Brian Bilston and Henry Normal to present a night of ‘poetry and jokes’
One is a poet and writer, who has been called the ‘Banksy of poetry’, the other is a BAFTA Award-winning writer, poet, and film and TV producer – and Brian Bilston and Henry Normal will soon be bringing their show to Cambridge.
The two appear together for the first time in a comedic show which one critic has described as “two people reading some poems”.
Along the way, they will be drawing on their vast catalogue of crowd favourites – and throwing in new poems, so they don’t end up becoming their own tribute acts.
“It’s two hours and there’s an interval in the middle,” says Henry of the show, speaking to the Cambridge Independent from his home in Fairlight on the East Sussex coast, between Hastings and Rye.
“And Brian’s very funny so I have to up me game… very intelligent and sophisticated, so I have to up me game twice as hard.
“I’m a little bit more bawdy and basic, so we do complement each other – you get a full range of stuff.
“We toured last year, it was great fun and people seemed to like it. I think we played to venues with over a thousand people in them.”
Henry, 68, whose TV credits include co-writing The Mrs Merton Show and the first series of The Royle Family with Craig Cash and the late Caroline Aherne – and working as executive producer on programmes such as Gavin & Stacey and Red Dwarf – says that as well as poetry, the show has “lots of jokes in it, stories…”
“Have you ever heard my BBC Radio 4 show?” he asks (my answer was no). “If you go on BBC Sounds, I’ve got 11 shows up there – they’re half an hour long – and it’s similar to that really.
“I pick a theme and talk about it and we do poems and jokes along the way.”
Henry and Brian first met at the Laugharne Festival in Wales in 2023.
“We were over there doing the festival, it’s where Dylan Thomas lived – a beautiful place,” recalls Henry, “and we hit it off.
“I’d seen him on the internet and read his books, and we got on so well we decided to tour.
“Last year was the first tour, this year we pushed it back a little bit to May so we get better weather.”
Henry will be debuting poems from his latest poetry collections – An Alphabet of Storms and The First Spark Has Led to This Blaze, both of which come out today (21 April).
Brian, fresh from releasing his new album of song-poems, Brian Bilston and The Catenary Wires: Sounds Made By Humans, will be reading a selection of poems from across his bestselling collections as well as new work.
“We constantly change the set,” says Henry, who founded the TV and film company Baby Cow with Steve Coogan, with whom he has also worked (Henry was executive producer on Mid Morning Matters with Alan Partridge and the film 24 Hour Party People, for example).
“Because we have to listen to it as well, so it amuses us and it just keeps it more exciting.”
He concludes: “People do have the wrong opinion about poetry, but it’s just a form of communication. So it depends what you’re communicating, and with me and Brian it’s usually fun.”
Retiring from TV to return to his first love poetry, Henry was awarded a special BAFTA for services to television.
He has also been awarded an honorary doctorate of letters by Nottingham Trent University, another by Nottingham University, and has had a beer and a bus named after him in his native Nottingham.
The Telegraph described him as “the funniest man you’ve never heard of”.
With more than 500,000 followers on social media, Brian Bilston has become popular with the online community.
He has published several bestselling collections of poetry, including You Took the Last Bus Home, Alexa, What is There to Know about Love?, and Days Like These, while his novel, Diary of a Somebody, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award.
The Spectator said of him: “Bilston is the greatest English anti-hero of our time.”
Brian Bilston and Henry Normal will be coming to the Cambridge Corn Exchange on Friday, 2 May. Tickets, priced £22.50-£30.50 (including booking fee), are available from cornex.co.uk.
