Any standup will inform you: to make it as a comic, you first want to discover your angle. For a younger Bill Bailey, then a long-haired, goateed Glastonbury fanatic, it didn’t take a lot looking. “I was portrayed as this sort of bewildered hippy who just exists on a different plain, out in the woods somewhere. And it wasn’t quite true!” he tells me. “But it wasn’t a million miles off.” Bailey would go on stage interspersing absurdist musical routines with materials about sneaking into festivals and rolling spliffs. Today, as he sits down to discuss to me about his newest challenge – Extraordinary Portraits, the returning BBC sequence about high quality artwork – it’s arduous to shake the sense I’m a really completely different animal.
He is, he jokes, “much more suave and sophisticated” now. To anybody who is aware of Bailey from his previous standup, his position as the docile oddball Manny on the sitcom Black Books, and even his triumphant 2020 stint on Strictly Come Dancing, the most instantly apparent change is his hair: gone are the shaggy record-shop-proprieter locks that for many years outlined the Bill Bailey look. “I remember I was on a crowded Tube and the doors closed on the back of my head, trapping my hair; I had to sort of style it out until the next station,” he recollects. “I thought, ‘Yeah, maybe this is a sign.’” By the finish, he provides, it had “become a bit unruly, to the point where I’d see photos of myself at a smart family function, and think, ‘Oh my God, some dodgy old bloke from the fairground’s made his way into the wedding.’”
Hair or no hair, Bailey in all different methods appears a lot the similar as ever. He’s genial and inquisitive, tempering his pure whimsy with sufficient world-weariness to keep away from crossing over into twee. In some ways, he’s the good selection for Extraordinary Portraits, a programme that requires each a light-weight contact and an underlying sensitivity. In every episode Bailey meets a noteworthy member of the public, an “everyday hero”, whose likeness is then captured by knowledgeable portrait painter. (Or, in one occasion, a sculptor.)
There is, Bailey says, a democratising component to the premise – taking an artform traditionally gate-kept by the rich elite, and re-appropriating it for the peculiar man or lady in the road. “We film in Kelmarsh House, this beautiful old house in Northamptonshire. And the walls are covered with old portraits – all of men, who were important in some way. And that’s really what portraiture was about, the great and the good, the well-connected, the wealthy aristocracy or the monarchy. And this show flips that on its head.”
The new sequence of Extraordinary Portraits begins with what could be its most affecting episode to date. titled “I Tackled a Terrorist with a Narwhal Tusk”. Bailey commissions a sculpture of Darryn Frost, the civil servant who risked his life to intervene in a terrorist assault close to London Bridge in 2019. As we watch the sculptor Nick Elphick get to know his topic, we see the enormous, traumatic impression the incident had on Frost’s life.
“Darryn was very articulate and measured, and talked about it with great compassion and self-deprecation,” Bailey says. “It affected him so deeply. He didn’t even realise how deeply. And it started to manifest itself in a lack of memory. He wasn’t able to remember what someone had just said to him. But he can remember in forensic, molecular detail – like 4K video – exactly what happened [during the attack].”
When Frost is lastly confronted along with his personal sculpture, the impact is overwhelming. “It was extraordinary,” says Bailey. “He became extremely emotional, and suddenly the whole weight of that was lifted. It was immensely powerful.” Bailey appears moved even now, simply talking about it.
Frost could also be the most uncommon case research – not a lot on a regular basis heroism as uncommon, probably life-saving valour – however each one among Bailey’s topics has a worthwhile story to inform. Eddie Brocklesby is one other – an octogenarian lady and late-in-life Iron Man triathlete who has efficiently championed train schemes for older individuals. In a form of mild, uplifting manner, her episode probes concepts round ageing, a topic Bailey thinks about lots. “I’m just aware of the passing of time,” he says. “And time is precious. I feel that more acutely now.”
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Tempus fugit certainly. It’s now been a little bit over 61 years since Bailey was born – in Somerset, to an NHS GP father and a hospital nurse mom – and greater than 4 a long time since he broke by means of on the comedy scene. He’s been along with his spouse, Kristin, for many years too, having married spontaneously in Indonesia in 1998; they share a son, and dwell in west London in a home stuffed with uncommon pets (armadillos, chameleons, cockatoos). You’d have to return even additional to discover the genesis of Bailey’s work: it grew to become clear in teenhood that he was a gifted musician with good pitch, and it was, in hindsight, inevitable when he began incorporating dextrous musical pastiches into his act.
Today, this act bears lots of the similar Bailey hallmarks, alongside his makes an attempt to wrestle with the cultural paradigms of the trendy period. This consists of generative AI, which Bailey has experimented with – and picked aside – on stage. “There’s been so much slop, as people call it,” he says. “AI videos that get pinged around on social media. And it’s just annoying, and wearying, and also just like… cringe, really. I think people are generally feeling that the great fear that it was going to replace everyone hasn’t materialised.”
Bailey’s forthcoming stage present, Vaudevillean, is an try to recapture the particular pleasure of dwell efficiency in the face of issues like AI. “Comedically, I think that AI is a dead end, really,” he says. “It’s self-parody. And of course the negative effect of that is when you see an amazing thing online, people just go, ‘Well, that’s just AI. It’s not real.’ But when people go along to a live show, they see something happening right in front of them. That’s a rare commodity, and that should be celebrated.”
In essence, Strictly is a straightforward concept. You get some individuals and also you educate them to dance, and get them to fall in love with it
Bill Bailey
There’s at all times been one thing of the vaudevillian showperson about Bailey, after all – maybe that is the key to understanding his success on Strictly in 2020, when he grew to become, at 55, the oldest contestant to carry the glitterball trophy, having received the competitors with the skilled dancer Oti Mabuse. Brushing apart any suspicions that his involvement would fall below the banner of “novelty act”, he grew to become, by means of sheer talent and enthusiasm, a competitor who went the distance.
In the previous few years, after all, Strictly has been beset by scandals, a number of of which contain the mistreatment of contestants. What did Bailey make of all this? He thinks for a second, and appears to decide his phrases rigorously. “I think that it’s difficult for me to compare my experiences,” he replies. “When I did it, it was during the pandemic, and that was a very unusual version of it. We danced, we trained, and went home. There was nothing else. It was intense. I don’t really know the people that were involved in it, but it was a great experience.”
“I think it’s a shame that it’s gone through all these supposed scandals and tabloid stories, because I suppose, in essence, it’s a simple idea. You get some people and you teach them to dance, and get them to fall in love with it. And that’s exactly what happened to me.”
Between Strictly, Extraordinary Portraits and the raft of different TV gigs Bailey has taken on in current years, it certain looks like he’s come a long manner from the counterculture. Last yr, he was awarded an MBE. I marvel what Bailey’s youthful self would make of this new iteration.
He mentions a time a couple of years in the past, when he was invited to make a speech at the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors. It was to mark the centenary of the dying of Alfred Russel Wallace, the originator of the principle of evolution, whom Bailey had made a TV programme about. It was additionally the weekend of Glastonbury.
“I was preparing for this speech I had to give, and got phoned up randomly by someone on site at Glastonbury, who assumed I was there,” Bailey says. “They said, ‘Bill, are you coming up the teepee field?’ And I said, ‘No, I’m not. I’m not at Glastonbury… I’m giving a speech at the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors.’
“Long silence on the phone. All you could hear was bongo drumming and f***ing dancing in the background. And it was just like, ooh, you’ve changed.”
He smiles, and form of mock-dramatically thumps his chest. “Not inside, though,” he provides. “I’m still a hippy at heart.”
‘Extraordinary Portraits’ airs Fridays at 7.30pm on BBC One
