Chill Winston origins

A minor cultural reference 🐰🕳️ #

I’ve seen a few references to “Chill Winston” recently, said in a Jamaican accent. The version I know most canonically is from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, where a bunch of white stoner blokes growing weed use the term about the front door ringing and the state of their security on the grow site. It got me wondering whether I’d seen it referenced elsewhere.

We were watching We Are Lady Parts recently, another fantastic UK series, only two short seasons, about an all-girl Muslim punk band. Very entertaining show. And there was a Chill Winston reference in it too. And I’ve heard this phrase uttered elsewhere in UK shows also. I was already fairly sure the Lock, Stock version wasn’t the origin, that it was itself referencing something older, and this confirmed it in my mind and sent me down a research path.

From what I can tell, it stems from a Lenny Henry sketch in the early 80’s. Lenny is a Black British comedian who had a character called Delbert Wilkins, a bit of a wide boy operating out of a pirate radio station, the Brixton Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). It was pretty funny, and I vaguely remember the sketch from re-runs in my youth. Delbert had a do-anything sidekick called Winston, and that’s where it came from. That’s the original cultural source of Chill Winston in the UK.

So I went back and started rewatching some of it. It’s actually still pretty good. Slow, but it ages well, and having lived in Brixton for a decade it’s fantastic to see the sights and cultural elements of a place 20 years before I knew it.

Which led me to the best part. Vas Blackwood, the actor who played Winston, is the same actor who plays Rory Breaker, the fast-talking Black gangster, in Lock, Stock. So when the white stoners say “Chill Winston,” the original Winston is standing in the same film. Additionally the Character Rory Breaker in Lock, Stock has a right-hand man called Lenny, which must be a reference completing the circle back to Lenny Henry 🤯.

I was well chuffed to go down this path, and figure it out.

I wonder if Guy Ritchie was a Lennie Henry fan, or whether after casting Vas Blackwood the references got written in (probably), and how much influence of that came from Vas vs Guy. If anyone knows more about this story, I’d be happy to hear it.

Worth pausing on where Lenny himself comes from. He was born in Dudley in 1958, the first child in his family born in Britain, after his parents came over from Jamaica in the 1950s. A Windrush generation child. So a phrase most people know from a Guy Ritchie film about London gangsters traces back through a Black British comedian to a Jamaican household in the West Midlands.

That’s the part I think gets missed. Chill Winston is one more entry on a very long list of British sayings and cultural furniture that came from Jamaican people and then got absorbed so completely that nobody thinks about the source.