How Henry Normal went from the Royle Family and Alan Partridge to poetry

He’s been a stand-up comedian, award-winning comedy writer, broadcaster and hugely successful TV producer but Henry Normal’s first love was poetry – and it is an artform to which he has recently returned.

This month he will be appearing at Huddersfield Literature Festival, reading from Staring Directly at the Eclipse, his first collection of poetry for over twenty years. Better known as the co-creator of award-winning TV series like The Royle Family, The Mrs Merton Show, Coogan’s Run and Alan Partridge and producer of films such as the Oscar-nominated Philomena, Normal has always written poetry, but over the past couple of decades he’s been busy with other things. In 1999 he set up Baby Cow Productions with frequent collaborator Steve Coogan, focussing on comedy and later diversifying into film, animation and radio. “For 17 years poetry had to be put to one side because there just weren’t enough hours in the day,” he says. “But then three things happened fairly close together – my brother died at the age of 61 of cancer, my dad died at the age of 90 and my son, who is autistic, reached 16. After that I started writing.” He also decided to hand in his notice. “So I’m retired now and I am writing full time.”

Although Staring Directly at the Eclipse contains a few poems that date back 25 years, most of them were written in the past two years. Many of them are laced with a dry humour but he deals with the big subjects – life, death, loss, love, loneliness among them – it is proper, thought-provoking contemporary lyric poetry, much of it profound and very affecting.

“What I tried to do in the book is mix things up a bit – some of the poems are funny and some are not,” he says. “I think it’s much more interesting to represent life as it is – there are funny bits and there are serious bits. Life is not just about one thing.”

A number of the poems refer to his son’s autism which he also explored movingly in his acclaimed BBC Radio 4 series A Normal Family, where some of the poems in the collection made their debut. “While I sat in my office writing, I started going through boxes of old photographs and they reminded me of the journey we had been on as a family,” says Normal. “And I think the poetry was also about trying to make sense of things.”

This could well have been what drew him to poetry in the first place. “My mum died when I was 11 and at that time I became quite introverted and I read a lot,” he says. “I read quite a lot of Spike Milligan’s poetry which was very heartfelt. I was struck by the way that within a poem you can communicate your perception of the world and your emotional experience of it. And the world is richer for that communication.”

He mentions a particular book of Milligan’s Small Dreams of a Scorpion, first published in 1973, which left a particular impression. In it Milligan candidly mused on his own periods of depression and hospitalisation as well as his experiences during the Second World War and his feelings about what was going on in the world at the time. It is a very personal collection and Normal’s has a similarly candid quality to it.

In Staring Directly at the Eclipse there is some very sweet love poetry including a touching ode, I am Not Belittled by Your Culture of Ambition, to the simple joys of a happy marriage – ‘Against all rules of fashion/and all aesthetic consideration/we are happy/at ease/daft in love’. There is a warm and funny tribute to his father in Tinned Fruit and Evaporated Milk and a couple of poems – The Last Parents, a chilling look forward to the dying of the sun, and Message to My Species in which he contemplates his own mortality and the fact that once his little family of three is gone ‘my evolutionary line is going out in a blaze of indifference’– which seem, I suggest to him, to have an apocalyptic flavour to them. “If you are writing about things in the world you have to think about where it all began and where it will all end,” he says. “Death is always there – you live your life knowing that but you have to live your life.”

One of the poems in the collection was written for a specific occasion when a friend who works in Child Services in Leeds invited him to speak at a conference. “I had never spoken at a conference before so I wrote them a poem about how undervalued kindness is,” he says. “I think it’s a very strong thing to be tender and gentle. I performed the poem and it went down very well. It is the one people tend to like in performance and they tell me how much it affected them.”

The poem, entitled Vanguard 
of Audacious is indeed, very affecting and in our cynical and divisive modern world, it’s a rallying cry for standing up for tolerance and understanding. ‘Kindness is bravery at its brazen best/Its boldest and most ballsy… Empathy and humanity are gifts that entail risk’.

Henry Normal is appearing at Huddersfield Literature, Heritage Quay, University of Huddersfield at 7.30pm on March 16. www.litfest.org.uk