Nigel Planer and Henry Normal at The Studio, Alhambra

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 for their kids: “the only Brexit benefit”. His portion of the show rambled freely over The Young Ones (dubbed into Catalan as the people of Barcelona love scatological humour), time travel, something called morphic resonance (look it up…) and poems.

Planer's poetry has been collected into a new volume (Image: SH Comms) Planer’s poetry has been collected into a new volume entitled Making Other Plans and spans the period 1970 to 2023 covering everything from Coronavirus to corduroy. There’s even a morbid love poem entitled ‘Assuming You Go First’.

All of it serves as an indicator to the authors: their lives, experiences, frustrations, emotions. The words are touchstones to moments in time. Sometimes funny, sometimes not, but always honest.

The Studio, Alhambra (Image: Google Street View) Planer recited ‘Axogram’, a song (accompanied by air guitar) from his time in comedy rock band Bad News and read extracts from his forthcoming memoirs that had Young Ones fans salivating.

The song felt timeless in a Spinal Tap sort of way (though Bad News came first) and led into a new composition, ‘When Love Strikes’, which Planer wrote during Covid and performed live.

The evening ended with a convivial Q&A with the audience in which Normal and Planer answered questions in candid fashion.

All in all, a pleasure.