Henry Normal

one

of the things I was always good at was spotting talent so even when I was at Radio Derby all the people who were involved in my show did well my resident poet was Henry Normal I ended up setting up Baby Cow and wrote the Mrs Merton show, it's from Nottingham.

When he left there and I went to Manchester, he'd moved to Manchester, so I brought him back in.

Then when he got busy, I brought Lem Cissé in as my resident poet.

Yeah.

How was it touring around with Henry Normal? That must have been fun.

Fantastic.

It was down to him that I sort of plucked up the courage to do the autobiography.

Like, if I'd have had to audition for encore, I probably wouldn't have got it.

But because Henry Normal, the executive producer, had just seen me in Edinburgh, and they'd just got a script in, and they were like, oh, well, that'll be great.

It was originally about an out-of-work actor.

Yeah.

When we filmed the first series, I think we filmed No Survivors, me in the street singing No Survivors, in like week two.

And then by the time we got to week six filming, or week seven, the crew were still singing it.

And then Henry Normal, he suggested that we expand one of the songs to full length and release it as a single to promote the show.

And I said, why don't we do No Survivors, because all the crew like it, and then we'll expand that to a full proper song.