He’s a poet, comedian, writer, actor and now film star, with comedy-drama The Ballad of Wallis Island. And he has a new book out too. Tom Hodgkinson meets the unusually talented Tim Key 

It’s hard to know, half the time, whether Tim Key is spinning amusing yarns or telling the truth. We are sitting in the café for the Playground Theatre in west London with a coffee and small piece of green and black’s chocolate. When we start chatting, having heard that he lives in Kentish Town, north London, I tell him it seems to be an area favoured by comedians – I’ve bumped into both Simon Farnaby and Michael Palin up there, wandering the Heath.

“Actually I did spot Michael Palin in the wild last week,” says Tim. “After the screening in Notting Hill.”

Tim Key and his long-time writing partner Tom Basden have just released a film, many years in the planning, called The Ballad of Wallis Island, and they’ve been doing Q&As at screenings to promote it. I went to one at the Notting Hill Gate cinema. The film is superb. It’s the tale of a lottery winner (Key), who offers a huge fee to his favourite folk musicians, played by Basden and Carey Mulligan, to do a gig on a remote Welsh island, just for him. It’s very funny, very charming and moving too.

“Oh really?” I say.

“Me and Tom were just discussing the idea of Michael Palin coming and watching our film, and we cycled past him in Kentish Town, in his natural environment.”

“Did you stop and talk to him?”

“We didn’t. That’s just weird – stopping and talking to an 82-year-old man at half past ten at night.”

“Oh, you should have stopped. He would have been thrilled. In our interview in the Idler, he talks about his deliberate decision to not be aloof from people.”

Slight pause. “I needed you to go through Michael’s personality before.”

For some reason I find this so hilarious that I spit out a sip of coffee I’ve just drunk. And on later reflection I realise that Key was weaving a fiction live in front of me. In similar fashion, the photographer Chris Floyd later asked him where he was from (he’s from Cambridge) and Key replied: “From Uruguay” in such a deadpan tone that Chris later rang me up to ask whether he really was from Uruguay.

But when he’s not ad-libbing strange stories, he’s very serious about his art. I start with the rather feeble observation that he seems to be very much in the public eye right now. The film has won awards and is being praised by the critics in the UK and US. He appears in the film Mickey 17, a caper from Parasite director Bong Joon Ho released earlier this year, and is well known for playing Alan Partridge’s sidekick Simon. His new book of poetry, L.A. Baby!, of which more later, is just out. Then there’s Tim Key’s Poetry Programme on Radio 4. And he’s just back from three months in Los Angeles filming a new series called The Paper, a spin-off from the American version of The Office.

The Ballad of Wallis Island has been a long time coming. It’s an extended version of a short film Key and Basden released in 2007. Does it feel to him, I ask, as if a lot of things that have been brewing for a while are coming to fruition?

“Yeah, I think the film is like that. But me and Tom – we always just do stuff. We plug away. And there’s a few of us. When we meet up for a pint and try and work out what the hell’s going on, it always comes down to the same conclusion, which is that you just have to plug away.”

He says he’s finding the success of the film overwhelming, in a good way.

“It’s different in terms of scale. If you do a live show and people like it, you really get that. So you’re in control when you do live stuff. But with the film, I have no idea how many people will watch it. And a lot of people I’ve lost touch with have been sending messages. Such nice messages. And that obviously won’t happen regularly in your life or career, but that’s what’s happening at the moment, and it’s kind of mad, and it’s really nice.”

I mention that the film has a very warm vibe. Bruce Robinson has said that Withnail and I came together very harmoniously. Was this the same with The Ballad of Wallis Island?

“I think it was about as harmonious as these things can be. We would shoot and then go to the pub and digest what we’d done. There weren’t any crisis meetings. It was like in tennis when doubles partners win a point. They don’t over-celebrate. They just do a very casual, quiet high five and get on with the next point.”

So the film is a great success, but, I venture, he and Tom must have had plenty of disappointments along the way.

“Yes, we’ve had ideas which have never happened or not been commissioned. We’re pretty…”

“Resilient?”

“I was going to say ‘indefatigable’. “

And Key and his comedy crew really have plugged away. They first met as undergraduates in Monty Python style. Tom Basden was in the Cambridge Footlights and Tim was a Cambridge resident who got into the gang. That led to a fertile twenties, working in a small group of kindred spirits.

“Me and Mark Watson directed a sketch show in about 2003 in Cambridge, and Tom was in that. And after that, me and Tom and two of the other people, Stefan Golaszewski and Lloyd Woolf, decided to start a sketch show.”

This was “Cowards”, about four young men. They recorded two series for Radio 4 and also made it to TV.

“We were people in their 20s with no other prospects. It was just the four of us living in each other’s pockets, learning how to do it, how to write, how to work with other people. And it was definitely the most exciting bit so far. And I think it will always be the most exciting.”

At this point, Tim kept the day job.

“In between working in bars or temping or whatever, you could write enough material that week. On the Sunday, we’d all meet up in Tom’s flat and read out what we’d written and then choose our favourite 18 sketches. Then bin off half of what we’d written and perform the rest at the Hen and Chickens [a comedy pub in Islington]. It was incredibly exciting.”

Exciting, but not lucrative. Tim taught English as a foreign language for years. It was only in his thirties that he was able to give it up (he’s now 48).

“It started to become… I think ‘untenable’ is the word. I’d be on the phone about a Hula Hoops commercial in my breaks. I would go to the principal of the school and ask her for time off in the same tone as someone would say, ‘my mother’s fallen ill’. But she was so understanding.”

But Key was always grateful for the paid employment he received. Not only did it bring in cash, it also provided him with material.

“My first instinct, when I finished university or when I first thought about writing, was to do it the other way around, and not get a job. That lasted for about a month. It doesn’t work. You turn yourself into someone who’s not really living. You’re just trying to write from a standing start. And actually, it’s better to work in a pub or office just so you see people and there’s material. My friend Ray says, ‘living is writing’.”

And after years of plugging away, says Key, there’s a moment when it comes together.

“I remember the tipping point where you could put on a work-in-progress, and 80 people would come. That’s a big moment, you know, because that’s never, ever something I would take for granted. I remember doing a show with Alex Horne at the Hen and Chickens when there were two people in the audience… and we needed two volunteers on stage.”

Tim generally writes in cafés on pen and paper, and makes notes on his phone. I ask how he finds this routine.

“Um, horrible… If I’m writing the film or my radio show, it’s black coffee in the café and the desperate fight to stay off the phone and write something.”

Do you have any self-discipline systems as far as the phone goes?

“I have no self-discipline, that’s the issue! I’ve got a friend who’s got a phone jail [a miniature locked cage for your mobile]. I bought an app that shuts the phone down but I thought it might destroy my phone, so I didn’t use it.  The nuclear option is to turn your phone off, leave it in the flat and come back two hours later. But that, I cannot envisage, is something I would ever do.”

His writing process was a little different for his poetry collection, L.A. Baby!. This is a kind of travelogue in poem form, annotated with chatty asides between Key and his publisher and designer Emily Juniper. It tells the story of the three months he spent in Los Angeles filming The Paper. The book is really funny and sweet.

“Writing it was therapeutic. I was slightly discombobulated and I thought that I might need to have something going on in addition to the show. I’d go and get a pint of beer and write any old thing in my notebook, and then the next day, type up the stuff that was least disagreeable. After about a week I had 20 poems.”

He uses Paperblanks notebooks (“I have over a hundred at home”) and a Pentel Tradio refillable fountain pen.

“I went to Japan with a friend and there was an amazing stationery place in one of the underground stations. And I bought this beautiful pen. And then on my last day in Tokyo, went back there and bought three more. I tried Lamy but I prefer these. It’s more of an out-and-about pen.”

I take a photo of the notebook and pen.

“Do a little tableau,” says Tim. “Good idea. Make me out to be a classy drinker of espressos.”

Tim’s poetic style is prosey and reminds me a little of DH Lawrence’s poems, but with a sense of humour.

“I had to read Sons and Lovers very quickly at A level. But I haven’t read his poetry. I don’t have any real influences, apart from this Russian guy, Daniil Kharms.” Kharms was born in 1905 and died of starvation in a psychiatric ward in Leningrad in 1942. Poems include “Today I Wrote Nothing” and “The Plummeting Old Woman”

Key shows me a copy of L.A. Baby!. It’s from Emily Juniper’s one-woman small press outfit, “Utter” & Press, based in Falmouth, Cornwall. I called Emily to ask her about it. She said she was a “comic dancer” and appeared at Edinburgh Festival shows, which is where she met Tim. She also studied bookbinding and decided to set up on her own. “I never liked being in a job where you had to arrive at the same time every day and look smart,” she says. “And I feel so lucky that my job is publishing Tim’s work.”

The artefact is lovely: it’s printed in small batches on high-quality paper and has the feel of having been produced by an anarchist letterpress studio. Her website declares: “We want to slow down. To listen to ourselves. To capture in ink and press on to paper.”

“I met Emily at a party years ago. Her interest is in watching things on stage and then turning them into print,” says Tim. “We’re good friends, and we have a laugh, we like what each other does. She watched my live show and said, it’d be amazing to turn that into something visual. I’ve never had any interest in filming any of my stuff. So that felt like a good thing for me – to have a record of my show, but in visual, word-based form.”

Tim’s done a few projects with Emily, including a poster and a pack of playing cards with words by Tim, and he’s particularly happy with Chapters, a collection of poems written during lockdown.

“I just cannot imagine how out of my mind I’d have gone in lockdown without Emily. It just meant that I knew for the rest of the lockdown that I was making something that would definitely happen, and Emily knew that she was doing the same thing. And it’s maybe the thing I’ve done that I’m most proud of. Later I did a show about it and people would come up to me to say what a useful work it had been for them.”

When it comes to L.A. Baby!, Tim has a dream.

“The dream is, there’ll be someone who’ll run out of their flat to get on the underground, and they’ll grab their phone, and their keys, but then grab L.A. Baby!, and then on the underground, not be on their phone, but be flicking through this. Oh, that’s a beautiful vision. That’s the dream. It’s a vision at this stage. Yeah. It’s not happened.”

L.A. Baby! by Tim Key is published by “Utter” & Press (utterandpress.co.uk), £16. 

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