You might not know the name, but you’ll know the face. Tom Basden has been writing and acting for a couple of decades, working on Peep Show, Fresh Meat,Afterlife and Man vs Bee along the way. But right now is something of a boom time for the comedian He has recently finished filming series three of Here We Go, his family sitcom for the BBC that never forgets to be funny. His first feature film, The Ballad of Wallis Island, is now out in cinemas after a triumphant premiere at Sundance earlier in the year. It feels as though this is Basden’s transition from being that guy to the guy.
The film was written with Tim Key, Basden’s occasional partner since university. It is adapted from a short film, The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island, made back in 2007 when the men were in their twenties. The feature retains all the charm of the original but adds star power in the form of Carey Mulligan, and the result is the kind of funny and moving picture rarely produced on these shores. Basden plays Herb, a folk singer lured to a remote island to play a gig without having been informed his former romantic and professional partner, Nell (Mulligan), has also been invited. Richard Curtis has already placed it in his top 10 British movies ever made, something an incredulous Basden considers “a lovely thing”.
The original short was nominated for a Bafta, and film companies wanted to work with the pair – but they decided to try and develop something entirely new, a decision Basden views almost two decades later as “a mistake”. The short worked; the screenplay they wrote – set in China, a place the men had only been for a fortnight in preparation – didn’t. Perhaps inevitably, that film was never made.
Basden grew up in Wimbledon and met Key as a student in the Cambridge Footlights. He won Best Newcomer at Edinburgh Fringe in 2007, the same year the original Wallis Island won the UK Film Council Kodak Award for Best British Short Film. Both leads are actors for hire but their ultimate goal is to write and perform their own material. “Generally your career is going to be about the stuff you generate yourself,” he explains, walking with me on Hampstead Heath.
He does, however, take great pleasure in acting in projects like Ricky Gervais, Afterlife and
Diane Morgan’s Mandy, where improvisation is encouraged, since “they’re really funny and they let you find something in the scene that’s really enjoyable.” He is not interested in taking on a role for the sake of it and has never been asked nor wanted to play a doctor or a policeman. He tends to stick to comedy in his own work and other people’s.
The first time he worked with Gervais, in Derek Back in 2013, Basden found it a daunting experience: “There’s something surreal about seeing people who are that famous or that big a part of your life, culturally. They don’t seem real.”The Office Gervais’ influence can be clearly felt in Basden’s own BBC mockumentary, Here We Go. The show’s cast includes Jim Howick, Alison Steadman and Katherine Parkinson alongside Basden and began life as a Covid-themed special in 2020 that does a better job of encapsulating that surreal period than any history book ever could. That special and the sitcom it spawned, like The Office, is filled with jokes that sit comfortably alongside heartfelt moments born of love for the characters.
That ability to move the audience is something that has been essential when turning a funny short into a bona fide feature. Had the film been made in 2008, Basden does not think he and Key would have had it in them to “write something that could be sad and insightful” due to “a dogged commitment to it being funny, first and foremost”. He also believes it would have been hard for an audience to buy characters in their late twenties feeling regretful about the past in quite the same way: “When the Justin Bieber documentary came out and he was 17 at the time, the tagline was, ‘Find out what’s possible if you never give up.’ He was 17! He hadn’t had a chance to give up.”
Key is more of a household name as a performer, but Basden seems the more natural writer. He’s the more analytical of the pair, obsessive about structure and tone. He has written sketches and sitcoms for radio and television before building up to a feature film and the West End stage. His riotous adaptation of Dario Fo’s iconic police brutality satire, The Accidental Death of an Anarchist, anchored by an astonishing Daniel Rigby performance, was a far cry from the bawdy ITV ancient Rome sitcom Plebs, but both work because of the writer’s instinctive understanding of tone. Despite the range of styles, he approaches all his writing in a similar way, “stress testing the story and the characters and making sure everything works. It needs to be surprising enough but believable.”
Jokes are at the heart of all Basden’s work, perhaps unsurprising for a man who cut his teeth performing in live settings. Assessing the comedy landscape, he has observed “a merging of comedy and drama that reached a kind of absurdist endpoint with The Bear Winning Best Comedy awards at the Emmys and Golden Globes. That’s been the direction of travel for a long time, just trying to rebrand anything that’s half an hour as a comedy.
He believes there have been big changes in what people think of or expect from comedy but views Here We Go in the classic sitcom mold, inspired by the likes of Seinfeld and Only Fools and Horses. Longevity shouldn’t be an issue. “The great thing about making a show with a family is that things naturally change as families change and dynamics change. You introduce weddings and babies and new living arrangements. The show will keep providing opportunities for stories.”
Basden will keep making it for as long as the BBC allows him unless, he jokes, a byproduct of Walis Island Is that? Marvel It comes calling. It is a “small film made very quickly” but has already surpassed all expectations.
It is a question he is often asked, but Basden is not particularly bothered about whether he is thought of as a writer, comedian or actor. He seems only too happy for others to hog the limelight as he gets on with the difficult work of making people laugh and, latterly, cry. His ambitions for the film are simple: “I hope the prize is getting to make another one.”
‘The Ballad of Wallis Island’ is in cinemas now