Tim Key is a comedian, poet, actor, and writer who co-wrote and stars in the new comedy The Ballad of Wallis Island, which is in select theaters from March 28 and everywhere from April 18. Key won the Perrier Award in 2009 and has since gone on to write and perform eight solo shows, including the smash hit, Mulberry. On screen, he is best known as Sidekick Simon in This Time with Alan Partridge, as well as The Double, Peep Show and The End of the F***ing World. Most recently, he was seen opposite Robert Pattinson in Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 and played Commissioner Harrold Scott alongside Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan in See How They Run. His radio series Late Night Poetry with Tim Key has just been commissioned for a sixth season and Key also has written several successful poetry anthologies, including Chapters, He Used Thought as a Wife and Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.
Three Great Things is Talkhouse’s series in which artists tell us about three things they absolutely love. To mark tomorrow’s release in select theaters of the new comedy The Ballad of Wallis Island, starring and co-written by Tim Key and Tom Basden, and also starring Carey Mulligan, the wonderfully idiosyncratic English poet, comedian and actor Key shared some of the things he loves most in the world. — N.D.
Blackadder Goes Forth
I was about 12 when Blackadder Goes Forth was first on TV. In those days, I wasn’t allowed to watch TV after my bedtime. For the second series of Blackadder, I was going to bed at about 8:30, and then it was on at nine and I could hear the theme music and then my mum, my dad and my brother laughing as they were watching it. I ultimately was able to watch Blackadder II at a later date, and then by the time Blackadder the Third aired, I was allowed to stay up and watch it with my family.
I first saw Blackadder Goes Forth right before I started to fall in love with comedy by watching stuff without my parents, things like I’m Alan Partridge. Blackadder Goes Forth was the fourth series of Blackadder, it’s set during the First World War and I think it’s complete comedy perfection. It stars Rowan Atkinson (right on the verge of becoming Mr. Bean) in his iconic Edmund Blackadder guise, and also Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, two of my absolute favorites. And then there’s Tony Robinson as Baldrick and Tim McInnerny as Captain Darling. I remember absolutely loving it and howling with laughter with my family.
I’m terrible at watching stuff on flights – I just fall back into rewatching things I’ve already seen. On a flight a few days ago, I rewatched Blackadder Goes Forth. I think it’s the first time I watched it from start to finish since I was a teenager, so I’m very clued up on it now. It’s so quotable and it really sticks in your brain. As it was playing out, I knew everything the characters were going to do and say next, and I was just so contented watching this beautifully put-together British comedy.
I don’t think my sense of humor or writing style has got anything to do with Blackadder, but that doesn’t change the fact that I absolutely love it. I mean, it’s just so perfect. In its own way, it’s the pinnacle of British comedy in the 1980s, which is about as good as it gets. And that iconic final moment, before they go over the top, it really doesn’t matter how many times I see it, I can’t handle it. Why are we investing so much in these five cartoonish characters who we’ve watched for five weeks, and then suddenly, we really, really care about them as people? I think maybe because the buffoonery and the pace of it just falls away. For almost the whole thing, the trenches are just a backdrop, but then suddenly they’re front and center. It’s just an amazing piece of writing.
The Diary of a Nobody
I probably first read this about 10 years ago, although I definitely studied it at school in an A-level English language class. One lesson, our teacher brought in a photocopy of two pages of The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith. I imagine he probably loved that book, but I was looking at it as just another text we were studying. It’s about a guy called Charles Pooter, and he writes in his diary about his next door neighbors, Cummings and Gowing, and when I read these photocopied pages as a teenager, I didn’t get it at all. I thought it was pretty lame.
But when I rediscovered the book in my thirties, I thought it was the greatest work of literature I’d ever read. It’s like a magic trick. I also can’t get my head around the fact that it was not written in the past 20 years. It’s so perfectly, precisely written and you can see a through line from The Diary of a Nobody to so many beloved televisual comedy creations, like Alan Partridge or David Brent. The guy at the heart of it is deluded, but even in his diary, he’s convincing himself that he’s making good headway in polite society. I don’t even know if it’s been made into a TV show, but when you’re reading it, you can’t help but picture someone like Richard Briers playing the protagonist, this fussy guy who wants to be doing better than he is. The character is an absolute staple of British comedy.
I tend to latch onto a few books and get into a rhythm of gifting them to friends, and The Diary of a Nobody is definitely high up on my gifting list, along with Blindness by José Saramago and Waterline by Ross Raisin. I know The Diary of a Nobody is high on my list because I accidentally gave it to my friend Katie twice. Now we have a running joke where every time I see her, I give her a copy of The Diary of a Nobody!
Easy USSR Volume II
When I was first starting out doing comedy with Tom Basden, who co-wrote and stars in our new film, The Ballad of Wallis Island, we were in a sketch group. One night, I went to a dinner party where our friend Peggy, who worked for Sony Music, gave me a CD called Easy USSR Volume II. And as she gave it to me, she said, “I think you’ll like this,” indicating that she was not giving it to anyone else there. That made me suspect she thought my taste was not very well developed or that I liked slightly odd stuff.
At home, when I listened to the first track, I was furious with her, as the music felt cartoony, like it was for children. But I stuck with it and listened to the whole thing. Then I went back to the beginning and listened to it again. It was kind of mesmeric, and absolutely crazy. The next day, Tom and I drove to Devon to make a short film. I put the CD on in the car and everyone else also said, “This is stupid.” But we ended up listening to it again and again and again. When we edited the short film, we used music from Easy USSR Volume II for the score. The next week, we were doing our sketch show in a room above The Hen and Chickens pub in London, and we assigned different tracks from Easy USSR Volume II to different sketches. A couple of months later, I did stand-up comedy and my new walk-on music was from Easy USSR Volume II. And for about five years, everything I did on stage would have this mesmeric lounge music underneath it.
I was very intrigued by Easy USSR Volume II, so I made a radio documentary about the album and looked into how it had come about. You wouldn’t look twice at it (let alone buy it) in a record shop these days, but weirdly, the album does have a story behind it. It was made by a guy called Vyacheslav Mescherin in the 1960s, and it was played a lot in supermarkets in the Soviet Union. It was basically lift music and lounge music, but it proliferated everywhere. It was just completely ubiquitous. And the more I looked into it, the more magical and mad this set of tracks became. For my radio documentary, I ended up talking to a Russian cosmonaut, who explained how he hardly took anything up into space, but one of the things he took was the music of Vyacheslav Mescherin, to keep everyone calm and just have a nice ambience up in space.
