Henry Normal is a stand-up comic supreme, who with fellow poet Brian Bilston, has been attracting bumper and appreciative audiences during the pair’s current tour.

He has maintained a prolific output since returning to poetry after retiring from a glittering career in television as a co-writer and producer, with an astonishing track record of hit shows. He currently has two new poetry books out – The First Spark Has Led to This Blaze, a selection of his poems with illustrations by Pete Ramskill, and his latest volume of new poems, An Alphabet of Storms.

Henry Normal intersperses wry, self-deprecating jokes with poems during his hour-long set. Opening the two-man show at Whitley Bay Playhouse on Thursday night, there were plenty of laughs, but also moments of seriousness, as he mentioned growing up with coverage of the Vietnam war always on the TV, and how we have somehow become immune to the suffering we see on our screens, even as children are killed by bombs in Gaza.  

Poems such as ‘Sans Pretension’ are brought to life on the stage (“Let’s call a spud a spud / no more lies or elaborate word contortions / Chips are chips / not pomme frites or french fries / why say ‘haute cuisine’ when you mean ‘smaller portions’? ”   

‘I Said to Ange’ is a poignant yet funny poem about death: “I hope I die first / That would be the biz/ cos I don’t really know / where anything is”, while ‘Birdspotting’ is a spectacular and encyclopaedic visualisation of doing to birds what they sometimes do to us:  “Stick one in the eye of a Magpie / Why not try tomorrow / and cry ‘there’s one for sorrow’. ”

Joking apart, there were also a number of simple but touching love poems. He surprised his audience by revealing that he had been offered an MBE but was turning it down, and gave his reasons, as an introduction to a poem about being awarded a series of medals for completing everyday tasks such as filling the dishwasher, or completing simple DIY jobs without making a song and dance about it.  

And he talked of co-writing the first series of the comedy show The Royle Family with Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash, and how they mined the conversations of their own families for material. His mother used to say: “I’ve still got my girlish figure, haven’t I?” He put it into the mouth of Sue Johnston in the show. When he was watching it with his family, and she uttered the words, his mum said to his dad: “I say that, too, don’t I?”

 

Brian Bilston is a poet who often focuses on the trials and tribulations of modern life. He opened his Whitley Bay set with a long and highly amusing poem about a poet standing at platform 3a, late for a performance at a poetry festival, and the infuriating failures of our modern railway system.

He came to fame as the ‘poet laureate’ of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, and reflected: ‘It’s a real shame to see what’s happened on Twitter … it will always have a special place in my heart.” He has a poem about Elon Musk that includes these lines: “He’s a billionaire in a mid-life crisis / If truth be told, he’s not the nicest.”

He was keen to make clear that he’s not an Instagram poet, “like Rupi Kaur and Donna Ashworth”. But on platforms like Facebook, where he still posts poems, he has to deal with trolls, including “a poet who once had two poems in the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse edited by Larkin”, and pedants, who were awarded their own clever and satisfying poem, too.

His love-hate relationship with technology extended further with ‘Love Poem, Written in Haste, with auto-correct on’: “Your light shins down upon me / and sets my heart on fir. / You stir up my emoticons / and fill me with desert.” This received a heartfelt round of applause from an audience that clearly had their own, multiple issues with modern technology. 

Brian Bilston was also critical of Amazon, who he said discounted all their books around Independent Bookshops Day.

He wound up his set with ‘Refugees’, a hugely popular mirror poem that looks at both sides of the migration problem, and has been used in campaigns for national and international refugee organisations, and taught in primary and secondary school classrooms; ‘The Caveman’s Lament’, a poignant love poem that drew satisfied sighs of recognition from the audience (“she tell me love invent not yet”);  and  ‘On ‘;..p’[[[[[[[[[[[[[;’;////////////////////////3,’ a poem that attempts to analyse one written by his cat on his laptop, in an affectionate nod to the complexities of some modern poetry. I should also mention that a short, tragic dog poem called ‘Frisbee’ made me laugh out loud – I’m not a dog lover.

Brian Bilston has in the past gone to some lengths to maintain his anonymity. But his fame is now well established, and although his flyers for this tour with Henry Normal still reflect a long-standing desire for pictorial modesty, he was happy to pose for selfies with book buyers after the show. You could measure the esteem and affection in which both poets are held by the long queues to purchase their collections. The right kind of poetry combo can be a whole lot of fun, and a great night out.

 

More Brian Bilston/Henry Normal tour dates

Sounds Made by Humans, an album of ‘poem songs’ by Brian Bilston and The Catenary Wires. The album is out now on vinyl and CD; it's also available for streaming on Spotify and elsewhere, such as Bandcamp, Shopify, and Rough Trade, and can be downloaded