Sir Lenny Henry

We were best friends.

And they did a big thing for me.

They were older than me.

So my first experience of being in a car and going to pubs was with Mac and Greg and Tom.

They would take me all over the Midlands in the car.

And Greg told this story on Imagine with Alan Yentob, God rest his soul.

Greg said, yeah, we'd walk into a pub in the country just outside the Midlands and we'd walk in and Lenny would walk in and half the bloody pub would walk out because they didn't want to be in the same room as a black person.

But I never knew, they never told me.

It just felt like the club was, there was just more room to sit.

Right.

Anyway, while we were in the pub, they would say, go on, Len, do Max Bygraves, do Tommy Cooper.

And I would do these impressions for them.

And because I'd been watching Mike Yarwood, ding, big light bulb over my head.

There's a guy on television who does impressions of other people on the telly, and he's got his own TV show.

Boing, light bulb.

I wonder what it'd be like to have your own TV show.

Boing, because up to that point...

There didn't seem to be any connecting umbilical cord from working-class Jamaican heritage.

There didn't seem to be any connection from that to show business.

And it's often the case, if you grew up in a working-class society, you've got no idea about theatre or voice projection or singing unless you've got a natural talent.