Lenny Henry and Danny Robins Interview

Lenny Henry began his career as an impressionist, and has since worked as a comedian and actor in shows including Tiswas, Chef!, and Hope and Glory. Danny Robins is a presenter, comedian, and writer who, with writing partner Dan Tetsell has created and written many comedy shows, including Paperback Hell, This Is Genius, and We Are History.

 

How did you come up with the idea for Rudy's Rare Records?

Lenny Henry: I always wanted to do a thing about fatherhood, because my dad was a very silent dad. He was a quite taciturn, monosyllabic guy. I used to think about our relationship a lot, and I've got a daughter, and I always wondered what it would be like if I had a son. So I started thinking about those things.

I'm a big fan of Frasier, and Steptoe and Son, and the idea of the ties that bind you to your family. Things you do for duty, not necessarily for love. You've got to do them because they're family.

And I love record shops. I love the fact they've got a big bass bin under the counter that makes every record they play sound much better than when you get it home. That thing of just standing there and nodding your head knowledgeably, it's great. There was a record shop in Birmingham with a father and a son and the dad was big, rotund, and jolly and the son had grey sideburns and a beautifully coiffed moustache. He always looked grumpy and cross, like he read the Guardian and ate tapas. He looked like he shouldn't be in a record shop. I always thought this would be funny, so, I wrote that down and I called it Rudy's Rare Records.

Then a few years later I started to talk to Radio 4 about doing various projects, and they said "Have you got any ideas?" so I sent a treatment and some characters to Paul Schlesinger and he said "This is great. What shall we do now?"

I'm still a baby writer. Although I've loads of ideas and I collaborate with people, I've never written anything on my own really. So, I said "Let's see if we can find some writers," and a meeting was arranged with Dan and Danny.

Danny Robins: Lenny gave us a treatment of about two or three pages and it just instantly leapt off the page. I think I might have just got back from Jamaica on holiday and I could hear the characters' voices in my head as I was reading it. Lenny had put in various lines and various jokes, and it just leapt out as a very strong situation.

Dan and I had written things before where we had written somebody else's ideas, but it was normally coming into something at a later stage, maybe as part of a team. This was the first time we'd come in at this stage, where it was still really in its infancy.

Lenny Henry: One question a lot of people ask is how come we didn't get black writers. The fact of the matter is it that we weren't offered any black writers, we were offered Dan and Danny. I collaborate with people all the time and I've always worked with white writers and rarely have worked with black writers apart from when I had Crucial Films. I thought that my influence was enough to make it work and make it happen.

There is a weird thing at various television stations and companies where they just don't have access to black and Asian writers. You rarely get that input, so I'm sort of used to it. What was cool was when Dan and Danny came in, they knew what the deal was. They had the thing in their head about how sitcoms break down.

Did you worry about writing stereotypes?

Danny Robins: We never really thought about that at all. We just went out and wrote something with characters that made us laugh and situations that made us laugh. We certainly never felt any angel of PC hovering over us whilst we did it.

Lenny Henry: I would have said first of all that an archetype is different to a stereotype. If we're peddling negative stereotypes then that's different - I don't think we are though. Rudy is an incredibly eloquent, curmudgeonly old git in the tradition of Alf Garnet and Albert Steptoe.

In a way it was old fashioned sense of humour …

Lenny Henry: We're trying to make something that you could enjoy at any time rather than try to catch some zeitgeist. It's quite good to do something that's about a relationship we understand of fathers and sons. When we can laugh at the relationships and the way the hierarchy works within that relationship rather than just funny lines.

How did you develop the storylines?

Danny Robins: That first treatment had a fairly clear structure. Lenny had this episode in mind, the dad faking a heart attack so Adam would come back and take over the shop. It was just very clear that that would be the first episode, and that was how things were going to kick off. So, really, Dan and I had a ready made story line there. We took that and we worked with that and it grew and other characters came in. I lived in Camden at the time and I used to see a lot of Goths out the window and every so often I'd see a black Goth. I thought that was unusual, so, this character Tasha became the assistant in the shop.

Things were kind of still growing in that process beyond the treatment stage. We wrote the script and Radio 4 liked it and it grew from there. We wrote the rest of the series quite quickly. I think that it was testament to the characters really engaging us. It didn't feel like we had to have tons of brainstorming sessions over it, the storyline and characters came out very quickly.

How did you develop the characters?

Danny Robins: The treatment was really clear and the characters were already formed. From that we had the voices in our head from the beginning. We talked a lot and chatted about ideas but I think Dan and I have always been kind of gagsters. We've always been able to pump scripts full of jokes. But, because we had these strong characters we were working with it felt like we could just chuck jokes quite comfortably and not worry about whether these characters work or not. This is kind of goes back, I guess, to that thing about how can white writers write a black sitcom.

How did you make it feel authentic?

Danny Robins: Really, it's about having these great characters and then writing jokes for them. It's not like black people and white people are different people. Everyone has the same sort of feelings and thinks the same sort of things. You write scenarios, you write plots, you write jokes. If there's a bit of slang, or bit of something that doesn't feel quite right then that's the point we say to Lenny "This doesn't feel quite right, how can we change that bit of slang?" And, we had another guy who worked with us, a guy called Doc Brown who is a rapper and he kept us right musically. There's a scene in the final episode when Ritchie and Adam's son confront a hoodie. Doc chucked a lot of language for that.

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