James Griffiths (2025)

Famous folk-rock singer-songwriter Herb McGwyer comes to do a gig on remote Wallis Island, off the coast of Wales:  it’s not long before he’s desperate to get away.  Watching The Ballad of Wallis Island, I soon felt the same but, like Herb, stuck it out and, also like him, ended up glad that I did.  It was more pleasing still then to find online the film’s prototype – a 2007 short, The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island.  The three main collaborators on the two projects are the same.  Tom Basden and Tim Key are the scriptwriters; James Griffiths directs; Basden plays Herb McGwyer, whose songs he also composed, and performs; Key is Charles Heath, the awkward eccentric who sets up and hosts Herb’s visit.  Except for the boatman (Alun Blair) who rows Herb to and from the island, The One and Only, which runs twenty-five minutes, is a two-hander.  Basden and Key introduce several new characters into the small cast of the hundred-minute The Ballad of Wallis Island.  The most important is Nell Mortimer, erstwhile half of the McGwyer Mortimer folk duo.  The new film’s casting coup – also its chief salvation – is getting Carey Mulligan for the role.

The short’s main premise is unchanged in the feature.  Herb has signed up to play Wallis Island for a fee of half a million pounds – in cash, as he soon discovers to his surprise.  When Charles tells him the audience will be less than a hundred, Herb says the more intimate the better:  he’s at pains to present himself as a modest chap (though he’s not).  He changes his mind when Charles admits there’ll be an audience of one – himself.  He’s a passionate devotee of Herb’s music and can afford to book him thanks to the National Lottery.  In fact, Charles has twice won a Lottery jackpot.  First time around, he spent all the winnings; second time lucky he invested in land and a big house on the island, where he lives alone.  In The Ballad of Wallis Island, Charles, unbeknown to Herb, has also invited Nell Mortimer to come out of retirement to perform at his private concert; she and her American husband Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen) fly over from their home in Portland, Oregon.  Unbeknown to Nell, Charles has offered her substantially less than Herb’s half-million.  Herb and Nell used to be partners in life as well as on stage and the atmosphere in Charles’ house, already tense, gets tenser once Herb learns that Nell is arriving, and she finds out he’ll be paid far more than her.  After a bust-up with his host, his ex and her husband over their evening meal, Herb storms up to his room midway through it and decides to sneak away early the next morning.  He fails spectacularly by slipping on the pudding that Charles leaves outside his bedroom door – crashing to the floor with his luggage, he wakes everyone else up.  Herb couldn’t have escaped instantly anyway:  it turns out to be anyone’s guess when the rowboat that brought him to the island will next be back.

The dessert collision outside the bedroom door isn’t Herb’s first landing mishap.  As the boat arrives at Wallis Island, he overbalances and topples with his guitar into the sea.  That understandably puts him in a bad mood but it’s not because he’s soaked through that Herb gets cold feet about the gig.  The reason is Charles’s insistent presence and relentless jokey wordplay – the same reason that made this viewer think ‘I can’t stand this’ at an early stage.  I began to feel differently when Nell appeared on the scene and soon so does Herb.  Nell’s husband is chiefly interested in birdwatching and is out of the story for a while in search of puffins.  During his absence, Nell and Herb talk and rehearse some bits of music together.  They go back a long way – Nell knew him as Chris Pinner before he became Herb McGwyer – and rekindled passion looks on the cards until Herb tells Nell that they’re made for each other, musically and romantically, and that she’s now wasting her life, which appears to consist of Michael and making chutney for sale at farmers’ markets.  Nell is reasonably angry, tells Herb she’s pregnant and, once her husband returns, decides they should leave Wallis Island, even though they could certainly have used the money Charles was offering; the unpredictable boatman arrives to take them away.  Carey Mulligan, effortlessly vivid and expressive, isn’t on screen for very long – long enough, though, to enrich the film’s emotional texture in a big way.

James Griffiths, Tom Basden and Tim Key know they need more characters than Charles and Herb for a film four times the length of their short but Nell is the only worthwhile addition.  It’s hard to disagree with Herb’s disparaging assessment of Michael.  Single-mother Amanda (Sian Clifford), who runs the island’s store, lives above the shop with her son (Luka Downie).  Although Sian Clifford is very likeable in the part, Amanda’s main purpose in the film is to deliver a feeble running joke – each time she’s asked if she stocks a particular item she says no before suggesting a tenuously connected item that she does sell – until, that is, she accepts Charles’ invitation to Herb’s performance on the beach.  After Herb’s eventual departure, Amanda arrives at Charles’ place to play tennis with him and the story ends with the prospect of a goofy romance between them.  Even so, The Ballad of Wallis Island is still essentially a two-hander for the main men.  They’re both talented and I’m glad to have seen their Wallis Island diptych – not least because of the intrinsic fascination of watching two actors now in their forties (Key is forty-eight, Basden four years younger) return to the same roles they played when they were nearly twenty years younger.  Yet the basic set-up is a problem that Basden and Key don’t overcome in the feature-length version of their material.

These two have often worked together since they first met up as Cambridge Footlights contemporaries.  Without having seen too much of either – relative to their lengthy lists of IMDb credits – I think I’ve seen enough to get an idea of the kind of performers they are (when they’re not doing stand-up anyway), an idea which this film certainly confirms.  On television, Basden, underplaying and rarely smiling, has been a highly effective straight man to leads as different as Ricky Gervais in After Life and Diane Morgan in Mandy.  Key, more extrovert and animated, has recently caught the eye in small film roles in, for example, See How They Run and Wicked Little Letters.  In other words, they’re highly complementary and The Ballad of Wallis Island exploits that dynamic.  The balance seems off, though, because Key’s performance is too dominant.  For sure, it’s the crowd-pleasing one:  nearly all the titters in the Curzon Wimbledon audience were in response to him.  But Basden and Key build Charles up only by multiplying his annoying quips and giving him more backstory.  The former are so often at Herb’s expense that they have the effect of diluting Charles’ admiration for Herb, which comes through more strongly in the short.  The latter is a bigger weakness.

In The One and Only misfit Charles’ solitariness isn’t explained – but you easily accept it:  it’s sad but you see why no one has been prepared to share their life with him.  It’s not especially convincing that, as he tells Herb, Charles blew his first lottery winnings on drink, drugs and women – but that doesn’t matter too much in the short’s scheme of things.  In The Ballad of Wallis Island, Charles immediately makes clear that he shared the first jackpot with Marie, his partner or wife, and they travelled the world together.  Marie is now conspicuous by her absence.  In other words, she’s dead and the details of lonesome Charles’ heartbreaking loss are eked out protractedly.  His dream of reuniting Herb and Nell suggests a clumsy attempt to resurrect more than one perfect union.  Herb discovers newspaper cuttings confirming that, like Charles, Marie (Kerrie Thomason, a face in photographs only) was a McGwyer Mortimer superfan.  It transpires that the gig is happening on the fifth anniversary of Marie’s death.  Yet this drip-feed of revelations doesn’t do much to develop Charles’ character – or Tim Key’s performance.

Herb doesn’t develop that much either but Tom Basden has advantages.  First, he can sing and, though Herb’s kind of music doesn’t do a lot for me, Basden makes it very pleasant to listen to.  Second, Herb is such a grumpy egotist for much of the film that it’s easier for the experience of Charles and Wallis Island to turn him into someone nicer.  It emerges that Herb’s career is now treading water – he’s engaged in ill-judged attempts to become more commercial – but he decides to leave it all but fifty quid of his appearance fee with his host.  To show that he’s rediscovered who he really is, Herb also signs his old guitar – the prize exhibit in Charles’ collection of McGwyer Mortimer memorabilia – ‘Your greatest fan, Chris Pinner’.

The Ballad of Wallis Island, which premiered at Sundance this year, has been getting mostly good reviews.  As I was setting off for Wimbledon, Sally mentioned that she’d just read about a well-known name lauding it as one of the greatest British films ever made; she then said she wouldn’t say who in case that put me off.  The opening credits, introducing a ‘Baby Cow’ production, immediately brought Steve Coogan to mind:  while struggling to stay with the film, I consoled myself with the thought that it would be far worse with Coogan doing his misanthropic snarky thing as Herb McGwyer.  On the train coming home, I tried to track down the high praise on Google and came up with an Instagram post from Amol Rajan, commending Wallis Island as one of the best British films he’d seen in years.  So I assumed that was who Sally meant, even if her aside seemed a bit surprising:  I’m not (as she is) a great Rajan fan but I don’t mind him.  When I got in, I Iearned the truth.  The admirer in question is Richard Curtis.

It’ll be obvious from the above that I don’t agree with Curtis about the film’s merits although it’s certainly much better than his own work in cinema (as distinct from television).  His high opinion did remind me, though, of resonances between The Ballad of Wallis Island and two pictures that I think are among the best-ever British films.  This one may be set on a Welsh island (finely photographed by G Magni Ágústsson) rather than a Scottish one.  But the big-city protagonist exasperated by the island’s ways and, especially, by its boat service calls to mind the plight of Wendy Hiller’s Joan in Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going!  Herb McGwyer’s re-evaluation of priorities and the island call box he must rely on (seawater has disabled his mobile phone) are unmistakable reminders of Peter Riegert’s Mac in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero.

12 June 2025