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| Tim Key interview: 'You look like a plum if you say you're good' | Tim Key interview: 'You look like a plum if you say you're good' |
| (14 days later) | |
| Tim Key has performed at the Latitude festival in Suffolk every July for the past five or six years – he's a little hazy on dates, perhaps because each long weekend passes, he says, in a blur of burgers, drinks and "walking up into the forest, going to that other bit and then walking back down again". Confusing, too, is the fact that he's billed under a different banner each year. "I've performed in the literary tent," he says, "the poetry tent, the cabaret tent. This year, I'm in the theatre tent. What they haven't defined me as yet" – he fixes me with a pointed stare – "is a comedian." | Tim Key has performed at the Latitude festival in Suffolk every July for the past five or six years – he's a little hazy on dates, perhaps because each long weekend passes, he says, in a blur of burgers, drinks and "walking up into the forest, going to that other bit and then walking back down again". Confusing, too, is the fact that he's billed under a different banner each year. "I've performed in the literary tent," he says, "the poetry tent, the cabaret tent. This year, I'm in the theatre tent. What they haven't defined me as yet" – he fixes me with a pointed stare – "is a comedian." |
| Key, 37, is used by now to seeing bookers, critics and audiences alike struggle to define his slippery, unsettling, frequently hilarious shtick. He's a comic poet, or a poetic comedian, or just a funny man who writes (intentionally) bad poems and delivers them in his own arrhythmic, deadpan style. | Key, 37, is used by now to seeing bookers, critics and audiences alike struggle to define his slippery, unsettling, frequently hilarious shtick. He's a comic poet, or a poetic comedian, or just a funny man who writes (intentionally) bad poems and delivers them in his own arrhythmic, deadpan style. |
| First-time audiences can find his act bewildering, but many come to love it. Since Key first inveigled his way into the Cambridge Footlights by pretending to be a student (he'd actually just graduated from Sheffield), he has won the prestigious Edinburgh comedy award, scored his own Radio 4 poetry series and become Alan Partridge's sidekick. His solo shows consistently receive the kind of reviews that say something like: "I'm not quite sure what this man is doing, but I love it anyway." | |
| We've met for coffee next to the bandstand on Hampstead Heath, north London, close to Key's home. He's affable, luxuriantly bearded, carrying a friend's squash racket in his backpack. "I used to be really good at squash," he tells me, "until I did my shoulder in." I can't quite tell whether he's joking or not. | We've met for coffee next to the bandstand on Hampstead Heath, north London, close to Key's home. He's affable, luxuriantly bearded, carrying a friend's squash racket in his backpack. "I used to be really good at squash," he tells me, "until I did my shoulder in." I can't quite tell whether he's joking or not. |
| The next few weeks will be busy: he's performing his latest show, Single White Slut, in London before taking it to Latitude and the Edinburgh fringe. But he's feeling more relaxed, he says, than is usual for this time of year. "This time, I'm arriving in Edinburgh with a show I've already performed. It takes out that feeling that I would usually have [before Edinburgh] of absolute fear that everything is going to come tumbling down around me… A kind of real, black fear that it could all go terribly wrong." | The next few weeks will be busy: he's performing his latest show, Single White Slut, in London before taking it to Latitude and the Edinburgh fringe. But he's feeling more relaxed, he says, than is usual for this time of year. "This time, I'm arriving in Edinburgh with a show I've already performed. It takes out that feeling that I would usually have [before Edinburgh] of absolute fear that everything is going to come tumbling down around me… A kind of real, black fear that it could all go terribly wrong." |
| This diffidence is typical of Key: it's part of his act, yes, but it also seems natural. This, after all, is a performer capable of selling out large venues who doesn't even have his own website. But when I ask him why he's so self-effacing, he looks faintly horrified. "What's the alternative?" he says. "I quietly like a lot of the stuff that I do. But I think you'd look like a bit of a plum if you started to think you were really good – or certainly if you started to say you were really good. You don't want to jinx it. I don't think it's quite sturdy enough to take being jinxed." | This diffidence is typical of Key: it's part of his act, yes, but it also seems natural. This, after all, is a performer capable of selling out large venues who doesn't even have his own website. But when I ask him why he's so self-effacing, he looks faintly horrified. "What's the alternative?" he says. "I quietly like a lot of the stuff that I do. But I think you'd look like a bit of a plum if you started to think you were really good – or certainly if you started to say you were really good. You don't want to jinx it. I don't think it's quite sturdy enough to take being jinxed." |
| Tim Key will perform at Latitude on Saturday 19 July; see latitudefestival.com. For details about his Edinburgh dates, see edfringe.com; for other tour dates, see theinvisibledot.com | Tim Key will perform at Latitude on Saturday 19 July; see latitudefestival.com. For details about his Edinburgh dates, see edfringe.com; for other tour dates, see theinvisibledot.com |
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