Rising to the Surface: 'Moving and honest' OBSERVER

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Lenny's second memoir 'Rising To The Surface' is out now! Please see below some of the great interviews he has done recently about the memoir. BBC Radio 4, Loose Ends

which my sister & I had mistaken as rude) when we met him decades ago, when Torvill & Dean appeared at Wembley Stadium. Lenny was with Dawn French then and during the break, their daughter Billie had the privilege of skating with Torvill & Dean. My sister & I worked as stewards (begrudgingly for extra money) and at my insistence, we approached a downright miserable Lenny and a very friendly and lovely Dawn, obviously over compensating for Lenny's silence. It must have been clear to all at the time that we wanted to speak to Lenny but as he was mute, the very lovely Dawn stepped in. There's also that guilty feeling when you arrive for fittings and your measurements have changed. Costume designers and producers don't mean to, but they can be a bit judgemental - "Ooh, put a bit of weight on, have we? We'll have to take that all the way out." Or, "Bloody hell - size of that a**e". Photograph: David Vintiner/The Guardian. Set styling: Lee Flude. Fashion styling: Sarah Ann Murray. Grooming: Min Sandhu, both at Carol Hayes Management. Hair: Morris Roots. Coat: OAMCAnd I go 'because it would have taken me a really long time to write up to the present day'. I also didn't really want to write about my marriage and stuff because I respect my ex-wife [ Dawn French] and my kid and my family and I think it's wrong to do that stuff. Henry turns over a few answers in his whirring brain, perhaps trying to decide whether to take the question seriously or to treat it as a joke. He settles on something in between. “I want a special medal,” he decides. “It wouldn’t be a gold one. Not a silver one. What comes after bronze? Pewter? I want a pewter medal. And I want it to be engraved with the words: ‘He fell over in the race. But he participated.’” I found myself reading up about what he had sacrificed and why. And then, before we knew it, the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute was upon us.

More significant for his career were his co-writers – Jon Canter, Kim Fuller and Geoff Posner – all of whom he praises fulsomely. But is there something telling that as a stand-up, he’s never entirely written his own material? The friends Henry was making were a who’s who of British comic talents: Rik Mayall, Ade Edmondson, Alexei Sayle, Tracy Ullman, Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French, whom he married in 1984. Up to that point, Henry confesses: “I’d been serial dating a variety of dancers from summer shows, funakteers and fellow clubbers. None of these relationships were based on [...] a “meeting of minds”. But then he met French. Their first date was at a bar in Soho called La Beat Route, and it was a peach. “I realised that you could have a reciprocal conversation with someone and not have to perform or amuse them all the time. They could make you laugh too. A massive light bulb went off over my head. BONG!” She was ordained as a lay preacher, and the photographs of her on that momentous day are joyous. She's got a big smile on her face and is wearing her church crown - we were all very proud. We'd experienced a number of unsuccessful rounds of IVF but were determined to expand our family. We'd been talking about adoption for some time and decided to go for it. We weren't going to let the misery of our time in LA dominate our future; we wanted our lives to be full of kids and fun and laughter.But then, in a chapter paying off that notion of Henry “rising to the surface”, he describes winning a major industry award for one of his 2000s TV shows. The chapter comes with a photo of him holding a Golden Rose of Montreux entertainment award and the words: “What surfacing looks like.” For the reader it’s an unsettling swerve, I say. It seems to undercut his epiphanies in the previous chapters about the relative value of private and public validation. I let the work take over. Silly sod,” he says, closing the chapter on his most prolific years with the realisation that no achievement can ever be enough or life path free of regret. By this account, success is no laughing matter. However, upon listening to his sequel to Who Am I? I think I now understand why he was so miserable - perhaps he was grieving? It couldn't be because we approached him to say hello, as we were respectful that his daughter was ice skating and the whole encounter lasted, what 20 seconds? Either way, Lenny obviously didn't care because he never so much as looked at us sideways, just blanked us. Dawn didn't. She was lovely. That said, now I've listened to what he was going through at the time. I understand.