Henry turns over a few answers in his whirring brain, perhaps trying to decide whether to take the question seriously or to treat it as a joke. He settles on something in between. “I want a special medal,” he decides. “It wouldn’t be a gold one. Not a silver one. What comes after bronze? Pewter? I want a pewter medal. And I want it to be engraved with the words: ‘He fell over in the race. But he participated.’” When I talked about my own struggle to keep the plates spinning in my career, she told me: "Stop the noise. Look at you earnin' all that money and complainin' about yu big house and everyting. You are blessed. Never forget that." But in Rising To The Surface – which covers the years 1980 to 2000 – he has made it, and even though there are vertiginous ups and downs professionally, the book often has the tone of a man just going through his CV. Should you want the lowdown on how he collaborated with cast and crew on the 1980s and 1990s variations of the Lenny Henry Show or long-forgotten projects such as Coast To Coast, Bernard And The Genie or The Suicide Club, it’s all here.

I found myself reading up about what he had sacrificed and why. And then, before we knew it, the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute was upon us. Henry, who released an album of blues covers and original compositions in 2015, New Millennium Blues, presented Our Classical Century on BBC Four in 2018 with Radio 3 host Suzy Klein. In between trips to the hospital for various treatments, Mum was becoming a very capable advocate for her church. She'd go out collecting donations at local pubs and clubs with fellow parishioners. Like its predecessor, the autobiography will be published by Faber & Faber and comes out next year.To date, Henry has won the prestigious TV award the Golden Rose of Montreux, helped raise more than a billion pounds for good causes, diversified his industry and grown into a beloved elder statesman of television. Yet what shall it profit a man? The book’s lasting impression is a sad one: the dutiful son unable to forgive himself for being too busy to take his mother on a final trip to Jamaica. It’s easy to forget he became a household name at just 16, after a breakthrough performance on New Faces in 1975. His early gigs were in the now vanished world of variety shows and seaside summer seasons; soon, he was working alongside the rising stars of a new generation. As a working-class youth from Dudley with Jamaican heritage, Henry was never fully adopted by either the working men’s club circuit or the middle-class alternative scene. The book’s early sections are its most engaging: his struggle to find his niche doubling as an account of the landmark shift in comedy itself in the 80s, as acts such as Alexei Sayle, Ben Elton and French and Saunders moved the genre’s goalposts. He was introduced to Shakespeare when he made the 2006 Radio 4 series Lenny and Will. Which saw him going "in search of the magic of Shakespeare in performance." In February 2009 Henry appeared in the Northern Broadsides production of Othello. He received widespread critical acclaim in the role. However, upon listening to his sequel to Who Am I? I think I now understand why he was so miserable - perhaps he was grieving? It couldn't be because we approached him to say hello, as we were respectful that his daughter was ice skating and the whole encounter lasted, what 20 seconds? Either way, Lenny obviously didn't care because he never so much as looked at us sideways, just blanked us. Dawn didn't. She was lovely. That said, now I've listened to what he was going through at the time. I understand.

There's also that guilty feeling when you arrive for fittings and your measurements have changed. Costume designers and producers don't mean to, but they can be a bit judgemental - "Ooh, put a bit of weight on, have we? We'll have to take that all the way out." Or, "Bloody hell - size of that a**e". In my mind, I felt myself careening downhill towards a large wall in a car with no brakes. My Hollywood travails were teaching me every day that you're nothing if you don't have control. He was the voice of the "shrunken head" on the Knight Bus in the 2004 movie Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and read the audio book version of Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys. And she told me it was about trying to protect me. She was trying to give me a shield to deal with the outside world. Suddenly, Mum and I were able to discuss grown-up matters on a level playing field. There was mutual respect, empathy and kindness as we chatted about how difficult her life had been, raising us in England in such a hostile environment.

Throwing himself into his work hasn’t always brought the satisfaction he sought, either. He acutely feels a failure as a son for not always being there for his difficult, larger-than-life mother as her health failed. When Henry wrote this up in a first volume of memoir, 2019’s Who Am I Again?, it was “like ripping off a plaster”, he says. “I felt like I was being truthful about myself for the first time, where before I’d had to be economical. And now I can talk about my birth father without feeling like …” He does an impression of a tortured superhero in pain. He grits his teeth and groans. Then he drops the performance, Lenny again, and says: “They’re all dead now. I can’t hurt them.”