Meet Henry Normal, the poet and TV producer who has worked on The Royle Family and Gavin and Stacey

Life on a council estate in the city was where poetry began for Normal. “There was a lot of hardship as I suppose there is now,” he says. “It was difficult. My mum died when I was 11 and I became very introverted. It was at that point I started reading lots and lots of things and I came across poetry.

“I read a book by Spike Milligan called Small Dreams of a Scorpion. I thought it was a comedy book which is why I bought it but it turned out to be a serious poetry book and it changed my life. I quite liked the juxtaposition of somebody who was so funny being so serious and making me cry. If you’ve ever been to any of my shows, I go from passionate and heartfelt to frivolous and bawdy at times and I quite like the extremes.”

These days, Normal, 66, tours the UK with his poetry performances. He has dates in Selby and Otley this week with his latest show Sit Down Poetry – “it’s like stand-up poetry but more thoughtful and relaxed and easier on the legs”. A mixture of poetry, comedy and stories, the gig is similar in its make-up to Normal’s BBC Radio 4 shows. He’s written and performed those since retiring from TV production in 2016 and they’re largely inspired by his life and family, including bringing up his autistic son, Johnny.

Normal (real name Peter James Carroll) recalls how he found himself in tears one Saturday morning when sorting through the family photo albums. “Some of them made me laugh, some of them made me cry and some of them made me angry. I was thinking it’s quite interesting that these images are affecting me and I started trying to explain this to myself in the only way I know - to write poetry.”

The result was the poetry series Photos With My Son. The radio show followed and Normal and his wife screenwriter Angela Pell have also written a memoir telling the story of their family. Normal, who lives in East Sussex, draws a lot from his personal experiences in his work. His shows in Yorkshire this week explore the concept of home. “My next radio show is about home. So a lot of the material I’ll be doing is around the nature of home, which is apt, because my mum is from Yorkshire, from Doncaster….There’s an element of home in me coming to Yorkshire.”

“I try to understand what home means to me and to the people around me,” he continues. “We all come on very different journeys but we all have a concept of the word home.”

It was in Normal’s hometown that he started writing during his teenage years. A career in the arts seemed unlikely to him, a boy born in “the slum district of Nottingham”. “My dad worked at Raleigh for 40 years and my brother worked at Raleigh so I think the expectation was I’d work at Raleigh,” he reflects. Normal failed to follow suit. He began his career writing and performing comic sketches just about anywhere he could.

“When I moved to Manchester I bumped into Steve Coogan and Caroline Aherne and John Thomson and Frank Skinner and Linda Smith, all these great comics who were just starting out on their journey to become famous comedians. I was in the right place at the right time.

"It was a bit like community arts - everybody got involved in everybody else’s activities. It was a bit like a small village if you like, all the up and coming comedians and poets and bands. The idea of being in a big creative gang appealed to me...There wasn’t a lot of money in those days because [the scene] wasn’t really geared up with particular places, regular comedy clubs or anything like that. It was a very ad hoc existence. So when television came it was regular work.”

Normal starred in Channel 4’s Packet of Three, a comedy series with scenes filmed at Theatre Royal Wakefield. He co-wrote the Mrs Merton show and the first series of The Royle Family and in 1999, Normal and Coogan set up Baby Cow Productions.

“The idea was we would set it up in Brighton (where they were living) and we’d go home for us tea,” Normal says. “But we couldn’t get people to come down to Brighton so we had to go up to London so I ended up commuting for 17-and-a-half years, four hours a day, five days a week. It backfired a bit.”

Still, Baby Cow became one of Britain’s most successful production companies. Normal executive produced all, and scripted most, of its output, which included Oscar-nominated film Philomena, Gavin and Stacey, Moone Boy, The Mighty Boosh, Red Dwarf and Alan Partridge.

These days, Normal’s focus is back on poetry. “There’s something quite beautiful about poetry in that it’s just between yourself and the person listening,” he says. "With a film like Philomena - there’s over 300 people who worked on that – whatever the writing of it is, it gets pulled this way and that way. The make-up person, the wardrobe person, , the lighting person, they’re all adding to the end product. With poetry it’s just your perception of the world communicated between you and the person who was listening. And I like that.”

Henry Normal is at Otley Courthouse on October 21 and Selby Town Hall on October 22.