No matter what type of comedy you are into, Tom Basden is your man. A fan of dark, naturalistic cult fare? Try his 00s sketch show Cowards. Profane historical farce? He created ITV2’s ancient Rome-set Plebs. Heartstring-tugging dramedy? He co-stars in Ricky Gervais’s After Life. Quirky musical comedy? He won best newcomer at the Edinburgh fringe for his. The lighter work of the great Russian novelists? He adapted Dostoevsky’s The Crocodile for the stage. Hip, esoteric double acts? He has got one with Tim Key. Unabashedly mainstream family sitcoms? Well, he has just about single-handedly revived the genre with Here We Go, which is about to return to BBC One for its second series.
Despite Basden’s startling versatility, that last still feels like a surprising achievement; it is hard to think of the last time we had a domestic sitcom that was conventionally low concept and solidly great (perhaps Outnumbered, which debuted almost 17 years ago).
Even its creator wasn’t initially sold on the idea. “When I started, I really wasn’t sure I wanted to write a family sitcom – I’d sort of resisted it until that point,” says Basden, during a break from editing the second series, a mere nine days before it is due to land on the iPlayer (“a slightly mad schedule,” he admits, without sounding the least bit flustered). He had originally pitched a mockumentary set in a south London block of flats, but during the development process the idea morphed into a broad comedy about the Jessop clan: highly strung matriarch Rachel (Katherine Parkinson), buffoonish dad Paul (Jim Howick), their two teenage children and Paul’s upbeat but slightly needy mother, Sue (Alison Steadman).
Due to its roundabout conception, Basden went into the project with a healthy distance, deciding to focus on “refreshing these family sitcom tropes”. He has done it: in a twist on the genre’s traditional slapstick denouement, each episode begins with a flash-forward to the comic finale. In turn, the mockumentary filter – much of the action is captured by younger son Sam’s phone camera – allows the classic sitcom farce to masquerade as realism. It’s something that programmes from The Office to Modern Family got audiences irreversibly used to, says Basden. “The studio sitcom – that Friends and My Family style with the three-walled set and the family talking in zingers and the studio audience laughing – it’s difficult to get an audience to buy into the reality of it now.”
Yet those technical coups were soon upstaged by the giddy, chaotic, vividly relatable Jessop family. Basden drew on his own childhood – but seeing the script come to life also gave him insight into family dynamics he never previously understood. “There’s stuff in my family that we’ve never talked about – not serious stuff, it’s not Festen – but my understanding of relationships has improved enormously through writing the show. I have growing affection for my mum’s constant need to give and mother because I can sublimate it through Alison Steadman and go: well, this person’s wonderful and any ingratitude towards them is misplaced and slightly cruel.”
Even with all Basden’s scriptwriting experience – his credits also include Peep Show and Fresh Meat – he still needed to get to grips with the early time slot. “In series one, where I didn’t understand the slot so well, there was a storyline about Amy [the teenager daughter] finding some weed in Rachel’s jacket from when she was at school – that was probably a bit risque,” he says. “There may be people watching BBC One at 8 o’clock who don’t want stuff that’s a bit edgier, so you have to be ready to piss someone off.”
The BBC seem happy with the results – having commissioned two further series off the back of the first. It’s a markedly different experience from Basden’s first foray into TV. In 2009, Cowards, the sketch troupe he founded with his Footlights friends – Key (now best known as Alan Partridge’s Sidekick Simon), Stefan Golaszewski (writer of Him & Her, Mum and Marriage) and Lloyd Woolf (co-creator of Black Ops) – was given a kind of half-series of three episodes on BBC4. Inspired by Chris Morris’s Jam and The Office, it was gloomy, deadpan and strange – but also relentlessly funny – even if the BBC didn’t always love it.
“Shows like Little Britain were very big back then,” says Basden, “so the note you would get is: can you just have the same characters saying the same catchphrases?” They did acquiesce to an extent with recurring skits – including the quartet of worryingly incompetent judges and the nightmarishly cramped caravan share – but drew the line at “literally doing the thing where someone says the same five words in a different place each week”.
As a result, we can look back on Cowards as a small masterpiece of alternative sketch comedy, and a meeting of some of our finest comic minds. “Stefan was mostly interested in stuff that was almost unnervingly naturalistic for a sketch show – you look at [his later work] and it makes perfect sense,” says Basden. “I liked stuff a bit sillier, more out-and-out comedic. Then Tim had his own very particular idiosyncratic style, which is very funny and often very hard to explain why.”
On Valentine’s Day in 2005 – “when we were both single” – Basden and Key formed a double act called Freeze! Key’s role is the belligerent and slightly deranged egotist, Basden is his downtrodden accomplice (Basden’s characters are pretty much exclusively downtrodden, although their response to that ranges from timid acceptance to mild indignance). Their “abusive” dynamic was so realistic it had at least one audience member seriously concerned; Basden remembers getting a note after a show that said: “‘You need to break away from this guy, you’re really good and he’s crap and awful to you on stage.’ I framed that because we were both so delighted that the show had been that convincing.”
In 2007, the pair released a Bafta-nominated short film called The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island. It stars Key as a lottery winner who invites Basden’s McGwyer, a successful folk-pop musician, to play a gig on his private island. When work dried up during the pandemic, Basden and Key decided to “hammer out” a script for a feature-length version, adding in an extra storyline about McGwyer’s former bandmate and girlfriend, Nell. They initially struggled to find funding and an actor to play Nell – until, that is, Key decided to send the script to Carey Mulligan, who had previously emailed him about a fundraiser. “We were like: yeah, that will work,” says Basden, with sarcasm – but it did.
“She loved the script, she’d seen the short and been a fan of ours for a while, which is obviously ridiculous,” he says. ”She basically said she wanted to do it straight away. From then on, as you can imagine, the film suddenly became a real thing that people took seriously.” Shooting took place in Wales last year and Basden is hopeful the film – now titled One for the Money – will be released this summer.
If the original short is anything to go by, the film will showcase Basden’s mastery of yet another strain of comedy: understated, impressionistic, minor key. It is a far cry from the amiable ruckus of Here We Go – as well as the recent West End run of his adaptation of Accidental Death of an Anarchist. How does he switch between styles so easily? “I don’t really feel like they’re that different,” he says. “Whether I’m writing Plebs for ITV2 or a play for the National Theatre, I don’t really make much of a distinction in my head – I don’t think there’s a high-brow low-brow divide.” (He says he was mystified when a Guardian critic called Plebs a “guilty pleasure”.) Yet whatever the institution, he has “no time for stuff that makes people feel shut out”.
Is there anything else he wouldn’t do? “I would absolutely hate to act in something where I had to be nude,” he says, before suddenly remembering another untapped ambition. “I would love to do a police procedural where I get to play a really hard-boiled detective, but I never get asked to do that.” I’m sure he could pull it off – but in light of his almost total comedy domination, surely it is only fair that Basden leaves the gritty cop dramas to someone else.
• The second season of Here We Go is on BBC iPlayer now
