworth