Bill BAILEY
Comedian Bill Bailey tells Tristram Fane Saunders about how he is hoping to make audiences laugh about lockdown
Bill Bailey doesn’t do anger. In years of TV panel show appearances, from QI to Never Mind the Buzzcocks, he has always seemed to exist in his own bubble of benign whimsy. His hobbies are all soothing hobbies: the 55-yearold spends his days birdwatching, sketching butterflies and gently paddleboarding down the Thames, that famous scraggly wisp of hair wafting behind him in the breeze.
And yet, phoning me from Hammersmith (where he lives with his wife, son, dogs, snakes, cockatoos, Flemish giant rabbits and African snails), Bailey’s usual Zen is broken. For a moment, Britain’s foremost musical comedian sounds very mildly cheesed off. “It’s absurd,” he tuts. “It’s ludicrous!”
We’re talking about the “confusing and unclear” new guidance on live entertainment. At the time of writing, bingo-callers are allowed to entertain an indoor audience by telling jokes into a microphone, but comedians aren’t.
“We’re all in a sort of limbo,” he sighs. “If there’s any uncertainty about it – which there is, and has been for months – clubs can’t survive. People can’t hang on thinking, hoping that they might open. They’ve got bills to pay, they’ve got families and mortgages and rent… You can’t just rely on ‘perhaps, maybe, in a few months’. That doesn’t cut it.” According to a report published last week, without financial support 77 per cent of comedy clubs expect to close for good within a year.
But what about the promised £1.57 billion arts rescue package? “I don’t think comedy will be much of a beneficiary from it.” Arts Council England, partly responsible for the cash allocation, has never funded comedy. “It appears to the arts establishment that it doesn’t really qualify, because it doesn’t somehow meet some criteria as being ‘prestigious’. There’s a kind of snobbery about it.
“Comedy has become an enormous business and it brings a lot of income into Britain – it drives a lot of the economy.” One estimate puts live comedy’s value to the UK at £500 million a year. “A lot of venues that struggle to fill theatres rely on touring comedians to subsidise the less popular and the less well-attended shows.” Comedy, he admits with a weary laugh, is still seen as “a lower form of entertainment”.
The cancellation of the Edinburgh Fringe is particularly worrying. “It will be a big hole in the year for a lot of comedians. It’s the focus. It’s sort of like the Olympics.”
Bailey put every penny he had into his first solo show there in 1995; it won a Time Out award and launched his career. The Fringe was where he met Simon Pegg and Dylan Moran, his future co-stars in (respectively) Spaced and Black Books. “For me, it was a springboard to an enormous amount of work that really has never let up since.”
Despite the bleak wider picture, Bailey is confident that comedians will find ways to adapt to the “new normal”: drive-in shows, for instance. Later this month, he will be performing for three nights in a north London car park. “It’s going to be very much a voyage of discovery,” he chuckles. In other words, he’s not entirely sure how it’s going to work. “What happens? Can you hear laughter, if people are in their cars? Will they be wiping their windscreen wipers if they like it? There are a lot of unknowns.”
One “unknown” he’s been wrestling with is whether to address the C-word onstage. “I can’t imagine that there wouldn’t be material
‘The loss of the Fringe will be a big hole in the year for comics. It’s the focus. It’s like the Olympics’
about it, because this is all that has occupied our thoughts for months and months now. But part of me thinks maybe we’re weary of it now and want to talk about something else.”
In one respect, he’s glad about the way coronavirus has changed the national conversation. As the son of a nurse and a doctor, Bailey is pleased that more respect is being given to healthcare workers – though “it’s a shame that it’s taken a once-in-acentury pandemic” to achieve this.
He has recently been thinking about how to bring “the sounds of lockdown” into his comedy. “We’re aware of birdsong much more. I actually recorded some birds in my back garden the other night. The wind chimes were clanging and the birds were singing along
– it was a beautiful combination of sounds. I sampled it, then I put that into a track and added drums and keyboards.”
This kind of mad musical experiment is Bailey’s great contribution to British comedy.
Bailey didn’t just want to make jokes set to music; he wanted to make jokes with music. He remembers realising it could be done when he saw the Danish comedian and classical pianist Victor Borge perform on TV: “It was something which was totally new to me – the idea of co-opting music and
‘Comedy’s a huge business but it’s still seen as a lower form of entertainment’
changing it, but at the same time playing it with a degree of skill, so that the music itself is in on the joke.”
A virtuoso musician blessed with perfect pitch, he loves noodling with obscure instruments. His last West End show featured a theremin, a steel drum and a four-string blues guitar he built out of a Bible. He is an honorary member of the Society of Crematorium Organists. “If somebody conks out at a cremation, I can step up,” he jokes. “I’ve never used the powers – I’d only use them for good, not evil – but it’s a good one to have in your back pocket.”
His wordplay can be as inventive as his musicianship. Take his reimagining of Old Macdonald: the farmer is a troubled alcoholic who wants his life to take a “new direction”, but despite his “best intentions”, each attempt at “reinvention” (once you remove the consonants) is nothing but EIEIO. That this is delivered as a noteperfect pastiche of Seventies’ Tom Waits is just the cherry on the cake.
One of his newer songs is inspired by a quintessential lockdown experience. “Video calling – that’s a thing everyone does now. The Skype ringtone has become a familiar part of our domestic arrangements. So I put it to some beats, and it turned into a bit of a rave!”
It might be a good source of inspiration, but video calling is an unwieldy tool for live performance – even when you can hear the audience. “It’s disorientating. Comedy’s so much about the timing. With online gigs, I’ve noticed there’s a slight delay. You say something… nothing. And you think, ‘Oh no! Well, that didn’t work.’ And then there’s a laugh. It’s perturbing, but you get used to it. We are very adaptable, as creatures.”