Few have tread the path that Henry Normal has taken – from performance poetry to TV producing and back again
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.
Normal 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.
“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.”Poet and TV producer Henry Normal has show dates in Yorkshire this week. Photo: Richard Davis 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.
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