Tim Key returns to the office

Key’s career has been on a slow but steady upwards trajectory ever since his stand-up show The Slutcracker won the Perrier award at the Edinburgh fringe in 2009. This year the film he co-wrote with Tom Basden, The Ballad of Wallis Island, has brought his brand of comedy – very British, very awkward, delivered with a glimmer of mischief and an afternote of self-doubt – to an even wider audience. But for The Paper he had to reach further back, to the office job he had in his early twenties. “I was a threshold assessment regional deployment officer,” he tells me, dressed in double denim and an LA Dodgers baseball cap, sitting on a sofa in a tucked-away room at The Observer’s office. “As far as I can remember, it was to do with placing threshold assessment regional assessors in schools …” He throws his head back and erupts in laughter.

The memory of that office – being in the midst of “a soup of people, some more eccentric than others” – helped him get in the zone. And simmering in the background was Key’s love for Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s original The Office, which brought a new level of realism and discomfort to TV comedy when first broadcast in 2001. “I think it’s perfect,” he says. “I was 23, 24, when it came out and I associate it with moving to London and starting to do comedy. It’s deeply, deeply ingrained in me.”

How many times has he seen it?

“I’d probably say 30. I literally watched it two days ago.”

The Paper’s narrative is driven by the arrival of Domhnall Gleeson’s Ned, the Truth Teller’s idealistic new editor in chief. Key’s character is the sort of colleague who “you don’t really know, but he keeps coming in and messing things up, and then you sort of see the back of his head as he walks away. And you think, ‘I could have done without that.’”

As Ken drops in and out of the action, Key found himself with time off, which he filled recording his experiences of LA in the trademark poems that litter his stand-up comedy – short, disarmingly funny pieces full of surrealism, bathos and brand names. His homesickness and anxiety begin as soon as he lands at LAX airport: “I surveyed the area for a WH Smiths. / Nothing. / I scanned back the other way. / Again, no WH Smiths. / What was happening to me?” The poems became a collection, LA Baby!, published earlier this year, though Key is keen to point out the text’s poetic licenses: in the book he tries and fails to do an American accent (“Dweeb me up, buttercup,” he drawls to a wardrobe assistant); in reality he refused to even try.

Key’s writing career can be traced back to his childhood in Cambridgeshire in the 1980s, when he would compose football match reports on his Amiga computer. His dad was an engineer and his mother was a learning support assistant in a school: they were all readers but he credits the long car journeys during which the family (Key has an older brother) spent listening to comedy tapes – particularly the “monumental” Tony Hancock – with fuelling his interest in writing and performance. After a gap year spent teaching in Kyiv, he read Russian at Sheffield University, where he kept a “fantastical” diary: “a blend of real things happening and other stuff that’s not quite real.”

Having returned to Cambridge with first-class honours, and busily deploying regional threshold assessors, Key wanted to audition for the Footlights, the legendary breeding ground for British comic actors. He hadn’t, however, attended Cambridge University, which has always been something of a prerequisite. His solution was to bluff. “It was quite epic. I was clocking off at 5.30 and cycling at breakneck speed to get to auditions, and doing workshops in the evening. It was like a double life.” He had a cover story – “a postgraduate degree in [Russian novelist] Nikolai Gogol at Sidney Sussex” – which was fine until there was a rehearsal at that college: asked to show another Footlighter the way, he had to pretend not to be hopelessly lost. Eventually the director rumbled Key but decided to keep him on. It was the right call: the troupe was nominated for the 2001 best newcomer award at Edinburgh.

Key’s chutzpah served him well again the following year when, in search of cash to fund another stint at the fringe, he entered a TV contest called Britain’s Worst Driver, in which the most-improved motorist of each episode wins a car. “I found it on a website called Crazy Jobs. I needed to get out by the second episode: I had to win the car on the Friday, sell it on the Monday and go to Edinburgh on the Tuesday.” Key, dubbed “Timid Tim” because of his tendency to crawl along the A14 at 26mph, did just that.

His career, it seemed, was off to a flying start. But then Key decided he was ready to be a stand-up. “I did 10 gigs and died eight times, sometimes spectacularly. I went away with my tail between my legs because I couldn’t work out how to do it.” What he needed was “to unlock something” and that happened through poetry. “I was writing in a very small notepad. So I think the first 200 I wrote were only three or four lines long,” which gave them “a kind of a style and life of their own”. Returning to stand-up two years later, he came armed with micro-poems written on playing cards: “I’d pull them out at random and kind of critique them as I read them out. I don’t do that any more, but it was an interesting vibe. Me reading them out, the audience a bit perplexed and my reaction being the same, like, ‘I’m with you; I don’t know what’s going on there.’ Now I own them completely.”

Along with the poems came a new persona: wearing a rumpled suit, Key would shamble on stage to Russian lounge music, carrying a plastic bag, and proceed to slowly put on his tie and crack open a can of Kronenbourg. It’s still how he begins his shows, though his style has mellowed considerably. I have been watching Key perform for two decades, and in the early days there was a palpable air of menace: he would savage his soundman (who was in on the act) and keep the audience on edge, even locking the door of the venue. I remember taking one friend to a gig above a pub, having told her Key was a genius; she remained stony-faced throughout. “It was interesting to divide a room,” he says. “But you grow up and learn that it’s not useful for the people walking out because they may have babysitters, and they’ve paid money to come and watch. So really the idea is to make everyone have a nice time. Mad not to notice that immediately.”

It’s a philosophy he and his longtime writing partner Basden (the pair collaborated on the sketch group Cowards, and on Tim Key’s Poetry Programme on Radio 4, among other things) applied winningly to The Ballad of Wallis Island. Based on a short film Key and Basden made in 2007, Wallis Island tells the story of Charles, a reclusive millionaire (Key) who conspires to reunite his favourite band McGwyer (Basden) and Mortimer (Carey Mulligan) for a private gig. Earlier this year a standing ovation at Sundance film festival and an endorsement from Richard Curtis, who called it “one of the 10 greatest British movies of all time”, started a word-of-mouth chain reaction. “We really did throw everything at it, and made as good a film as we could,” says Key, but the response has been “overwhelming”.

After making the original short, Key and Basden would periodically return to the story. But something needed unlocking here too. “If we’d made it in our thirties, we might have made a mess of it,” says Key, who has just turned 49 and lives in north-west London (his comedy persona tends to be single and seeking romance, but he prefers to keep us guessing about how close that is to the truth). The feature added a poignant backstory for Charles, and turned Basden’s solo musician into a duo. “The gap of 18 years is almost the trump card of the film,” he says, “in that people are stuck in a time that’s gone by and they need to move on. That’s at the heart of it.” Key’s performance is not only delightfully comic – like the broken tap in his house, Charles cannot turn off his babbling – but full of pathos, as his eyes dart back and forth between his heroes and threaten to well up when they break into song around his kitchen table.

Key is reluctant to make intellectual claims for his work, but there is a sharp mind behind it all. He has made documentaries on Gogol and the Stalin-era writer Daniil Kharms, who often ended his madcap miniature stories (or “incidences”) with an abrupt, “And that’s all”. Many of Key’s poems have a similar strand of absurdist DNA. During the pandemic and the last days of Boris Johnson, he wrote a series of inspired, withering political satires featuring “Bohnson”, “Moggeth” and lockdown parties soundtracked by “chilled Tory beats”.

The Paper has been renewed for a second season, so it “looks likely” Key will be heading back to LA next year. He will do his current live show, Loganberry, for a little longer. His “incredibly supportive” parents, now in their eighties, will be there; they haven’t missed a show yet. But what he wants more than anything is to reunite with his “powerhouse” friend Basden and record his next radio programme. Silly, funny, almost certainly brilliant, it will be something for another family to play on the car stereo as they hit a bank-holiday motorway, the kids listening along in the back.

The Paper is on Sky and Now

Photograph by Suki Dhanda