Alongside Robin Ince, Richard Herring, Geoff Norcott and more

Tim Key has joined the line-up for the Chortle Comedy Book Festival.

The comic – and star of shows including The Witchfinder and This Time With Alan Partridge – will be talking about his acclaimed collections of poetry and prose written during the Covid lockdowns.

He joins a line-up that includes:

• Robin Ince talking about books about comedy and by comedians as well as his own title, Bibliomaniac: An Obsessive's Tour of the Bookshops of Britain

• Richard Herring talking about his experience with testicular cancer, as amusingly detailed in his book Can I Have My Ball Back?

• Geoff Norcott, talking about finding a political home in the Tory party, despite being brought up by trade unionists on a council estate, in Where Did I Go Right?

• Sadia Azmat on her twin lives as a comedian who loves sex and a  hijab-wearing Muslim woman, as explored in her book Sex Bomb

• Stand-up Pope Lonergan sharing his first-hand experiences of the care system in the darkly funny I’ll Die After Bingo

• Comedy academic Oliver Double in conversation with Jenny Lecoat, one of the pioneers of the alternative comedy scene, talking about the groundbreaking movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s

•  Comedian and medic Ed Patrick giving a dispatch from the front line of the NHS Catch Your Breath: The Secret Life of a Sleepless Anaesthetist

• Count Binface, the veteran election prankster known for standing against Boris Johnson with policies such as bringing back Ceefax. 

The festival takes place at 21Soho in Central London across the afternoon and early evening of January 29, with Key’s session closing the day at 8pm. Day and single session tickets are available here.

His anthology of poems and conversations, He Used Thought As A Wife came from the depths of the first lockdown. It was a claustrophobic number, existing entirely in the confines of his North London flat.

His follow-up, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, took place in Lockdown three. This time Key could make Government-sanctioned expeditions out onto the streets of London, and so we see him plodding around on his phone, promenading with his bubble. Another three months of mind-freezing inertia.

Between these two books, and the conversations and poetry within them, we see the lockdowns come and go... through Key's unreliable lens.

Published: 11 Jan 2023