Tom Basden plays men who would rather be somewhere else, and writes them the rooms they cannot leave. Mostly a comedy writer who acts, he put both jobs to work at once in The Ballad of Wallis Island, and it suited him.
Fi1m perspective
Herb McGwyer arrives on Wallis Island wet, and stays wet for some time, because his host will not stop offering things long enough for him to change. Tom Basden plays him mostly in reaction: the tightening jaw, the glance at the door, the polite noise a man makes when he has decided not to answer. Tim Key does the talking and Basden does the enduring. It is the part he has been playing, in smaller sizes, for the best part of twenty years, the quiet one at the edge of the sketch who is not sure he agreed to be there.
He came out of stand-up and sketch comedy around 2006 and 2007, and for most of the time since the writing has come first. He was one of the writers on Fresh Meat from 2011, alongside Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, where the voice held across a wide table of writers. He co-created Plebs with Sam Leifer and played Aurelius in it from 2013 to 2019, wrote for and played Noel in The Wrong Mans (2013–2014), and turned up as Matt in After Life (2019–2022) and in Here We Go from 2020. Supporting parts, mostly, understated and slightly awkward, and a good many writing credits. Then he and Key went back to a short they had made in 2007 and stretched it into a feature.
The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025) is where the two jobs finally meet. Basden co-wrote it, plays the lead and wrote the songs, and the songs are what make the film hold. James Griffiths lets them run in full, no cutaways to anyone being moved, and they are good enough that the film's claim that Herb and Nell once mattered is not a stretch. The first time Basden and Carey Mulligan sing together in Charles's front room, we stopped waiting for the next joke and did not notice we had stopped. It was the harmony, and the look on Basden's face as it came back to him, that did it: a man hearing something he had told himself he did not miss. He has said the songs were written alone in his bedroom and that handing them over felt exposing. It shows, in the good sense.
What does not quite work is also his. Herb is the less generous part; Charles gets the jokes and Herb gets to be annoyed by them, and after an hour the being annoyed wears. Mulligan is given less than she deserves, and Basden's name is on the script. A performer who has spent his career as the other half of someone else's act has written himself a film in which he is, again, the other half, and it is a fair question whether he could carry one alone. We would like to see him try. We would also settle for him and Key, an island and another set of songs.
Biography
Tom Basden is an English actor, writer, comedian and musician. Born on 30 November 1980 in Sutton, Greater London, he was educated at King’s College School, Wimbledon, and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he was vice-president of the Footlights. He began performing stand-up and sketch comedy in the mid-2000s.
He co-created, co-wrote and starred in the ITV sitcom Plebs (2013–2019), which won the Royal Television Society award for Best Scripted Comedy in 2014. Basden has appeared in series including Fresh Meat, The Wrong Mans, Ghosts and After Life, and created the BBC sitcom Here We Go. He is a member of the sketch group Cowards and was nominated for Best Newcomer at the 2007 Edinburgh Comedy Awards.
With Tim Key, Basden co-wrote and co-starred in the short film The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island (2007) and its feature adaptation The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025), in which he plays Herb McGwyer and wrote the screenplay and music.
