Kai Wright

I mean, that is like a meaningful part of what happened in Richard Pryor's life.

You know, I think there's more to that story and particularly the questions around why.

From BBC Studios and Pushkin Industries, this is Big Lives.

I'm Kai Wright.

We are both journalists and cultural obsessives who love trying to understand the world through an individual person's life.

These are architects of our culture, people who have just had a huge impact on the way we live, the way we take in art, the way we think of ourselves, but who have been flattened over the years.

And so we want to bring them back to life, look into their complicated, big lives.

And we're using the treasure trove of the BBC archive to do that.

There is over 100 years of tape of some of the biggest cultural figures in our world.

The BBC's got it.

And so we're digging through it.

So, listen, first off, the basics of Richard Pryor, if you don't know who he is, he is a genre-defining comedian.

Just if you talk to almost any comedian today, certainly of his era, they would say he's the GOAT, you know.

He just had a titanic career, five Grammys.

He was the first Black person to host SNL.

He was the first Black person to make a million dollars in a movie.

Wait, what?

Yeah.

Okay.

So as I've been rooting around in the archive for Richard Pryor, there's this clip I found of his daughter, Rain Pryor, in 2006.