Lenny Henry ‘always surprised’ by lack of black and Asian faces at Glastonbury

Sir Lenny Henry has said he is “always surprised” by the lack of black and brown people at Glastonbury, as he called for better representation of ethnic minorities in all facets of British society.

The actor and entertainer, whose new BBC documentary exploring identity and belonging is out later this month, said festivals were an area of British life where proper integration was still missing.

“It’s interesting to watch Glastonbury and look at the audience and not see any black people there,” Henry said in an interview with the journalist Clive Myrie in the Radio Times.

“I’m always surprised by the lack of black and brown faces at festivals. I think, ‘Wow, that’s still very much a dominant culture thing.’”

Henry’s Caribbean Britain, a two-part documentary, features a host of famous names from the arts including Sonia Boyce, David Harewood, Trevor Nelson and Benjamin Zephaniah sharing their stories and experiences of Caribbean culture in the UK.

Sir Lenny Henry. Photograph: Matthew Joseph/Comic Relief/PA

His comments came as Glastonbury’s co-organiser Emily Eavis said Stormzy’s 2019 headline performance was “a little bit late maybe”.

The grime artist and rapper was the first black solo British headliner in the festival’s history. Speaking in a new BBC Two documentary, celebrating 50 years of the festival at Worthy Farm in Somerset, Eavis said: “He was representing the black community in a very predominantly white festival and obviously that’s a really important moment for us, but it’s also a little bit late maybe. We should have probably done it before.”

The documentary’s director and producer Francis Whately also said Glastonbury was a good indicator of what was happening in the bigger music scene. “So, whether that’s with Stormzy or a 50-50 gender split … They’ve always tried to reflect what’s going on in society and in the music industry,” he said.

Henry, who co-founded Comic Relief, was born in Dudley in 1958 – a year after his parents arrived in the UK from Jamaica. He recalled how he was told by his mother as a young boy that he had to go out and integrate with local people.

“Because my experience up to that point, around the age of nine or 10, was to be a victim of casual racism and to be fighting all the time at school. Suddenly I had something to compare myself to,” he said.

He also spoke about the cultural power of television and said he would like to see the representation of ethnic minorities, disabled people and the LGBTQ+ community in the creative industries to continue to improve.

“It’s great to have David Olusoga on television talking about black British history that goes back to Hadrian’s Wall,” he said. “Somewhere the gatekeepers have changed, because now we’re allowed to have you on Mastermind. But how long did that take?

“We still want more representation because we deserve it. We are British citizens, we are colonials. We’ve been in this country, we have grown up in this country, we’ve contributed and a lot of us feel it still isn’t being reciprocated enough. That’s what this documentary is about.”

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Henry is a longstanding campaigner for diversity in the media and helps lead the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity at Birmingham University. He also has a role in the film adaptation of Kit de Waal’s My Name Is Leon, which his company Douglas Road is producing.

Speaking at the Hay festival about My Name Is Leon, Henry criticised the way streaming services commission content, saying they failed to nurture new writers, and in particular writers of colour, sufficiently.