Lenny Henry jokes Nolan sisters nearly got 'fried' on TV's 'most dangerous show'
Sir Lenny Henry has reflected on his time working on "the most dangerous show in the world" in the late 1970s.
Sir Lenny Henry jokes they "nearly fried the Nolans" during "dangerous" Tiswas filming.
The 67-year-old comedian and actor has recalled his early career breaking out on the wild ITV Saturday morning children's TV show from 1978 to 1981, and he admitted lots of fans have been asking about that period during the Q+A portion of his new Still At Large live tour.
Appearing on ITV's This Morning on Monday (01.06.26), he said: "They really wanna know about Tiswas!
"Tiswas was the most dangerous show in the world. We were in a studio that was smaller than this, and we threw water everywhere, and there were electric cables everywhere.
"We nearly fried the Nolans!"
Despite the chaos, Sir Lenny looks back fondly on his time on Tiswas ("Today is Saturday, Watch and Smile"), which helped him learn about working in live television.
He added: "Tiswas was an extraordinary show to be on because it taught me about all this, it taught me about live telly.
"And usually - what's lovely here is autocue. On Tiswas, there was a man called Dave, who heled up a card with your lines on it.
"Often, Dave would forget his job and he would just walk off! [laughs] 'Dave, come back!' "
After 50 years on TV, Sir Lenny has plenty of stories to tell, although he joked that most of his fans bring their children to his live shows and they have no clue who he is.
He quipped: "Thank you for bringing your children, who literally don't know why they're there."
Meanwhile, Sir Lenny couldn't let the interview with Cat Deeley and Ben Shephard end without making a public pitch to go on Ben's daytime quiz show Tipping Point.
He begged: "Please invite me on the Tipping Point show!
"I want to be there, and I want to push the thing and the right time so it falls in the right place, and we make all the money for the charities."
Earlier this year, Sir Lenny - whose parents were Jamaican immigrants to the UK - recalled how there were very few black faces on British TV when he started performing stand-up comedy as a teenager.
Speaking at the British Diversity Awards in March, he told BANG Showbiz: "When I was 16, so there were very few people that looked like me on the television. There was Rudolph Walker, Derek Griffiths, Floella Benjamin and then eventually, by the late ‘70s, Trevor McDonald. So that’s five or six people, and I knew them all.
"These days we have a much bigger plethora of artists working in front of the camera, but still behind the scenes we need more gatekeepers and we need more producers and directors and writers in the mix too.
“It’s about everybody, it’s not just about a small group of people. I think we’re getting there but it’s a slow, glacial pace still. It’s almost like we’re going backwards.”
