There is nothing in Tim Key’s background — beyond a father with a penchant for amateur operatics — that explains his coronation as Britain’s new king of comedy. When we meet it is less than 48 hours since he won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for his Fringe show, The Slutcracker, and he is understandably elated and exhausted in equal measure.

In a profession that is long on gongs and short on ready cash, the Eddies are still routinely referred to as the comedy “Oscars”. The £8,000 which Key pocketed with the award is very welcome. He also gets to perform at the Toronto and Montreal comedy festivals.

Key is an accidental comedian. His emergence as a comic talent has come via a tangential route involving a stint in the Ukraine, a degree in Russian and an audition with the Cambridge Footlights.

It’s hard to explain what he does but adjectives used to describe his work include “oddball”, “whimsical”, “low-key”, “Dadaist” and “on the fringe of lunacy”. Part Spike Milligan, part McGonagall, he describes himself as “a poet, performer and savant”.

For the past month he has been performing two shows a day, Slutcracker and a Tom Basden play, Party, which won a Fringe First award. “It’s been a peculiar mixture of being really happy and then physically absolutely and completely broken,” he says.

Slutcracker is a follow-up to his previous fringe show, The Slut in the Hut. Key has been coming to the Fringe since 2001, when the sketch show he was in won the best newcomer prize.

At the heart of Slutcracker is very banal poetry interspersed with exquisitely shot silent films and lists of things — most notably, animals that Key would fit inside. There is plenty of interaction and at one point he uses members of the audience to traverse the stage without touching the floor.

“At its essence it is quite a shambolic poetry show,” Key says. “I made a slight shift in my approach this year. I’ve made it less disarming and a bit more polished and charming. I wear a snappy suit. I’m slightly more in control of what I’m doing and there is a bit more direction.”

It has paid off. A diffident man, Key now joins the list of luminaries who have won the Eddies, formerly known as the Perrier Awards, including Frank Skinner, Sean Hughes, Lee Evans and Jenny Eclair.

“When I heard I’d been nominated I phoned my brother,” he says. “I got through to his answer machine and just broke down. After that it was very surreal. My phone went mad with calls and texts. For me it’s just amazing to be aligned with that group of winners.”

Key was brought up in Cambridge where his father was an engineer and his mother a school learning-support assistant. Beyond being press-ganged to perform in the Gang Show, he had no theatrical leanings. What kind of child was he?

“Pretty much the basic model,” he says. “I did my football. I did a Gang Show. I must have liked it because I took drama at GCSE. I don’t know why I did that. My dad did Gilbert and Sullivan — lots of it — but there’s nothing too majorly theatrical in my family.” A trip to the Ukraine in his gap year — “I was disorganised; when I applied there was nothing else left” — led him to study Russian at Sheffield University where he did some drama.

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