Though some of her co-presenters – among them Brian Cant and Derek Griffiths – were adored too, her gift was to make every child feel they were being directly addressed. “I wanted to give unconditional love to every single child watching.” Did she realise how transformative her contribution could be? “It took about five years before I fully realised children are like blank canvasses, and you can draw on that canvas to make happy human beings.”
She had a swift cultural impact, all the same. A rare ethnic minority face on TV at the time, she quickly told its producers to “put black and Asian children in the illustrations, to make sure they knew that they were part of the bigger picture”.
The acting work didn’t, however, move on in leaps and bounds. There were some notable credits – she drew acclaim playing a Brixton café owner in an evocative 1977 film about the black community in London, Black Joy – but does she not look at the relative abundance of roles now available to young actors of colour and wish she could have had those opportunities? “No, I get pleasure seeing black actors and actresses playing incredible roles on TV, in theatre and films. I’ve helped pave the way for them. I have no bitterness.”
It’s one thing to radiate kindness on the small-screen, another to do so round the clock. Some might assume that her determinedly cheery demeanour is an act; yet, you glean, that exceptional positivity is fundamental to her outlook.
“It’s a very unusual thing to be around,” affirms Sean Foley, artistic director of the Birmingham Rep, which is premiering Coming to England, as adapted by David Wood (who, co-incidentally, wrote for Play School’s sister programme Playaway). Foley has made her patron of the theatre’s youth and education programme and named a room after her. “Whenever she’s here, it’s like Mary Poppins is in the building. She wants to help people. It’s totally uncynical.”
Evoking her childhood in Trinidad and ‘Windrush generation’ journey, in 1960, aged 10, to Britain, Coming to England supplies a crucial explanation for Benjamin’s beneficence. It wasn’t so much the abrupt plunge from a lush tropical idyll into cold, austere Blighty that shocked her, as the swirling rapids of racism she had to negotiate. And that proved character-defining.
