Tim Key: Poet Without a Plan

"We just have to play this one with a straight bat, Sam", Tim Key tells me solemnly. "There’s no other way". We’re discussing how to deal with the fact that our interview has got off to an unfortunate start. "How about I introduce it," he says after a long silence. "Would that help?"

"It’s worth a try", I concede. So he begins:"Sam’s asked me to say a few words about the concept behind this piece. The concept was that he would interview me in the place where I did my first comedy gig. That would be his angle. He could use phrases like 'well, this is where it all started' and 'so I s’pose you were stood over there.' So we arranged to meet in The Albany, and as I walked up Great Portland Street the memories really did come flooding back.

"In the end, though, there was a fuck up and Sam was at a different Albany, in Deptford. I then had to rush across London on the hottest day of the year and I was sweating as a lady took photos of me in a theatre I’d never been in before. To be fair to Sam, he was very apologetic and bought me two pints in a nearby pub—The Amersham Arms—where, completely coincidentally, I did my first poetry gig. But by then the photographer had gone and all we had was each other."

Key reclines in his chair, looking pleased with himself. ‘That sort of thing?’

It feels a bit emasculating to let someone else do your job for you, but when that person happens to be Tim Key it’s hard to resist. After all, there’s few better over 100 words. Of course, Key’s verse is usually contorted into short and beautifully strange poems, which he writes on the back of pornographic playing cards and reads aloud before tossing them nonchalantly into the ether. Key has been honing this innovative, form-bending approach to standup for several years now, but at this year’s Fringe it perhaps reaches its pinnacle with a 15-night run of Single White Slut at the enormous 770-seater Pleasance Grand.

"But things haven’t always been so straightforward, have they?," I ask Key – desperately trying to shoehorn my ‘concept’ back into conversation. "No, they haven’t, Sam," he deadpans back. Certainly, Key’s upward trajectory has constituted a rather bumpy and non-linear ride. The first few years, he recalls, were particularly ropey.

He describes a string of excruciating early gigs, most notably a comedy contest where he came ninth out of nine. "It was like I was that brave English lad who does the gymnastics, gets ranked 1, and then has to watch as one by one everyone else passes him. Devastating." Such a wounding experience was exacerbated by the fact that Key was accompanied by his friend Mark Watson, who was also starting out. Watson won. "It was a fairly chastening experience, really. Here we were finding out whether we could do standup and our findings were more or less… he could."

The problem in the early days, Key tells me, is that he really didn’t know what he wanted to say. "It felt a bit like someone doing a tribute act of what they thought standup should be like," he says. "I was sure I could do something better, but after seven gigs the facts were pretty stark. I couldn’t do any better."

I first saw Key at the Fringe in 2004 where he performed a one-man play, Luke and Stella. It followed Luke, a sensitive youth caught up in a vicious circle of small-town lad culture, and featured Key darting around the stage, in the title role, responding to lines and characters that the audience couldn’t hear. It was a fractured, unsettling and remarkable little play that left me baffled and enthralled in equal measure. It only attracted modest (and largely bewildered) audiences and Key has never performed it since. But nonetheless it was a turning point. "At least it was something I thought was interesting, that didn’t have zero worth." 

From there Key’s career gradually began to build up a head of steam. First he teamed up with his Cambridge Footlights friends Stefan Golaszewski, Tom Basden and Lloyd Woolf to form the sketch group Cowards, who enjoyed three successful Edinburgh runs. And then came the quartet of slut-themed poetry shows, beginning in 2007 with The Slut in the Hut, continuing with the Edinburgh Comedy-award winning Slutcracker, then Masterslut, and culminating this year with Single White Slut. Key has also taken on a number of more high-profile projects, most notably as Charlie Brooker’s poet-in-residence on Screenwipe and Newswipe and more recently as Alan Partridge’s hapless co-presenter in Mid Morning Matters and its film follow-up, Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa.

What is interesting about Key’s ascent is that, unlike many of his fellow comedians, he has so far managed to marry more mainstream success with the retention of a certain cultural cachet. He is often seen as the figurehead for a new breed of alternative comedy associated with the London-based venue and production company, The Invisible Dot. In recent years, The Dot has become a byword for a certain brand of unusual, offbeat comedy. It acted as an incubator for the likes of Jonny Sweet, Alex Horne and Claudia O'Doherty, and is now busy cultivating a promising second generation, including at this year’s Festival Liam Williams, Natasia Demetriou and Ellie White. I suspect Key knows what I’m talking about here, but he remains coy about romantic talk of artistic movements and aesthetic paradigms. "It’s all smoke and mirrors. It may look like that from the outside but inside it’s just a lot of troubled individuals trying to work out how not to fail."

Although there has been near-unanimous critical praise for The Dot, one charge leveled at some of its acts—including Key—has been that they’ve somehow taken the bite out of ‘alternative’ comedy, shifting the genre in a kind of post-political direction that prefers experiments with form than explicit social critique. In a recent and otherwise glowing review of Single White Slut in London, for example, Guardian critic Brian Logan notes that "sometimes one starts to crave something meaningful amid the advanced whimsy." Key initially winces at the mention of this. "Wow," he says with a deep intake of breath.

But rather than defensive, his eventual answer is thoughtful and considered: "You could definitely level a charge at my shows that there isn’t much meaning, but then I guess I don’t really know what meaning means. Some of my favourite things have got meaning. Simon Amstell and Daniel Kitson talk about stuff, but then Adam Buxton doesn’t really talk about much stuff, or Tim Vine. And you never know, they might not be talking about the big topics, but something they say might just stay with you. I guess what I like is to be kept interested, to watch someone who’s got an approach you don’t really recognise, where you just think: ‘now, where does that come from?’"

For a moment Key seems genuinely earnest. The knowing half-smile temporarily absent from his lips. But it's fleeting. More often there is a skilful slipperiness to the way he talks about comedy. He carefully evades bigger, more probing questions, batting them away with deliberately distracting analogies and charming humility (although he cheerfully warns me the modesty is strictly reserved for interviews).

The point, he finally tells me, after a string of dead-ends, is that there's "no grand narrative" to his comedy, no aesthetic vision for transforming standup. "With me it’s more: tried to do it. Couldn’t do it. Worked out a new way. Another circuitous route up the mountain." The kernel of another analogy emerges and he grabs at it gleefully. "Yeah, that way was too steep and too difficult and it looked like there was too many climbers on that side of the mountain. They seemed to be finding it really easy and doing it naked, so I just had to go back down to the bottom of the mountain, buy loads of kit, and make my way up another part."