Tim Key may be well known to you through his role as Sidekick Simon for Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge, and/or as a comedian and participant/consultant for television’s Taskmaster. He is also a flagrant poet.
Poetry is often disregarded as being an uncommercial enterprise, the realm of the obscure or elite, where poets ponce around being dreamy and delightful, but there are fortunately a few who manage to successfully raise its profile with aplomb, or even a bang – we suggest Key is one of those people.
Tim Key’s Late Night Poetry Programme has been broadcasting on BBC radio since 2012, and he has a substantive bibliography, including He Used Thought As A Wife (An Anthology of Poems and Conversations from Inside) (2020) and Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush (An Anthology of Poems and Conversations from Outside) (2022). These two collections were published by “Utter” & Press, an English publishing house “offering a paper stage for the spoken word” run by designer Emily Juniper.
Chapters is Key’s latest collection, initially only available from “Utter” & Press direct, but now unleashed on the wider world. As the title suggests, the collection is organised by a series of (twelve) chapters, with a loose theme to each; there is also an ongoing commentary, “meta” dialogue, between Key and Juniper addressing the organisation of the book and other matters which starts in the delightful front flap.
The reader can choose to take or leave this extra non-poetry content as they see fit, but it incorporates some fine comic chat worthy of some time. As part of this, the chapter titles themselves become a contentious matter, but they mostly reflect the themes of the sections, sometimes very specifically so – “The Canterbury Ones”, “Hairdressing, London, Ambition, and the News”, “The 2022 Fifa World Cup, Doha”, and final chapter “The Dregs”.
For those who think poetry may be an elitist or obscure art form, Key’s style is accessible and he works in the colloquial. “Let’s do this, Trish”, he resolves, when deciding to join the army in “Papers”. He gets a “boner” after adding a fresh red chilli when making a non-traditional cup of tea in “Cuppa” (this poet could only be English).
Key’s poetry has its roots in his early stand-up – poetry was helpful for him to find his voice – and his poems almost always engage through humour. It’s doubtful whether the “I” or “me” in Chapters is the same person throughout all the poems, but there is a consistent sense of a comic persona; a character who picks a fight at the hairdressers (“Trim”), down the boozer (“Nuisance”), and with his partner (“Fight”).
This character is generally difficult – not moving out of the way for a passenger on a train because he is listening to a podcast (“Acast”), who agitates his boss at work when he “sacks off” the day (“Monday”), and intimidates and leers at a couple engaged in heavy petting (“Young Lovers”). He is horrendously vain (“A Gorgeous Boy”), and has trouble controlling his appetite for the good things in life. He goes overboard at a well-known sandwich shop (“Pretox”) and is a glutton for doughnuts (“My Special Day”). He has problems with alcohol (the guzzler of “Quenched”) and drugs: “I quickly got stoned off my tits and scuttled into your friend/and mine, the red-light district” (“My Orange Life. I.”). He is weak-willed and deceives himself about giving up smoking (“Ashes”).
He has language difficulties, ejaculating in speech (“Stretching the Tape”). Surprisingly, he appears to have a secretary (who has to slather ice cream on to him as a salve during the hot day of “The Heat”), and a wife (“The Lead”). He is our everyman with all his delightful faults and quirks, a man in an overly tight anorak (“A Tight Squeeze”), a modern day Malvolio –“denim shorts, no top, pop socks, sandals, my little yellow beret and a wooden necklace” (“Wood”).
These snapshots of an anti-hero could well be the expression of the poet’s fear of what he could become if he let himself go, and his willingness to always go further. In this sense, many of the poems are daring and challenging, ready to be misinterpreted and taken out of context by those who know no better, who assume that these poems represent fact. He walks a blurred line between Tim Key, the celebrity television poet, and the alter-ego he’s created as he takes to the field for the English cricket team in “A Day at the Cricket” (and is amusingly confused with someone else from television when coming off the pitch).
Chapters is also appealing because of its subversive focus on the contemporary world. He takes us to the “rancid heat” of Qatar for the World Cup (“more than oil and bad vibes”) in “Figurehead”, and the queue for the lying in state of the late Queen, Elizabeth II in “The Elizabeth Line”, provoking us with his description of shuffling past “Her Nibs’s boxed-up bod”. He (probably sensibly) substitutes a football manager for Chancellor in “The Only Man for the Job”, and re-imagines TV programme “I’m A Celebrity” in disturbing terms in “Sir Nick”.
Many of the poems have wondrous ideas contained in short bursts of fanciful conjecture – the lack of practicality in travelling without a bag in “LTN-PRG” or celebrities going on strike in “Action!”. Other poems take a distinctly surreal turn. A doctor joins the poet in the tube for an MRI Scan in “Ah, the Doctor!”; there are plagues of Santa’s and transformative moments with dolphins, lobsters and dentists. Colette gives birth to an adult “fully formed”. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, things described which may remain in the reader’s brain for some time, running jokes and poetic obsessions – traumatic shopping visits to FatFace (repeatedly, both his bête noire and salvation), Pret a Manger, White Stuff, M&S, and a re-occurring House of Games carry-on suitcase.
Emily Juniper’s impressive pocket book design includes some elegant illustrations, and the innovative final index – “by what’s going on in the poems” – may well be a breakthrough for the publishing industry.
Publisher: “Utter” & Press
Publication Date: 14 FEB 2024
Poetic Justice 