Henry Normal: Ilkey and Scarborough date for comic and poet who brought us The Royle Family and Philomena

And so it is with Henry Normal, who, though his (made up) moniker might sound a little like an android simulating a real person’s name, has been portraying the all-too-mortal comic pathos of the human condition in television, film and poetry for decades.

“I'll tell you what the most striking thing is at the moment,” he says to The Yorkshire Post over the phone.

“AI doesn't have a sense of humour. As yet. It can do puns but it can’t do humour. It's not got the social nous. A lot of humour is based on imperfection, it's based on being frail as human beings and, of course, AI isn’t frail and doesn't think of itself as imperfect, so it hasn't got that self-knowledge that human beings have, so it can't fill in the blanks of humour in the same way that we all do.”

It would be quite something to see an AI representation of work written or overseen by Normal: his name can be found in the credits after The Royle Family, The Trip, Gavin and Stacey, among plenty more examples of top British comedy.

However, after retiring from the television business in 2016 - latterly he was co-founder, with Steve Coogan, and managing director of Baby Cow Productions - he has returned to his old love of poetry.

Since then, he’s released numerous books, including his latest, A Moonless Night, which was inspired by his son Johnny’s art work.

Tonight, alongside Brian Bilston, he’s performing at King’s Hall in Ilkley and, on Thursday, will be at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough for Everything and More, an evening of jokes, poems and stories.

But his first stop will be Bettys, for a slice of cake. Normal (real name Peter James Carroll) was born in Nottingham but has had Yorkshire connections since his earliest days.

“My mum was born in Doncaster, so I'm a part of the diaspora,” says Normal, 67, who now lives in Hastings with his wife, the screenwriter Angela Pell, and Johnny. He also has an uncle in Wakefield who gets along to his gigs and, when he was about 20 years old, lived on the Yorkshire coast.

“Before I got into writing full-time I was an insurance broker and I lived in Hull. Funnily enough I lived about 100 yards from Larkin at Pearson Park. This was back in the 80s and I used to go up the coast, Hornsea, Withernsea, Scarborough, Bridlington. That was always very nice for a day out.”

It was that job which led to him creating his Henry Normal stage name when performing poetry on the road with a pre-Britpop era Pulp and other Sheffield bands, when he lived in Chesterfield. Turning up in his business attire after his shifts, he thought he’d get the joke in with an appropriate name before the audience had the chance.

Poetry, for a long time, took a back seat, when Normal’s hugely successful career in television comedy got motoring.

Although, he adds: “I would like to think that the shows that we made, things like the Mighty Boosh, Gavin and Stacey, films like Philomena and my wife’s film, Snow Cake, I'd like to think there's poetry in those, that they’re of a certain quality, and I'd like to think I helped bring a little bit of poetry to the things that I was involved with.”

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Alongside Caroline Aherne, Normal co-wrote and script edited the multi-award-winning Mrs Merton Show and the spin-off series Mrs Merton and Malcolm. He also co-created and co-wrote the first series of The Royle Family.

With Coogan, he co-wrote the BAFTA-winning Paul and Pauline Calf Video Diaries, Coogan's Run, Tony Ferrino, Doctor Terrible and the film The Parole Officer.

In 1999, they set up Baby Cow Productions, for which he executive produced all and script-edited many of the shows 450 shows and dozen films during his time as managing director. Highlights include the Oscar-nominated film Philomena, and programmes such as Gavin and Stacey, The Mighty Boosh, Marion and Geoff, Red Dwarf and Alan Partridge.

But, he says: “I didn’t write a poem for about 25 years.”

That changed when, after more than 17 years at the helm at Baby Cow, and having done his share of commutes to London, he retired in April 2016 (and in June 2017 was honoured with a special BAFTA for Services to Television).

He says: “The difference between poetry and television and film is that, with a film, there can be up to 400 people working on it, so a creative idea gets pulled lots of different ways. With poetry, it’s a very pure form of communication. It's just you and the person you are communicating to. It's undiluted and I like the purity of that and the concentration of that.”

He is also founder of the Manchester Poetry Festival (now the Literature Festival) and co-founder of the Nottingham Poetry Festival, and has written and performed his own shows for BBC Radio 4.

Normal’s verse might be described as ‘accessible’ – simple language, everyday observations – but, as he puts it, over the centuries, “we’re probably all rewriting the same poems because the human condition, I'm sure, doesn't change that much, and our hopes and dreams and fears don’t change that much over the generations, it is just that language changes, doesn’t it?”

He adds: “What you find in humour is, there's always a little bit of truth. I'm not as deep as I would like to be. There's plenty of human beings throughout history that have written poetry and captured things in grand ways. I'm a council estate lad who enjoys words and enjoys communicating, and I would hope through humour in the same way as, say, the Liverpool Poets, some good people like Brian Bilston and John Cooper Clarke, that I'm able to communicate a bit of poetry, but I have no pretension to my own gravitas.”