BILLED as a reunion of comedy writers and performers on a mission to entertain, educate, and inform, this pairing of Henry Normal and Nigel Planer was constructed on a platform of poetry – with a touch of the memoirs. Normal, the man who co-wrote The Royle Family, and Planer, aka Neil from The Young Ones, have been writing poetry since the 1970s. As one might expect, much of it is layered with humour – some light, some dark.
But both tend to delve into other areas: love and romance, sex, death and loss, politics, and the sort of observational comedy that made The Royle Family so vivid and authentic, and Neil so ‘80s relevant and lovable. Nigel Planer (second from right) as Neil in The Young Ones (Image: Photos 12) Normal, 68, described his part of the evening as “a poetry salad, with me as the tosser”, indicating that if he took his role as wordsmith seriously, himself he took seriously not a jot. Cue comments on fast-forwarding the boring bits in movies – car chases, fight sequences, and sex scenes, the latter described as “like eating in front of the starving”.
There was a gentle rant about the impact of social media, a few pointed pokes at politicians, and poetry in the vein of Spike Milligan and Pam Ayres with a love poem to a librarian entitled ‘My Heart will not be Shushed’. Filming of The Young Ones (Image: Courtesy of Ed Wooden/BBC) Planer, 71, confessed he’d always hated his first name and observed that, since 2016, parents have stopped using it.
