It’s a misty morning in Fairlight when I ring Henry Normal’s doorbell and, as I do, I notice two peculiar sculptures – each about the size of a shoe box – sitting on a stone bench near the entryway. Wooden, with facial features made out of scrap metal, these sculptures appear friendly yet uncanny, like something out of a Tim Burton film. Once inside, I spot another sculpture of a similar aesthetic, this time with an egg-white strainer for an ear, and marvel at the ingenuity.

The sculptures are made by Johnny Caroll Pell, Henry Normal’s son with screenwriter Angela Pell. Johnny is also a painter, his paintings showcased pretty much on every wall in their house. Some are abstract landscapes (symbols of hills and trees); Others are portraits (David Bowie, Nick Cave), but almost all of them are alive with imagination. “He paints every day,” Henry tells me as I follow him out to his patio overlooking the valley, a view which, unsurprisingly, is obscured by the mist. 

Some of you may know Henry Normal as the former executive director/producer of Baby Cow Productions (The Mighty Boosh, Gavin & Stacey, Alan Partridge). Others may know him as the author of several poetry collections, plus one non-fiction book co-written with Angela titled: A Normal Family: Everyday Adventures with our Autistic Son (Johnny is autistic). But in his most recent poetry collection, The Fire Hills, he tackles “both the external and internal landscape”, using surrounding nature and historic landmarks as an analogy to confront greater themes in his life like aging and death. “I’m 67 next week,” Henry informs me. “My brother died before the age of 67, so part of your attention – part of the way you view life – is through the filter of ‘I might not see this next year.’”

Which is not to say that the collection is devoid of the humour and wit which has made Henry a household name. On the contrary, the collection is a balance of self-deprecation, lyric playfulness and quiet reflection. The poems range from sending off a stool sample in the post to Henry’s weekly commute to his father’s deathbed. Seemingly disproportionate in tone, the comedy of one poem off-sets the emotional depth of the next, forging a gap from which the humanity of the overall collection emerges. 

It’s a precarious balance to strike, but Henry assures me it’s a feeling. “It’s all to do with feelings. If there are no feelings involved then what’s the point? Why would you even bother to write? There’s something in you that observes and thinks ‘Oh, I need to communicate that’ or ‘I need to jot that down”, but it’s got to start with a feeling and if it doesn’t, then you are just going through the motions.”

Henry started writing when he was 14, living in a council estate in Nottingham with his widowed father and four siblings. He recalls, “While all the other boys were out playing football and trying to get girlfriends, I sat in my room with a paper and pen.” When I ask him why, he tells me that “Writing has always been very cathartic,” like listening to music. “I would listen to Led Zeppelin and I wouldn’t be in a council estate in Nottingham, I’d be anywhere in the world – I’d be in a different world, a world that didn’t actually exist.” Similarly with writing, one is transported: “You’re in your head and in a world of your making.”

But it wasn’t until an English teacher assigned Henry’s class to write an essay on The Ballad of Hollis Brown, a Bob Dylan song about the dust bowl in America, that he began to relate to “lyrics as a serious form of communication.” He then started to read Liverpudlian poets like Adrian Mitchell, and fellow comedian Spike Milligan. At 16, he bought Milligan’s Small Dreams of a Scorpion, which made him cry. “I thought ‘this man is so incredibly funny and yet so incredibly moving’.” 

And it’s precisely this cathartic friction between humor and depth which Henry hopes to achieve in his own poetry. He describes some “light-verse” as “neither funny nor moving” but something in between with “a sort of afternoon tea party” formality. “It all feels a bit like a parlour game, whereas what I found with the poems coming mainly from a working-class background is that they were quite sharp in their comedy and in their passion, and I thought those are the poems I want to write. I don’t want the middle ground.”

When I ask him if he thinks humour helps one endure the burdens of working-class life, he hesitates to agree. “I think it is to do with feeling like an outsider. I think that you could be rich and successful and still feel like an outsider, which is that you can’t relate to people or people can’t relate to you.” But again, he resists putting too much of a label on it. “We’re in an age where we are conscious of race and age and gender and really, these are just divisions that we make” – divisions which ultimately aid in feelings of inclusion or exclusion.

As for Henry, art and poetry should be anything but exclusive. He believes that art is first and foremost about self-expression and that no one should have to subject their expression to a preconceived notion of what ‘good’ art is. He uses his son’s work as an example – he had an exhibition at the Phoenix in Brighton a few years back. “A lot of professional artists came, and I was slightly hesitant with them, but they were saying ‘it’s marvelous how bold he is!’ And it’s because he is unencumbered by the pressure of living up to the artists of the past. Basically he is expressing himself through art and you can either like it or not like it.”

For someone who battles with her own creativity, it’s refreshing to hear Henry speak; his words destabilise a hierarchical conditioning which may have, consciously or unconsciously, permeated my own creative process as a writer. “I don’t think anything I write is necessarily of any greater value than what anybody else writes,” he continues. “But I can only write the things that I write. And whether somebody would look at anything I’ve written and know the specific place and have the same experience, I don’t know, because it is filtered through everything that they’ve experienced. And it feels like there is something precious about that.” He smiles, “Valuable.”

It’s an ethos commonly shared with the Hastings Book Festival, which Henry is a patron of. And I can’t think of a better spokesperson for the Festival than Henry Normal. Describing his poetry as “deliberately accessible,” Henry likens himself to a kind of John the Baptist character: “I’m out there bringing people in for the poet yet to come,” he laughs. Humbling jokes aside, it’s obvious that Henry is making himself aesthetically vulnerable so as to embody this ethos of inclusivity which makes me think less of John the Baptist and more of a knight crusader. 

You can hear Henry read his poems at the Hastings Book Festival on September 15 at 7.30.