Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Kascion Franklin, Lenny Henry, Arthur Darvill, Cecilia Noble, Richard Wilson, Evanna Lynch, Peter Bankole, Danya Bateman, Mark Benton, Richard Boland, Reis Bruce, Michael Crump, Tonia Daley-Campbell, Leonie Elliott, Adam Fray, Don Gayle, Natasha Gordon, Brenton Hamilton, Tina Harris, Lee Hodge, Daniel Holden, David Knopov, Laurence Inman, Marlene McKenzie, Quinn Patrick, James Phelps, Oliver Phelps, Danny Sapani, Cherrelle Skeete.
Deep in the heart of the Black Country lays the town of Dudley, a little piece of the Midlands which was part of the epicentre of the Industrial Revolution, coal mining and a million other trades that its two big city neighbours, Wolverhampton and Birmingham relied upon and arguably for many in both cities was the butt of many a joke throughout the last century. It’s most famous gift to the world is it’s zoo, the great Duncan Edwards and the equally great and certainly noble, the comedian Lenny Henry.
The comedian’s life has been played out on television since he made the daunting challenge to go up as a 16 year old lad from Dudley and make his way to the then premier talent television programme New Faces. It is a life that as a writer he has bought back to the screens in the tremendous and absorbing Danny and the Human Zoo.
Danny is a young black lad with a talent but like a lot of teenagers in the 1970s, especially in the midland’s area, opportunities were few and far between and for many it was a case of going to work in the factories, such as Longbridge or Wolverhampton or finding an escape from the cruelty of the age and either sinking into it as the young racists found or by confronting and defying expectation by doing something outstanding with your life. For Danny, despite the obvious pressure of being young, black and clever, a way out was found and in the same way that the model of the man was taken from, talent was allowed, reluctantly, to shine through.
To base a serious drama upon the life of a person and see it through the eyes of Nom de Plume, a realistic caricature, takes some doing, the proposal of laying out your own life but changing who it happened to is a wonderful sense of deflection. Lenny Henry was and remains a role model because of his ability to be someone else even whilst being himself and to many children who were growing up in the midlands area in the 1970s this was a man to look up to and hope to achieve the same dream of not being flagged straight from leaving school and ending up in the factories, especially as they had spent all their childhood resenting being stuck in an educational one.
The star, the Lenny Henry lookalike, the young and quick witted spark that is Danny, was undoubtedly Kascion Franklin. An unbelievable performance that bordered upon the heroic, especially as a lot of his scenes in the family unit were played off and against the strict Jamaican background and with Lenny Henry playing his father Samson. With Arthur Darvill playing the money grabbing Jonesy and Evanna Lynch as his young alcoholic girlfriend Bridget Riordan, this was a piece of drama that captured the mood of an August Bank Holiday evening.
The term national treasure is one those that gets bandied around when chat show hosts want to ingratiate themselves on their next guest but for 40 years Lenny Henry has been just that, a man who fought against expectation and prejudice to become one of the most well known faces on television and in theatre; Danny and the Human Zoo exemplifies this perfectly.
Ian D. Hall