Free Thinking - Lenny Henry
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 16 September 2014
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Rudy's Rare Records stars Lenny Henry as the son who works alongside his father in a record shop. The Radio 4 comedy has been adapted for stage and is being performed with live music at Birmingham Rep and the Hackney Empire. In a conversation recorded in front of an audience at The Studio at Birmingham Rep, Lenny Henry talks to Matthew Sweet about performing on radio, stage and screen and his campaign for better Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) representation.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.4 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids |
| 0:25.5 | the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.9 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:43.5 | Ralph Richardson's impression of David Bellamy was hopeless. |
| 0:48.9 | Shaw Taylor never gave Sir Donald Wolffitt 10 out of 10 for star quality. |
| 0:54.0 | Paul Schofield was never billed with Nookie Bear in the summer season in Blackpool, or sang backing vocals |
| 0:55.4 | for Kate Bush, or gave a BAFTA lecture, or formulated a ready-made policy for government |
| 1:00.7 | designed to do something radical, make the people who make television look more like the audience |
| 1:06.5 | who watch it. Lenny Henry has had several of the most interesting lives in showbiz, his own |
| 1:12.4 | prime time sketch and song show, a fellow at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Celebrity Squares, |
| 1:18.4 | new faces, comic relief. At a time in life when a lot of comedians are out on the golf course |
| 1:23.9 | or telling the world that they were really novelists all along. He went back to school, |
| 1:29.1 | studied screenwriting, and is now writing a PhD on black and minority ethnic representation |
| 1:35.1 | in the television business. Right now, he's back in the theatre, starring in the stage version |
| 1:40.5 | of his Radio 4 sitcom, Rudy's Rare Records. |
| 1:47.4 | And to do that, he's come almost but not quite home to Birmingham. |
| 1:51.6 | Today, he'll do two performances of the play and play a late-night set with his band, Poor White Trash and The Little Big Horns. |
| 1:55.1 | For the next hour, though, on this special edition of Freethinking recorded here |
| 1:59.6 | on the stage at the Birmingham Rep, he's ours. |
| 2:02.5 | Lenny Henry. |
| 2:08.3 | Lenny, Rudy's Rare Records, is about a man who is trying to drag his father forward into the future, a man who's rather stuck in his ways. |
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