Lenny Henry has recalled the day his late mother Winifred made him re-enact his first ever TV audition when he was just 15 years old on their front doorstep.
The Dudley-born comedian and actor has just published his second memoir, Rising to The Surface, and his new children's book, The Book of Legends, and he appeared on Friday night’s Late Late Show.
Speaking about his mother, he said, "It’s always felt like she's always with me. My mum passed away in 1998 but I feel like she’s still around saying stuff to me.
"I was away in Australia when my mum passed away and I always wished I’d spent more time with her because I never got the recipe for the cake - she made this Christmas cake that was devastatingly good. We all tried to make the cake but none of us got there. Same with the `Saturday soup’."
Lenny rose to fame aged 15 after appearing on UK TV show New Faces in 1975 and he skipped school for the day so he could travel to Birmingham for the audition.
"My mum didn’t know I was auditioning," he said. "I was 15 and I wore my Sunday school clothes, did the audition, and came home at about 6 o’clock and mum knew that I hadn’t been to school, and she said, `where you been?’ And `I said New Faces’. `What you mean new faces, what kind of new faces?’, she said.
"She wouldn’t let me into the house, and she made me do the whole audition on the front doorstep before I was allowed to have my tea. I did Tommy Cooper and Max Bygraves and Dave Allen and she smiled and let me back in the house and a few months later she really smiled when I bought her a new house.
"She moved my dad from the top of the table and put me there and gave me the biggest pieces of meat. Being the one that was able to help the family was great and I took it very seriously."
Asked about his role as "Irish Hobbit" Sadoc Burrows in the new Lord of The Rings drama, The Rings of Power, he said he was amused by the amount of online trolling he saw because the show featured people of colour.
"Let’s celebrate this - for a child of African heritage whose parents were taken to Jamaica and then went to Dudley in the West Midlands, that’s not bad!" he said.
"When they announced that there were going to be people of colour in Middle Earth, there was a lot of trolling - a lot of stick on Twitter, racist stuff, bigoted stuff about having black people in Middle Earth because how would that happen?
"I was like, hang on! There’s a dragon and an elf and you’ve got a problem with a black Hobbit? That’s ridiculous!"
Lenny will be signing copies of his two books in Dubray Books on Grafton Street, Dublin on Saturday at noon.
You can watch Friday night’s Late Late Show on the RTÉ Player.
