Thread by @thetimes

He is the national treasure from Dudley who became famous overnight 50 years ago. Yet for decades, @LennyHenry was the token black person in an industry where discrimination was rife.

Change is coming, he tells @thetimes — but it’s too slow. thetimes.co.uk/article/lenny-…

In 2015, Lenny Henry received a knighthood at Buckingham Palace. That night, ITN reported the news. “But they had the story with a picture of Ainsley Harriott,” he says. “Sad. But very funny.”

He has a CBE, a PhD and in 2016 received an honorary doctorate from Nottingham Trent University to recognise his contribution to British comedy and drama and his charity work.

And yet ITN couldn’t tell him apart from another black man.

“These things happen all the time,” says Henry. “Microaggressions. People not serving you in restaurants. When I was touring in Australia a few years ago, I got called a terrible name for the first time since I was 16 by a man standing in the queue for autographs. It was awful.”

In all his decades on stage and television, he says, “There wasn’t another black person within a 30-mile radius of wherever I was in television land. Everybody looked the same.”

“I used to joke about me and Derek Griffiths and Floella Benjamin picking cotton in the Blue Peter garden because there was literally nobody else.

“But after a while that can get to you. You wonder, ‘What’s wrong? What do I have to do?’ You feel so dislocated.”

Having long put up and shut up, time made him more outspoken. The game-changer was a 2012 report showing that in the previous three years the number of BAME people employed in the media industry had decreased from 12,250 to 10,300.

“Things are changing but it’s infinitesimally, glacially slow. We could do with a bit more speed behind it.”

Read the full interview with @LennyHenry: thetimes.co.uk/article/lenny-…