playnext.fm

Desert Island Discs · BBC Radio 4

Lennie James, actor

·52 min·4 clips
Lennie James shares how West Indian men thank him for seeing their hidden stories in his BAFTA-winning role.
A BAFTA trophy opens the conversation. Lauren Laverne introduces Lenny James through Mr. Loverman, Snatch, Walking Dead, line of duty, Save Me, and the first play published while he was still in his teens. Then the story tightens around home. Coming up to 16, he remembers the children's home being sold and foster care starting to happen around him. Pam becomes the person the episode keeps returning to. She came to England from Jamaica to be a nurse, retrained as a social worker, and worked in fostering and adoption for Wandsworth. He met her at 15. The sale of the Georgian mansion made him angry enough to write to the council and send the letter to the South London Press. It was his home, and he talks about the children still living there, along with the ones who had left but still needed a place to come back to. What lands is how much choice Pam gave him. Visits, overnight stays, weekends, then the question of moving in all came at his pace. Later, after he left for drama school, Pam turned the foster home into a privately run satellite children's home, with his foster brother and foster sister working there. He kept returning on weekends and holidays, helping out, and that experience went straight into Storm Damage. By the end, the lost house has become a story about the people who keep the door open. The episode closes by naming Lorraine Kelly as the next castaway, then moves into a BBC Radio 4 trailer about Bruce Springsteen.

As heard by us

James traces foster care, belonging, and Storm Damage through a personal conversation about learning how to tell his own story.

Lenny James's story of losing a children's home in his teens gives this Desert Island Discs conversation its emotional weight. As the home was being sold, he wrote to the South London Press about the loss of somewhere to live and somewhere former residents could still return to.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Want the story behind Storm Damage, and the foster family whose children's home gave Lennie James a way to honor what they built?

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
Listen to the show on
Apple PodcastsSpotify
Play clips from this episodeMore from Desert Island Discs