‘IT’S A TOUGH JOB’
Bill Bailey always wanted to make people laugh, but when his close friend Sean Lock died he was forced to think again…
‘We have to get on stage and appear charming, engaging and funny’
Hennikay
Tuesday 6.30pm Radio 4
For Bill Bailey, comic, musician, actor, Strictly winner and star of Radio 4 comedy Hennikay, it all started with Les Dawson and a funeral. “An elderly aunt died when I was a child and there was a big wake at our house. We had an upright piano in the front room and I’d learnt a Les Dawson TV routine where he plays a Tchaikovsky piano concerto and he gets all the notes wrong. I remember vividly that my dad was talking in a very concerned way to someone when I hit this bad note and he just spat all his tea out. Then my mum said, ‘Oh bugger!’ – and she never swore. I realised right then – ‘Wow this is good, this is great. This is dynamite!’”
That moment eventually led to a career that has been as successful as it was unplanned. “No, not planned at all,” the 57-year-old says, speaking from Australia where he’s presently touring. “I just keep going merrily along, doing what I’m doing. Whatever happens to come my way is a bonus. I love music and I love comedy.”
In Hennikay, Bailey plays middle-aged, Maidstone-based software developer Guy Starling. On the surface one of Solutify Technology’s achievers, given to saying “I’ve got the world in my pants and I’m ready to rumble,” in reality Starling, lost in a dismal culture of paintballing and idea hothousing, finds himself wondering, like many of us, just where his life went. Then, at this low ebb, his imaginary childhood friend the invisible Hennikay reappears. Last seen in 1976, the 11-year-old is here to sort everything out, with the proviso that only Starling can see him.
“It’s about the idea of an imaginary friend, but also about the way we tamp down the fun of childhood,” Bailey says. “Hennikay injects that fun back into Guy’s life. He gives him a kick up the arse and says: ‘You were great, you had all these plans and they got abandoned, but you’re still the same person inside’.” Bailey’s own childhood near Bath, as the only child of a doting GP father and a mother who “was a great life force, always singing”, sounds near idyllic. “I’m not going to be writing some agonising memoir of childhood anytime soon,” he admits. “I had very understanding parents. I wrote a lot, I read a lot, I cycled for miles and miles in the local area, just taking my dad’s old Ordnance Survey maps.” That sounds more like a 1930s childhood than the 1970s. “Yes, but without the imminent threat of war and the Great Depression. I remember playing Pooh sticks over a little stone bridge, getting conkers, building a go-kart, nicking apples from the neighbour’s garden, getting caught.”
His middle age is pretty happy as well, helped no end by winning Strictly Come Dancing in 2020 – very public proof that nearly everybody in the country likes him. Unlike others, Bailey managed to come through the experience with his reputation enhanced and marriage to Kristin – mother of his 19-year-old son Dax – intact. “Strictly gets a huge amount of attention,” he says. “While the show is on, you have that light
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of the forensic glare of media on you. But even now I get people singing the Strictly tune to me as I walk past in the street and then I’ll have to respond. It’s become a kind of musical conversation. It’s not a bad thing, I don’t hate it, but I’m slightly wary of being a national treasure. That’s quite odd, it feels like you’re being slowly laminated and then put in a diorama.” Strictly had the effect of sending new crowds to his shows – where they will find the same musically inclined sideways humour that makes him a favourite of the King, whose London Palladium 70th birthday gig Bailey played in 2018, and equally suitable entertainment for sevenand 70-year-old audiences. “When we were starting out at the Comedy Store we all swore in our acts,” he says. “One night there was so much effing and jeffing I thought, ‘Is it absolutely necessary?’ So, as an experiment, I started using old English words instead of swear words: scoundrel, rascal, rapscallion, you footpad! That sent me down a different path.”
There have been low points on that path, the loss of his comedian friend Sean Lock to cancer last year being an obvious one. “Loss is part of life. Everyone goes through it and we all deal with it in our different ways. The difference for comedians is we have to get on stage and appear to be charming and engaging and funny, and all those things, to entertain people. The only way to do
that is to be quite good at compartmentalising parts of your life. Comedy is one of those things that you just have to box in, that’s the thing I do: that’s my professional life and I will carry on doing that. It would be very difficult to do if I couldn’t do that.” He is, in that sense, an old-fashioned trouper. “There will be times – there were times – when we don’t feel much like talking to people, we don’t really feel much like going out, you want to stay under the duvet and hope for the best. What I’ve learnt, perhaps, is comedy teaches you a kind of resilience. It’s a tough job anyway, you’re having to get up and do it, regardless of how you feel. Just feeling a bit down, feeling a bit ill and still having to do it. But then losing a dear friend, or a family member or someone, it’s really tough to get through that. But you do because this job, this business, teaches you that.” And for the pleasure of making people laugh, for the old dynamite? “Absolutely. I love making people laugh, that’s what I’m here to do, really.” MICHAEL HODGES