He may not be a household name, but Tom Basden has had a hand in some of the best British comedies of the past two decades. There’s his dark, brilliant Noughties sketch show Cowards, his side-splittingly funny stage adaptation of the Accidental Death of an Anarchist, and his Bafta-nominated historical comedy Plebs. He’s got writing credits on Peep Show and Fresh Meat, acting credits in satires W1A and The Windsors, and Ricky Gervais won’t stop casting him – in Derek, After Life and David Brent: Life on the Road. Earlier this year, Richard Curtis called his romcom The Ballad of Wallis Island, co-written with Tim Key, “one of the greatest British films of all time”. And tonight marks the return, on BBC One, of Here We Go, his family sitcom that some say has revived the genre single-handed.
All of the shows Basden has written share at least one quality: a fascination with the absurdities and idiosyncrasies of British life. His are middle-England milieus teeming with puns, interesting knitwear and references to Mick Hucknall. Characters have pet dogs called Alan Sugar (and end up in the park, desperately calling after “Sir Alan”). There’s mini-golf, Monster Munch, archery. It’s hard to explain quite why these things are so funny and so British; they just sort of are.
A lot of Basden’s best writing has been informed by those close to him. “The characters in Here We Go are a mishmash of my family and friends,” admits the 44-year-old, affable and chatty as he speaks from a book-stuffed study in his north London home. On paper, Here We Go may sound a little prosaic, its generic title not exactly the most inspiring. But give it a chance and you’ll be rewarded with a modern classic. With shades of The Royle Family and Outnumbered, the show revels in the banal, revolving around a chaotic suburban family, led by Katherine Parkinson and Jim Howick. As the perpetually embarrassing parents of two teenagers, they are note-perfect, and naturally hilarious vessels for Basden’s brand of cringe.
But the star of the show is Alison Steadman’s Granny Sue, who turns up at the front door every day with tiramisus, hot cross buns, chocolate oranges, you name it. “Would you like a cup of tea… or a casserole?” she asks one person who pops round the house. Basden’s mother, “an impressive feeder”, is the same. “She’ll just produce a roast chicken dinner and put it in front of someone,” says Basden. “She’s incredibly giving, but in a way that can be quite absurd.”
Basden grew up in Sutton in south London, the son of two teachers. It was a “very middle-class” upbringing, and he remembers the family spending basically all their time together, inside, at home. “We would never go to restaurants or stay in hotels,” he says. “We’d go into London maybe once a year.” For the series’ Bedford-based Jessop clan, too, family outings are A Big Deal. Trips to Italian restaurants and escape rooms tend to have a huge buildup – and then end in disaster.
As well as writing the show, Basden stars as Uncle Robin, a man of two constants: he’s always in skinny jeans and he always has a new thing, whether it’s cycling, rock climbing or investing in crypto. He is essentially an extended joke at the expense of Basden’s own brother. “Around the age of 17, he had a very similar energy to Robin,” says Basden. “So I wanted to write about that person in the family who’s always reinventing themselves, and everyone being very accommodating, but sort of knowing it’s probably a mistake.”
His family do sometimes “get prickly” about the idea of Basden writing about them, but he knows they don’t mind really, because they often volunteer anecdotes. Recently, his dad pulled out of a lottery syndicate with a group of neighbours because he thought it was a waste of money. A few months later, the syndicate got five numbers and everyone in it won thousands of pounds. Basden is already planning on using this material.
The return of Here We Go arrives as a certain buzz seems to be building around Basden, thanks to the release of his first feature, The Ballad of Wallis Island. It’s been the word-of-mouth hit of the summer after Richard Curtis gave it his seal of approval. Based on a Bafta-nominated 2007 short by Basden and his longtime collaborator Key, it follows lonely lottery winner Charles (Key), who offers a huge sum to his favourite musician, Herb (Basden), to play a concert on the secluded Welsh island where he lives. What Herb doesn’t realise is that there is likely to be an audience of just one – Charles – and that his old flame and musical partner Nell (Carey Mulligan) has also been invited, in a plot by their superfan to get the pair back together. It’s a small film with enormous feelings, by turns offbeat, melancholy and very, very funny.
Curtis’s comment, says Basden, “was transformative for the film”. “It really changed its trajectory,” he says, “because getting a film in cinemas and getting people to watch it is incredibly difficult unless it’s, like, Spider-Man.” The Ballad of Wallis Island, by contrast, was shot in 18 days on a budget of, it has been joked, “roughly 50p”.
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The yin-and-yang dynamic between Key’s over-familiar Charles and Basden’s despairing Herb is the lifeblood of the film, with Herb spending much of the runtime visibly pained by Charles’s incessant punning. (On the way to the island, Herb gets soaked. “Dame Judi Drenched,” quips Charles, in the first of many jokes to that effect.) “Tim and I do talk to each other like that,” says Basden, explaining that they often “drift into gobbledegook” as they’ve known each other so long. He chuckles. “I do think it makes hanging out with us very hard. I feel for anyone who has to do that.” They’ve been making comedy together since Cowards, which arrived in 2009, a few years after they were both part of Cambridge’s Footlights. Key had inveigled his way into the comedy troupe by pretending he was a student.
Having Mulligan on the billing was a big win. Already a fan of the pair’s work, she pounced on the script. “The prospect of working with Carey was terrifying,” admits Basden. They were expecting her to call her agent and say, “Sorry, but I can’t possibly do this with these complete clowns.” To their relief, Mulligan never made that call. If anything, her enthusiasm got them through filming.
Basden wrote all the songs for it. They had to be excellent – enough to convince the viewer that Herb and Nell were a musical duo so good they’d have superfans. “It was very exposing,” says Basden, Herb’s guitar hanging on the wall behind him. He was self-conscious emailing his songs to Key, but even more agonising was sending them to Mulligan, who’s married to the lead singer of Mumford & Sons. “I’d send them, knowing Marcus Mumford may well have an opinion,” says Basden, bursting into laughter with palpable retrospective embarrassment. “I’d be refreshing my inbox every 30 minutes, and three days later she’d reply, ‘Yeah, love it, really good.’ It was mortifying, but also weirdly quite easy and wonderful.’” The fact that they were love songs only made him more on edge. “I was writing love songs for a fictional relationship with Carey Mulligan. I felt like I could get an email back going, ‘Oh my God, you’re such a creep.’”
The film’s success has been a pinch-me moment for Basden. It’s a far cry from 2019, when he almost gave up acting, before he was cast in Gervais’s Netflix show After Life. It was a turning point. He’d always admired Gervais – “with The Office, it felt like they had discovered a new kind of comedy” – and starred in a couple of his projects, but After Life was a main role as Gervais’s boss. “What Ricky understands is that, in comedy anyway, auditioning is not very helpful,” says Basden. “You’ve got to work with people to see if your tastes overlap, if they can improvise and how funny they are. It’s a lovely thing working for him, because he knows exactly what you can do and he trusts that you can do it. Filming After Life, he was pissing himself all the time. He found it so funny.”
Like Gervais, Basden has had some of his biggest breaks on the BBC. “The BBC means a great deal to me,” he says. “I grew up watching Blackadder, Dad’s Army, One Foot in the Grave and Only Fools and Horses. These really shaped not just what I wanted to do, but what I thought was funny. What those shows have in common is that there is an acute level of observation mixed with absurdity and joy that I just think the BBC and by extension British comedy writers do better than anyone else.”
Basden loves the sense of “aspiration and desperation” in British sitcoms. “It just gets to me,” he says. “I find the pathos of it really powerful and funny. The Del Boys, Basil Fawlty, David Brent, Alan Partridge – it’s their desperation. I just love it.” Overall, he says British comedies are more interested in truth and humour than American shows, which he believes are more preoccupied with entertainment.
The BBC might be in turmoil at the moment – over the misconduct of its stars, its Gaza coverage, and its struggle against streamers – but “there are reasons to be cheerful”, says Basden. “A lot of the actual TV shows on the BBC are in really good health. I feel worried about the direction of travel but also optimistic that viewers will fight for the BBC, not because of what it represents, or because it’s part of our history, but because it’s making TV shows and providing a news service that are brilliant and indispensable.” If the BBC keeps delivering hearty, life-affirming shows like Here We Go, I’d be inclined to agree with him.
‘Here We Go’ returns at 9pm on Friday 25 July on BBC One, with all episodes arriving at once on iPlayer
