Tim Key

Tim Key (born 2 September 1976) is an English poet, comedian, actor and screenwriter.

He has performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, both as a solo act and as part of the comedy group Cowards, and plays Alan Partridge's sidekick Simon in film and television.

Key was born on 2 September 1976, in Cambridgeshire.

He grew up in Impington, Cambridgeshire, was educated at Impington Village College before moving on to Hills Road Sixth Form College in Cambridge and then the University of Sheffield, where he studied Russian.

Following graduation, he returned to Cambridge and joined the Cambridge Footlights, despite not being a student of Cambridge University.

There he met Tom Basden, Stefan Golaszewski, and Lloyd Woolf, with whom he formed the sketch group Cowards.

Key's first appearance with the Footlights was in the stage production Far Too Happy in 2001.

The cast, which included Mark Watson and Sophie Winkleman, took the show to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and were nominated for the Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Newcomer.

Key has regularly attended Edinburgh ever since, performing in solo shows and collaborations.

Key has regularly been heard on BBC Radio 4 since 2006, when the station commissioned All Bar Luke, a series based on his earlier stage show Luke & Stella.

It aired from 2006 to 2008, with a Christmas special in 2009.

Key's prior radio projects included Cowards and Mark Watson Makes the World Substantially Better.

Key first appeared on television in 2006's satirical comedy Time Trumpet, as an Eastenders special effects supervisor.

The next year, he appeared as himself in Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, reading poetry.

He also appeared in an episode of Saxondale alongside future Mid Morning Matters with Alan Partridge co-star Steve Coogan.

In 2009, he won the Edinburgh Comedy Award and was nominated for the Malcolm Hardee Award for Comic Originality.

In 2009, Key's solo poetry show The Slutcracker won the Edinburgh Comedy Award and was nominated for the Malcolm Hardee Award for Comic Originality.

He took the show to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival the following year.

In 2009, Key (along with Mark Watson and Alex Horne) co-created We Need Answers for BBC Four, a comedic quiz show in which celebrities answer questions posed by question-answering text services.

It was hosted by Watson, with Horne providing technical support and Key reading questions.

As part of the show's bonus online content, the BBC uploaded videos of Key and Watson playing No More Women, a parlour game they had invented several years earlier, with Horne supplying narration.

In 2010, Key was heard as Duncan in the radio sitcom Party, created by Tom Basden and based on the stage show of the same name.

Key's first album, Tim Key. With a String Quartet. On a Boat. was released by The Invisible Dot Ltd / Angular Records in November 2010.

It features Key reading poetry backed by a string quartet, with interjections from Basden.

In November 2010, Key appeared as "Sidekick Simon" alongside Steve Coogan on Mid Morning Matters with Alan Partridge, an online series based on Coogan's Alan Partridge character.

In 2012, he reunited with Basden for Tim Key's Late Night Poetry Programme, a series that features Key reading poetry and Basden providing musical accompaniment, intercut with dialogue between the two.

The series was also broadcast on Sky Atlantic in 2012.

Key co-starred in Daniel Kitson's play Tree when it premiered in September 2013 at the Royal Exchange, Manchester.

Key would appear again as Simon in the 2013 film Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa and the BBC series This Time with Alan Partridge.

In 2013, Key played Greg in the E4 comedy-drama series Gap Year.

In 2014, he played Ian in the Inside No. 9 episode "Sardines".

His performance was praised, with one journalist calling him "an unsung hero of British comedy".

The following year, he was a panellist on the first series of Taskmaster and has been credited as a "Task Consultant" since the show's second series.

Key has also had minor roles in shows such as Skins, Plebs, Life's Too Short, Stag, Peep Show, Brassic (TV Series) and The End of the F***ing World.

The play then transferred to The Old Vic in 2015.

He appeared alongside Paul Ritter and Rufus Sewell in Yasmina Reza's Art at The Old Vic, directed by Matthew Warchus, from December 2016 to February 2017.

Key's comedy show Megadate toured from 2017 to 2018.

Like The Slutcracker, it featured Key reading "deliberately bad" poetry interspersed with black-and-white films.

Five series of the show have been broadcast as of 2020.

The three reunited in 2020 to play the game as a trio, renaming it No More Jockeys.