by James Mottram
Students of British comedy will likely know, or at least recognise, Tim Key. The 48-year-old stand-up, poet and actor has appeared in cult sitcoms Peep Show and Detectorists as well as playing ‘Sidekick Simon’, a hapless co-host alongside Norwich’s fabled broadcaster Alan Partridge across TV, film and web episodes. You might have even caught him earlier this year as a man inside a pigeon costume in Bong Joon-ho’s off-kilter sci-fi Mickey 17.
Now he’s back on the big screen in The Ballad of Wallis Island, a charming comedy-drama that he co-wrote with fellow British comic Tom Basden. In it, he plays Charles, an eccentric millionaire who lives on a remote island and decides to use his wealth to reunite his favourite folk-singing duo (Basden and Carey Mulligan), getting them to perform his very own personal concert. The hitch? The once-married pair have long since separated.
The film comes expanded from a BAFTA-nominated short – The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island – that Key and Basden wrote back in 2007. In that, Basden’s titular folk singer once again finds his love for music when he’s brought to Charles’ private island for a one-off concert. “We wrote it really with a lot of love. It’s really from the heart,” says Key, who was living with Basden at the time.
The pair dreamt of turning it into a feature, something the short’s director James Griffiths encouraged. “We knew the short really worked as a self-contained little fairy tale,” says Key. “But we didn’t know what the feature would be.” It wasn’t until 2020, thirteen years on, that they finally cracked it. “And then once we had that, we wrote it in about six weeks, I think, and had a real voracious appetite to get the script written and see whether we could make it as quick as possible.”
Curiously, Key says that he’s never been obsessed by a band or a singer, the way Charles is, but it’s something that’s become more prevalent. “You’ve probably seen those little articles, the news in brief, where someone has hired a band to play at their party. It’s probably happening more now than it was then.” But does he not fantasise about reuniting a band from music history? “No. I mean, obviously it’d be nice to have another look at The Beatles.”
What were he and Basden like as flatmates? “We only lived together for about six months. But it was really good, creatively. We just would scuttle off into our respective bedrooms and write because we’re writing a lot together, but not together. We’re not ‘together’ type people.” He recalls how they wrote the short in just two days, carving it up into quarters, dividing the labour and then returning a few hours later to compare notes. “When I look back, it seems an overly simple way of making something.”
Nevertheless, they did the same thing for the feature, once they’d worked out how to introduce Herb’s ex-lover Nell Mortimer, the other half of the duo ‘McGwyer Mortimer’. “Once we got the new idea, once we worked out that a former lover would be in the film, we then carved it down into four pieces. Maybe we carved it into eight. And then separated them and then went off and wrote them. He writes quicker than me. He wrote all the music. I think he’s, in fairness, a genius.”
Certainly, the McGwyer Mortimer songs all sound credible enough to be real hits. “I do remember [when we made the short] having that conversation and being doubtful and him being furious…and he went off and started writing, and it was kind of mad. I’m just listening to his music and thinking, ‘Oh, wow, he’s right. He can create a credible sound for what a musician might be, that a man could be obsessed with.’” This continued onwards into the feature. “In all the different elements, we’re trying to make it better [than the short]. And the music, I think, is one of those ways that elevated it.”
Another element was the casting of Carey Mulligan as Nell. “She has this warmth and humility that comes for free when on screen. She just feels like such a human, beautiful person on screen. She elevated everything. Suddenly you’re making a movie where Carey Mulligan is the star.” The actress even picked up an Oscar nomination for Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro just before the Wallis Island team reunited for some pick-up shots. “It’s quite good to say to your leading lady, ‘Congratulations on your nomination. Good luck with that!’”
Meanwhile, Key is about to taste the big time himself. He’s set to feature in The Paper, the new mock-documentary from the team that made the U.S. version of The Office, all set around a crumbling regional paper. He was also utterly distinct in Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s cloning sci-fi, though even he doesn’t know why the South Korean director dressed his character up like a pigeon. “It’s really random. Very surprising. I said, ‘Why am I pigeon?’ And he didn’t have an answer, and I asked him again at the premiere. He just laughed.”
After recently finishing an impressive run of his stand-up show Loganberry at the Edinburgh Fringe, as well as releasing his latest volume of poetry, L.A. Baby, he’s also looking to do another film with Basden. “We’re starting to whir back into life with more phone calls to each other. Me and Tom are talking more and getting enthused about ideas and things, and then gradually that will rise into what our idea is, and we’ll write another one.”
With Wallis Island premiering at Sundance earlier this year, it’s left Key with a rosy glow about the whole experience. “I guess that’s quite a useful thing about memory. It papers over the cracks slightly, and I think we just have only fond memories. Before we made the feature, we only had fond memories of the short. God knows whether the short was that hundred percent a perfect experience. But in my mind, it is, and I think that’s what I think about this feature. It obviously was quite hard at times. But we’d love to make another one. Maybe just an hour-and-a-half statement from me about the genius of Tom Basden!”
The Ballad of Wallis Island is in cinemas from 28 August 2025
