As a schoolboy in the West Country, Bill Bailey had the misfortune to be good at everything. He excelled at exams. He played tennis at club level, but was equally accomplished at hockey and cricket. He could act. He was the lead in the school play the same year he was school cricket captain. With perfect pitch, he was the only student at King Edward’s School in Bath taking an A-level in music, but his teacher persuaded him also to go for an associate diploma at the London College of Music. It duly awarded him one.
Being good at everything at school was a misfortune for Bailey because when he left, he was still unsure what he wanted to be good at in life. He dropped out of university, travelled the world, fell in love with Indonesia (“where chaos reigns”), joined a band, did a bit of acting, worked in telesales, played the organ at crematoria and ploughed on as a supporting stand-up comedian, sometimes in a double act, sometimes not.
He was fully ten years into adult life before he realised that being good at a variety of things or, to be precise, two things – making music and making people laugh – might be the way forward. In the great tradition of Peter Ustinov and Victor Borge, music became essential to his comedy and comedy to his music. For a quarter of a century he has shared his stage with a keyboard, a set of bongo drums and more obscure instruments such as a bouzouki or a cittern. Some of his anecdotes end with a punchline, others with a musical flourish.
He is 56 now and his eclectic brilliance can still surprise us. A consummate panellist on Never Mind the Buzzcocks? The loveable actor playing the eternally resilient Manny in Black Books? Yes, but a dancer? Last Christmas Bailey waltzed off with the Strictly Come Dancing glitter ball. We were not expecting that, those of us who had assumed that the shortish, long-haired bald guy with the goatee had been cast as the show’s comedy fall guy.
The Fred Astaire of Middle Earth, as he became known, was paired with Oti Mabuse, 25 years his junior and already a Strictly champion. For once in such pairings between a young pro and an ageing amateur, there was no hint of sexual awkwardness. In my recollection, Bailey did not crack a joke of any sort in the entire series. Oti and Bill were as one, but only in their determination to win.
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“That was it. That was completely it,” he says in his office in west London. “We sussed that out about each other very early on. Here we are, from very different backgrounds, different generations and on the face of it we don’t have much in common, but actually it turns out we have a lot in common. We’re very driven, very ambitious and we want to try to dedicate ourselves to whatever dance we’re doing that week”
He did not say much on those Covid-stricken Saturday nights as the shop lights dimmed all over Britain, but what he did say was always the right thing. After showdancing to The Show Must Go On he said, “This is not just a song about the arts. This is an anthem about not giving up, keeping hope, getting through this.” The 13 million who saw him win slept easier that night.
What does he think about those Strictly pros who decided not to have the Covid jab this year? Would he have danced with one?
“I wouldn’t,” he says. “I just don’t think it’s worth the risk. We’re still not out of this by any means.” People call Bailey zany, but the zaniness is a serious man’s veneer. He is good at being funny because he is good at everything.
He is certainly good with people. I arrive at his door on time but flustered, having failed to find a taxi. It is the week Britain decides it is running out of petrol and the one cabbie who stops for me drives off claiming, paradoxically, he is “out of fuel”. Amused, Bailey recreates this conversation for me. “Have you any? I can use anything, mate. White spirit? What’s in your Thermos? Surely. Just a cupful, mate.”
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He makes coffee. This is a rather slow process involving a hand press, measuring the exact amount of coffee and being attentive to the stirring. In Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to Happiness, a self-help book he published last year and typically to be found on the humour shelves, he calls the process “a physical action, an act of nurture, a mindful thing [and] a meditative moment”. Bailey: the master of all trades, even the barista’s.
At his direct grant public school, he was encouraged to take an aptitude test to help him decide on a career.
“It came back and it said, ‘Museum curator or member of the diplomatic service’. At the time it was just ludicrous. The idea of curating a museum seems truly dull to a teenager. I mean, now I’d absolutely love it. It would be fascinating, but back then… But maybe it saw something there which I didn’t see at the time. In a curious way, it was right. I travel around the world doing my comedy, which is a very British form of comedy. I simultaneously send up and celebrate Britishness. In my own way, I’m promoting Britain.”
His act’s a sort of diplomacy?
“It is a sort of diplomacy and it’s also about curating lots of ideas.”
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The curation of ideas, when done from a platform (the main stage of the Royal Opera House, for example, upon which this summer he became the first comedian to perform), contains a strong educative urge, he admits. He introduces audiences to recondite musical instruments, explains that the major key is inferior to the minor because it “tries too hard”, instructs us that “ecopsychology is the study of nature’s benefit to mental health”.
He comes from a home that took learning seriously. His parents worked for the NHS, his father as a GP and his mother as a nurse. His wife comes from a medical background too and their teenage son, Dax, favours science subjects. Bailey may look like a hippie, but his world view is strictly rationalist. He comes down heavily against the healing power of crystals and is pro mask-wearing and vaccines. He says I would too if I had spent as much time as he did at West Country music festivals.
Yet did he not decisively reject education when he walked out of his English degree course at London University after a single year? “I know. I thought, ‘We’ve done this. I’m not getting anything else out of this,’” he says and adds that the year’s intellectual high point had come early on when he won a student balloon debate making the case against WH Auden being thrown out of the basket. He pleads guilty to pretentiousness, but I do wonder if the story does not demonstrate that he preferred performing to being lectured to.
As to his being an ambassador for Britain, I am curious about the message about the British character he is delivering. One of his stand-up shows began, “I’m English. I crave disappointment.” In 2015’s Limboland, he constructed a long, funny anecdote about how disappointing the northern lights are. Some unproductive audience interaction was summarised as “a long walk down a windy beach to a café that was closed” (brilliant, but from him it sounded applicable to life itself). To hammer home the melancholy, he transposed Happy Birthday to a minor key.
What does English disappointment stem from? The loss of Empire?
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“I think there’s definitely an element of that in it, the idea that somehow things were better in the olden days. We won the war, we invented football, we invented cricket. We invented all these things and we gave them to the world.”
You hear the yearning in the chant, “Football’s coming home,” I say.
“Yes. It left us. It left us bereft and it’s gone round the world, and only comes back to do its washing.”
And now we’re going to be disappointed by Brexit?
“I’m sure. I’m sure it’s not what people thought it was going to be. I feel for so much of Britain right now. I just feel that we’re riven by the division that it has caused. I think it’s lessening now. I think everyone realises that we just have to get on with it.”
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Originally named in reference to the aftermath of Brexit, now as much about Covid, his coming tour is called En Route to Normal, a title that you feel demands a question mark. As he says, when he posts something about vaccines on social media, he cannot help but note that the “general railing against the world” has not fully abated.
We meet before Sir David Amess is killed, but just after Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, has called the Conservatives a “bunch of scum” at a do at the Labour party conference. I say that I so much prefer the word that Bailey, a lifelong Labour supporter, used about the Tory cabinet: “jackanapes”. Would he have called them scum?
“No. I mean, just purely on a linguistic level there are so many more choices in the English language. It’s so rich and mercurial with levels of meaning and inference.”
I thought “jackanapes” caught the bumptious absurdity of Boris Johnson.
“It was a deliberate term. There’s an element of charm in a character like that. They have charisma. People sort of like them. They actually are likeable. The negative side of it is there’s an opportunistic, dilettante, kind of ‘I’m not really engaged in this’ attitude. If you just call someone scum, where do you go from there?”
I like it that he never swears on stage.
“I just think there are so many more options. There’s a lot of swearing around us all the time. People are not going to go, ‘Oh, I’m strangely shocked.’ It feels like it’s reductive. It doesn’t feel like you’ve thought about what else you could say. It feels like an initial reaction and, for me, if you’re putting something on stage, in front of people, there has to be more thought that’s gone into it.”
Bailey obviously loves music. He believes it transfers emotion through time. You hear a symphony by Beethoven and you feel what Beethoven felt when he wrote it. Yet there is plainly something he adores more.
“I think what I realised many years ago is that I have an equal love of the spoken word. I think the spoken word is even more subtle. It can apply itself to so many more subjects, quicker and more nimbly than perhaps music can.”
So much of Bailey’s stand-up is indeed about words, not music. He quite often reads extracts from an English-Indonesian phrase book, Practical Dialogues, whose exchanges are Pinteresque in their elliptic aggression. “What happens if I am caught smuggling drugs?” “You will be hanged.” On the net, there is someone who has searched for a copy so long that he offers a £15 bounty for anyone who can lead him to one. After we meet, it crosses my mind that perhaps Practical Dialogues may not exist. “It very much does,” Bailey emails me. “I bought it in a bookshop in Ambon in the Eastern Moluccas.” This exchange could almost have come from the book itself.
In a more intimate routine, he talks of the linguistic perils of dating. An initial conversation can seem to be going well and suggest many levels of like-mindedness. Then the other party says something wrong. The example he gives is of a woman describing a biscuit as “yumbles”. At that point you – or Bailey – call the whole thing off. In the same show, Limboland, he relives an excruciating encounter with his musical hero Paul McCartney. Paralysed with awe, Bailey is left drowning in a soup of random sounds, the coruscating wordsmith terrifyingly wordless.
Thirty-four years ago Bailey met his now wife and manager, Kristin, in Edinburgh where she was running a bar. They got each other’s sense of humour and 11 years later they married in Indonesia. The initial year’s courtship was, however, conducted almost entirely by letters from London to Edinburgh.
“It’s so ridiculously quaint.”
Could he not afford the train fare?
“It was ludicrous.”
Were they long letters?
“They were. They were long letters and Kris, she’s a very good illustrator, so she would illustrate these letters with little cartoons about what had happened and would send them back. I do think that time allowed us to get to know each other. Perhaps that was a way to fall in love, taking the time to put pen to paper. You choose words a bit more carefully. You craft something. Whereas now it can be a couple of clicks and then somebody’s photographing their body.”
If his marriage, he writes in Happiness, were a weather forecast it would be: “Generally fine with some chance of cloud and occasional drizzle, followed by sunny spells.” Neither party had any fear of the marriage-ending curse of Strictly befalling them. The family of three live close to his office, sharing a house with a “small menagerie” of animals that over the years has included cockatoos, rabbits, rescue dogs, snakes and tame monkeys. (Secondary definition of a jackanapes: a tame monkey – who says Bailey is not an observational comedian?) This morning he is wearing the sheeny blue suit he was married in, although Kristin tells him to change into something else for the photoshoot.
The path from successful epistolary romance to psychopathic phrase book lies, obviously, through comedy, an art form that relies on the right words in the right order, and it was among its practitioners the man who had considered himself an outsider found his tribe. He likes them, then?
“I do like them because we’re a disparate bunch and from all different backgrounds and across all different demographics. That’s what’s so lovely about it. You meet all these different people who’ve lived these different lives.”
In the book, he thanks the comedian Sean Lock, a builder’s son, for “so many adventures”. Lock died of cancer this summer.
“A huge loss, obviously to comedy, but to me,” says Bailey. “I was a very old friend of his. Again, we just got on. Like a lot of comics from different backgrounds, different parts of the country, different lives, comedy became the thing that united us. We all made each other laugh. We would hang out together and have the most brilliant times.
“I can remember sharing a car with a bunch of comics on our way to Bracknell, laughing all the way there, doing the job, coming off stage, going, ‘I can’t believe this is a job. How can we be doing this?’ and then laughing all the way back.”
There is only one thing about comedy that might discomfit Bailey, I would imagine, and that is its careless cruelty. He says he does not warm to it. Like the major key in music, it is too direct.
“If you start wanting to shoot people, you’ll find targets. Knock them down. That’s fine. That’s a big part of comedy. I’m not averse to that, but I think if you’re going to pick targets, they have to be powerful, not people who have no voice.”
Not somebody who creeps in late to a gig?
“No, exactly. That’s right.”
Or Dominic Raab, fired from the Foreign Office, for allegedly paddle-boarding in Crete as Kabul fell. (I present him this hard case because paddle-boarding along the Thames is among Bailey’s top recreations.) “Don’t knock paddle-boarding. If you’ve tried it, you’d understand why you wouldn’t want to get off the board for anything.”
Nevertheless, for six years he was a team captain on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, a notoriously vicious panel game that targeted musicians. Was he cruel on that show?
“Well, I don’t think I was. I say that now. You’ll probably find some YouTube clip of me berating someone, but I think it had that reputation unfairly. Real musicians were always celebrated, always championed. Martha Reeves, Jimmy Cliff, these were the heroes we worshipped on the show. Those who were pretenders, people who were not real musicians, whatever that means, were rightly pilloried and egos were punctured and maybe bruised. That was the nature of the show.”
It is rare, especially in comedy, for the big-brained and quick-tongued to resist using their talents to wound others. If Bailey has managed to do so, it may be down to his mother, Madryn, the “life and soul of every party”, whose home his friends wanted to go round to, the one who sang Perry Como’s Magic Moments round the house.
“She was a huge influence on me. She had very strong opinions about what she liked in comedy. She said, ‘Now, I don’t want you to mock religion. I don’t like you doing that.’ She said, ‘Do something with languages. I like that. And do something with music. I love the music and the language jokes, and I don’t like swearing.’ I think I took it to heart.”
She saw his first show, Cosmic Jam at the Bloomsbury Theatre, in 1995. His father, Christopher, a Goons fan, got the surreal material immediately. It took his mother until the interval. “She said, ‘Look at all these people! They’ve come to see you!’ And I said, ‘Well, yeah, it’s what it is.’ And she was really impressed by it.”
Madryn died of bowel cancer in 2005.
“I’d done a show, Part Troll, which had done well. The tour was successful and I was sort of really experimenting, choosing more subjects, being quite ambitious. I think [her dying] just made me take stock a little bit. I had just become a father for the first time. I had turned 40, a big milestone because suddenly a little bell of mortality is ringing. And it was like a delayed grief. It didn’t hit me immediately. There were a lot of practicalities and I was more concerned about my dad, you know, making sure he was OK. In fact, I invited my dad on a number of jobs I was doing. I just thought, ‘I want to spend some time with him.’
“I got this job presenting a documentary about jaguars in Brazil. I said to my dad, ‘Why don’t you come along?’ He’d never been to Brazil. And he immediately agreed. So we travelled to Sao Paulo and there’s this huge wetland area in the middle, about the size of Belgium. Everything’s the size of Belgium. This enormous wetland area and it was beautiful. Full of wildlife: anacondas and caiman and giant anteaters and macaws and crab-eating foxes and strange wonders and productions of nature. My dad loved it.
“Then he came to LA with us when I was doing a show. And that was when it hit me. It was almost a year to the day after she’d died and I find myself in the worst place on the planet if you’re going through any trauma or grief. Every time you go into a shop: ‘How are you today?’ ‘How are you today?’ Relentless sunshine and upbeatness.
“And we were in some store in Los Angeles and this woman said, ‘How are you today?’ And it was the umpteenth time and I turned to her and I said, ‘Well, actually I’m not feeling that great today. My mum died a year ago and I’m not having a good day.’ You could tell she was looking around for security.
“I got back to the apartment and I was just overcome with grief. I wept uncontrollably for a day. And the whole loss, all of what had happened, it must have been stored up for a year and on the date of her death, suddenly it all came out. I think it was the fact that I was there with my dad. My little boy was there. I just thought, ‘She should be here.’ I think that’s what it was.”
Reading Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to Happiness, I was struck that this man with all the gifts has had to strive for contentment. Yes, he acknowledges happiness can be tidying up your study, finding the correct receipt for a product you need to return, but most of the pages are filled with jogging, cycling, learning a foreign language, scuba diving, sky diving. I say he makes the pursuit of happiness sound like hard work.
“I think it is,” he says.
For some of us, less encumbered by talent, happiness may be transitory, but it is easy enough to attain. We need simply watch Bill Bailey cajole comedy from a musical instrument that looks as if it has come from a torturer’s armoury, dance to Rapper’s Delight in a pinstripe suit or express mild but amused disappointment about, well everything, really. I promise you, it never fails.
Bill Bailey’s tour, En Route to Normal, opens in Plymouth on December 12 (billbailey.co.uk)
Shoot credits
Styling Hannah Skelley. Grooming Katrin Rees at Carol Hayes Management using Tom Ford
