Lenny Henry says TV industry still has ongoing struggles with Black hair and makeup

Lenny Henry says TV industry still has ongoing struggles with Black hair and makeup(Image: PA Archive/PA Images)

Sir Lenny Henry has revealed the TV industry is “still struggling” to provide proper support for Black people regarding makeup and hair. The comedian, 66, collected the outstanding achievement award at the Edinburgh TV Festival on Wednesday and looked back on his career and experiences breaking into the industry during the 1970s.

“It was hard, you know? I mean, they didn’t have a light for me”, he told the festival. “I called it the negro light. I said, ‘Break out the negro light’ and they’d bring out this big-ass spotlight and point it at me.”

Sir Lenny, who made his TV debut on British talent show New Faces in 1975, revealed someone who worked at the BBC “started to realise that I needed different lighting to those guys”.

The star says the industry still struggles with Black hair and makeup(Image: Getty)

“Also there’s the thing on (TV series) Three Of A Kind where all the wigs were for white people,” he said. “So we had Michael Howard and Dave Allen’s wigs, and they never had any wigs for me.

“I had to get some dreadlocks for a character. So they sent me to the London wig company, and they made some dreadlocks for me.

“And then a year later, they had more stuff for me to do, and they got nearer, closer to what they should be like.

“And so I sort of began a whole thing where they had to know how to make Black hair, and they had to know how to do Black makeup.”

Sir Lenny Henry catapulted into the limelight in 1975(Image: PA Archive/PA Images)

He added: “They’re still struggling with it. People like (makeup artists) Jan Sewell and Sally Sutton really knew how to do it, because they did it on my show.

“But before then, they never had to do it.

“I went to a Black makeup lady on The Fosters in 1976 and I thought, ‘Oh, it’s going to be like this. There’s going to be people that do makeup for us’. Once The Fosters was over I never saw her again.”

Sir Lenny, born in Dudley near Birmingham in 1958, catapulted into the limelight in 1975 when his stand-up comedy act won the TV talent show New Faces.

Following his television debut, Sir Lenny graced the screens in the iconic Black working-class comedy The Fosters, and the comedy sketch show Three Of A Kind, before securing his own self-titled show in the mid-1980s.

In 1985, he co-founded Comic Relief, and in 2015, he was knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for his contributions to drama and charity.

A year later, he received a special Bafta award acknowledging his exceptional contribution to television and in 2020, he helped launch an independent body examining representation in journalism, acting, film, television and radio in the UK, known as the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity.

In February, he was granted the Freedom of the City of London and in May, he and filmmaker Richard Curtis accepted a philanthropy award recognising Comic Relief’s efforts to combat inequality and poverty.