Tim Key and Tom Basden turn up the heat on curry night
I’ve missed live comedy very much since the closure of theatres. But I haven’t had to miss Tim Key. His shows were a special event in the pre-pandemic world, but I’ve seen plenty of him in these months of livestreamed comedy. Or maybe it just feels that way. In both Mark Watson’s Comedy Marathon and Freeze – a two-hander with Tom Basden – Key’s cocksure manner translates particularly well to the virtual sphere. There’s nothing more cocksure than cracking open a tin of beer and delivering comedy to a live audience from your own front room.
In Freeze, Key – AKA Sidekick Simon, Alan Partridge’s wingman – has a sidekick of his own, the meek, hangdog Basden providing the perfect foil to the former’s charismatic-bully persona. Of course he does: this is a double act of over a decade’s vintage, albeit one that has played out on comedy’s esoteric fringes. You could tell as much from this livestream, which features material from the duo’s back catalogue: dreamy films set to Key’s gnomic poems; a spoof advert for “Woodland Rain” shampoo; and the pair’s Bafta-nominated 2007 short, The One and Only Herb McGwyer, attached as a bonus after the live material.
So does this grab bag of Key and Basden goodies work as an online show? It does, just about. The abusive dynamic is distinctive, and there’s a productive uncertainty about what’s scripted and what’s spontaneous – which bits are “sketch” and which are happening “right now”. You could argue that the several technical snafus were a positive because they ramped up the show’s unstable, unrehearsed quality. But I’d beg to differ: by the fourth or fifth time that Key and Basden’s dialogue was interrupted by Enya’s Orinoco Flow (first heard as part of that faux shampoo ad), a little more slickness would have been welcome.
This patchwork of a show is threaded together by bully-boy Key’s insistence that, after the gig, he join whipping-boy Basden for a Sunday-night curry. Basden would prefer otherwise: he has a wife and kid, there’s social distancing to think about – and Key isn’t anyone’s idea of a gracious house guest. He cuts off Basden when the latter starts strumming his quick-hit comic songs, and edits his magic trick out of the show entirely. He mocks his partner’s voiceover skills – which are, admittedly, comically poor. The abusive dynamic also finds its way into the pair’s sketches, in which Key plays a man with trenchant opinions about the Olympian Steve Redgrave, and a quizmaster doggedly posing 10 rounds of Harry Potter questions to a friend who has no knowledge of Harry Potter.
That’s a funny idea, performed with bite in a sketch inserted seamlessly into the fabric of the show. It all gets complex towards the end, as multiple cameras and a complicated captioning game are deployed to show Key gatecrashing Basden’s Sunday at home. The discrepancy between creative ambition and technical means is a likable part of the joke, and the closing moments (musical duet in the garden; face-off in the car) bring this online edition of Freeze to an endearingly offbeat conclusion.
Live on Show and Tell, Sunday 26 July only.