Tim Key reckons he’s a poet but there’s a few in the literary world who would not agree. “Right at the start I was working out what my thing was and where it went – I didn’t know whether it was poetry or comedy, so I went to a poetry night where people were sitting on the floor on bean bags.

“There were about 30 of them in a house somewhere, and some of the poets were published. The first person went on and the themes were personal and devastating.

“I was sat there watching him and leafing through my own poems and thinking this might not go well.

“It didn’t. A couple of women very slowly closed their eyes and there was quite a lot of silence. Afterwards people said they really enjoyed it, but I didn’t believe them.”

He watched the next one because there was no way out.

“It was more or less at that point I escaped the situation, and fled to London.”

He’s not looked back. He named his first solo show, comprising short, prickly and humorous poems, Slut In A Hut, because it was at a venue called The Hut in Edinburgh.

“I said to my agent I might do that. She said good idea – there are no real adults who say anything as ridiculous, but I had massive misgivings. “I thought I might get a drunken crowd who had different expectations, who might be shattered when I walked on and did poems.”

That show sold out at Edinburgh and, buoyed by its success, he came up with The Slutcracker.

“That opened the floodgates. I thought, I can’t go back. Not really by choice. I have branded myself. I will call my next one something with slut in it.”

With the deliberately bad poetry and shambolic stand-up, The Slutcracker won Key the Edinburgh Comedy Award.

After those colloquial vignettes of modern life set to Russian pop and opera comes Masterslut.

“The show involves a bath, which asks more questions than it answers. It combines live bits and pieces of film. In fact, it’s more just a set of mathematical problems that needed to be solved.

“For the last one I trusted it, put it down to luck and it sorted itself out. With The Masterslut there has been more thought. I furrowed my brow about it. The more torturous it is to put together, the greater the rewards are. “You remember those dark, bleak afternoons walking around Edinburgh thinking, I don’t know what to do with this beast.”

He says the bath is custom-built and lugged around the country in a Transit van.

It’s the centrepiece. “I am stood there wearing a suit and to my right is a bath full of hot water and bubbles, and you just think something has got to give.

“It is tantalising sat there, there is always a threat I am going to dunk, but it would be giving too much away to say whether I give in. But I am only human. I’d be cold-hearted to not get in.”

Integral to the new show are the laminated pornographic postcards on which Key scribbles poems that now number more than a thousand.

He’s picked 20 or so which form the basis of The Masterslut.

“It’s now a massive part of my life. It’s how I try out new material because I have no memory for poems.

“It’s completely practical. I just put 50 poems on 50 cards and try them out on the corkboard at home.”

Key began to write poetry on the Tube in London when he found himself without a book or paper and instead only with a notepad.

He started writing short three-line poems. He did it again at home and decided to make a book of them, which then became a show.

After studying Russian at Sheffield University, he joined Cambridge Footlights on returning to his hometown.

“In my first poetry show that was chronologically closer to my time in Russia, I did have a bit in it where I did an anecdote in Russian. This is the closest I’ve got to using my Russian, which is a catchphrase of my mum’s.

“She was always quite keen that I used my ‘degree’, which she ‘paid for’, or that perhaps I should do a ‘law conversion course’. But she keeps her distance now.”

By the time Key won the Edinburgh award, his career was already on the rise: BBC4 had commissioned a series of his quiz show with Alex Horne and Mark Watson, We Need Answers, which was shot shortly after his win.

He was then asked to write topical poems for Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe and Newswipe.

Later he had a role as Sidekick Simon in the web-based return of Alan Partridge.

“They came to me and said this is what we think you should do. It was quite a surreal turn of events. You never really expect Alan Partridge to approach you in life.”

  • Brighton Dome Corn Exchange, Church Street, Sunday, October 7. Starts 7pm, tickets £15. Call 01273 709709