The producer whose TV hits include The Royle Family and Gavin and Stacey on finding the poignancy in life’s little moments, and heading back to the comedy circuit with his poetry
Comedians become actors, pop stars become TV presenters … we’re used to artists switching lanes. Seldom travelled, though, is the road leading from performance poetry to TV producing – TV producers not being renowned for their poetic souls. It may be that Henry Normal is the only poet to make that journey, and he did it with spectacular success, co-running the production company Baby Cow with Steve Coogan, creating hit after hit (Gavin and Stacey, The Mighty Boosh, Nighty Night) across a 17-year run. But the siren call of spoken word proved impossible to resist: Normal quit producing five years ago and is now prepping a standup poetry tour.
“It’s the biggest tour I’ve ever done,” he tells me, Zooming from his native Nottingham. “I toured with Caroline Aherne and Steve back in the day. I’ve done over 1,000 gigs in my life. But an actual theatre tour, where it’s me doing a full show by myself? That’s very much a big deal for me.” The tour, called The Escape Plan, will feature work from his two lockdown-era collections, The Beauty Within Shadow and The Distance Between Clouds, as well as material from the BBC Radio 4 shows that began in 2016 with A Normal Family. “It’s a mixture of stories and comedy, jokes and poems,” he says. “It’s basically 64 years in the making, and I’m hoping to pack it all into just under two hours.”
