Tim Key Let Us Into His House

I’ll tell you what’s unexpected: the laughter of Tim Key. I’m not hamming it up when I say it is actively booming, especially when it's underscored by him clapping his hands together at the moment of peak hilarity. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard Tim Key laugh before. Who has? His whole schtick depends upon him being the one man in the room who's not laughing. Tim Key's the guy who’s taken the deadpan baton and run with it, expressionlessly.

The ability not to laugh while reading tiny poems off cards has so far served Tim Key very well. When I turned up at his home he'd just started a week-long run of his Single White Slut show in London's West End. It went off without incident. “People said I was quite well-lit,” he reflects.

We are in Tim Key’s Kentish Town flat, and it is perfectly alright. There is a four-level bookshelf in his toilet and the coffee comes in seaside postcard mugs, in which a woman with large breasts holds two watermelons. The miniature apple pies come courtesy of Mr Kipling. “He does a better job than me.”

There is a guitar behind the sofa, despite the fact that Key is allegedly one of those people – David Mitchell is another – who has no interest in music whatsoever: the musical version of asexuals. Someone has gotten one of those labelling machines and stencilled "pheasant incubator" on the big wooden tea chest that serves as his coffee table. There’s nothing particularly posh or modish about the place: it’s a pretty standard London maisonette in a cut-above neighbourhood.

Across the corridor is the bathtub where Key marinates himself for up to an hour a day as he moves through his complex rituals of procrastination. Round the corner is the unmade bed where he sleeps naked. Tucked in the lounge is the TV where he habitually loses himself in the hypnotic racking and potting clackery of the snooker. He is very good at failing to make the best use of his time. Tuesday mornings, apparently, are the only time he seriously gets anything done – that’s the deadline for his Independent column. I point out to him that today is Tuesday and it is very much the morning.

“You know when you rang the bell – and there was that pause where you probably contemplated ringing the bell a second time? That was me pushing send. That gets done. Because that must get done. Outside of that, I’m terrible.”

It’s easy to see how procrastination might become habitual if you too had stapled together 25 haikus about people called Chris and Claire darning condoms and it had given you the secret elevator key to the top floor of British comedy. To having your own rumpus room in Charlie Brooker’s comedy zoo, to being Alan Partridge’s sidekick, to a spot in Richard Ayoade’s new film. You might wonder, after that, whether any over-exertion was strictly called for. Rent needs paying? No bother. Do some poemlets. This is Tim Key’s blessing and his curse. The poems – well, he shits them out. Everything else – well, that takes ages.

“Oh, I can do five poems in a morning. It’s a great way of procrastinating. Because it always feels like work… but is it?”

"When you start them, do you know how they will end?" I ask.

“Never,” he says.

"How many of them do you keep? What’s the attrition rate to get to one good one?"

“I’d say I personally enjoy over half of them," Key replies. "Whether I would try all those onstage… maybe not.”

"Are you one of those authors who has to find the perfect name before a character can take shape?"

“Actually, one of the things I had to do when compiling the book, was to go back through all of my old poems, and check that there weren’t too many people called 'Chris'. There’s a lot of 'Rod'. A lot of 'Ian'. 'Claire’s another one, for girls.”

Soon enough, he’s gone into the study and pulled out an old biscuit tin full of rubber-banded sets of Daily Sport soft porn playing cards, a typewriter, and – not to let too much daylight in upon magic now, you understand – a MacBook Pro. From deep inside the tin of nipply hearts and spades, he whips out a tiny reporter’s notebook. Page one, column one: the first ever Tim Key poem.

"Two men met, or should I say they ran into each other…"

“Yes, it’s good!” he cries, as I read out the first line in my driest Tim Key voice. Does he want to finish it off, then?

“Oh no, I don’t know how it ends…”

This is how it ends: "They curtseyed."

“You see, I like it because there’s a strangeness to it. It’s not a gag thing. Nowadays, sometimes I find myself writing them, and feeling an inbuilt pressure to create a payoff moment…”

This sparrow-sized ledger is the full early works: 228 tiny essays on nothing very much, all put down in neat black biro, with no corrections, mainly written on the London Underground. In totality, they would soon enough become his first Tim Key show – The Slut in The Hut, performed in The Hut in Edinburgh for the festival. There, Key would start off by announcing that he had a poem that would split the audience. He would then deliver said poem. Half the audience would duly stare unblinking back. And Key would then rather theatrically go up the aisle and lock all the doors to make sure that no one could escape, as he ground them through an hour of tiny poems, shambling-rambling monologue and blatant audience baiting.

“I think you use your amateurism and naivety as a weapon in those early days. People haven’t paid a lot of money to see it, and they don’t know what to expect, so the stakes are much lower. Nowadays, this week, people have paid real money. I think you get better at your craft, but perhaps at the expense of that ragged leading edge.”

Why do tiny poems at all? Because he’d thus far sucked up a storm at regular stand-up comedy. Nothing particularly original had fallen out of his dome, so he decided to hack at the problem from another direction. Good or bad, everything in the book was unique. And on that score, the bad actively complemented the good.

Key spent the early 2000s working in a call centre for notoriously shit cable TV company NTL, and pretending to be doing a PhD at Cambridge. Which is how a great many people of his age spent that era, minus the Cambridge PhD thing. Despite having lived in the town his entire life, he was disappointed to realise there is no such thing as a "catchment area" for universities, and hence he would have to go to Sheffield to study Russian. Emerging with a first and no plans beyond pissing around onstage at a higher level, he found himself working days at the call centre, and nights at Sidney Sussex College at Cambridge working on a PhD on the short stories of Gogol, so that he could attend the legendary Footlights drama society.

Overall, this was surprisingly easy. Though things did become more hairy the one time the Footlights crew went to rehearse at Sidney Sussex, and Tim was asked to lead the way to the practice room. After eight weeks of living a small but decent lie, he had no option but to rumble himself because he couldn’t get time off work to attend an audition. “It was a bit like The Secret Of My Success with Michael J Fox. I would be lying to everyone on the phone all day, then cycling very fast to lots of different places. There basically weren’t enough hours in the day to do all three things.”

Some of the Footlights people are still his allies – he remains one quarter of moody sketch group Cowards, and works a lot with Tom Basden, with whom he made a brilliantly creepy comedy The One And Only Herb MacGwyer Plays Wallis Island. Behind the acting that seems to have become a mainstay, he’s working on a sitcom or two: his study has a neatly pinned cork-board wall of ideas and things in process, pinned to another load of soft porn playing cards. In fact, his entire show is pinned up there, in case it escapes him.

What’s absent anywhere in the house is any poetry, bar 15 copies of The Incomplete Works Of Tim Key. “That’s mainly due to sales…”. You’d imagine that he’d at least have read the bluffers’ guide to WH Auden. But he seems to exalt in a splendid ignorance of the subject. It’s like trying to talk to the Queen about the Spurs back four. Larkin?

“You see, again, I’m not going deep on it.”

Betjeman? Joan Hunter Dunn, perhaps, has something Key-like to it?

“So what’s that about, then?”

This, despite the fact that, by any yardstick, he’s probably the country’s third most famous living poet: Carol Ann Duffy, another of your choosing, then him. Not entirely sure what this says about "the Land of Shakespeare".

“Surprisingly, I have occasionally performed on the same bill as real poets.”

And?

“We have a standing agreement that what I do isn’t poetry, and it all works out very well.”

The racks of shelves in the shitter are full up with Wodehouse, Russell Brand’s Booky-Wook, and I Am Zlatan. Overall, sports books seem to dominant. He waxes a bit lyrical about the Andre Agassi autobiography. I make a possibly over-optimistic promise to "check it out". He may appear frequently on Radio 4, but in terms of tuning in, gets most of his world affairs from 5Live. “Just habit, I suppose.” He does, however, switch over to the Today programme once every morning: at exactly 8.25AM, for the sport. He has also written at least two poems in honour of matronly snooker referee, Michaela Tabb.

In fact, despite his well-burnished eccentricity, the real Tim Key seems much closer to the bloke in the street than many of the more outwardly conventional have-you-ever-noticed comedian types he trails around the circuit. He designed his persona as an attack on the conventional setup-payoff, wreathed it in absurdist storytelling and drunken menace, grew beards, wore weird dungarees and cheap suits and undermined it end to end by the fact that he has the face of a mordant Victorian child. But deep down, he just likes Ronnie O’Sullivan and egotistical footballers and pints and Mr Kipling’s cakes.

At midday, Key has a train to catch, so we take off, and stand at the door receiving his warm thanks. “I’m glad that you came today, now that the run’s already started. I’m quite relaxed now. Honestly, if you’d seen me this time yesterday, I’d have been much more jittery.” You’ve got the basic technique down nowadays, though, don’t you? “Well, compared to 2007, definitely. That first show I did was a pitiful hour… Which I really enjoyed.” He laughs. Not as boomingly.

@gavhaynes / @Jake_Photo