Lately, Bill Bailey has been thinking a lot about where technology is taking humanity. He is currently the face of a campaign to get people off their phones and into the outdoors; his latest stand-up show, Thoughtifier, sees him riffing with a specifically designed Bill Bailey AI chatbot and is predicated on the premise that as a society we are “sleepwalking into a world where humans might be redundant”.
“I think there’s genuinely a fear of that,” says the comedian, actor, musician and 2020’s surprise Strictly Come Dancing winner. “We’re in that existential threat”.
So before we our interview I asked ChatGPT if it could make up a Bill Bailey joke. Could it capture the 59-year old’s sideways mix of everyday quirks, hippie-ish philosophy and singularly British whimsy? Let’s see: “Why did the guitar break up with the banjo? Because it couldn’t handle the banjo’s twangy attitude and kept fretting about it”. I wouldn’t open with it.
“Urgh!’ he says when I tell him, clearly unimpressed. “You see. There you go, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. It’s figured out how to do puns. It can be sarcastic. But that’s it. It’s not yet ready to take over. But as human living actual comedians, it’s beholden on us to go in more eccentric and original directions”.
Bailey has certainly done that. His surreal yet warm comedic and musical stylings marked him out as a unique talent in the early 90s. He was born Mark Bailey in Keynsham, a small town between Bath and Bristol (he was nicknamed Bill by his old music teacher after a classroom performance of jazz number “Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey”). His father was a GP, his mum a hospital nurse; he was privately educated at King Edward’s School in Bath, where he excelled before being drawn to rock music. After years of drifting, he took up comedy, and was a natural; in 1995, he was nominated for the Perrier award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He has since acted brilliantly in sitcoms such as Simon Pegg’s Spaced and Dylan Moran’s Black Books, as well as Doctor Who and Skins, but it is onstage where his work truly resonates: any given night can be a medley of absurd flights of fancy, history lesson and musical experimentation.
Take Thoughtifier, which combines topics as disparate as Love Island and nuclear fission, plays on Phil Collins drum solos and features a blackly comic song about ageing. Is he bothered about getting old? “Oh, definitely. Yeah. It used to be birthday cake and candles, now it’s (puts on tired voice) another year, I’m jaded. That song represents that kind of Brechtian sense of alienation about getting older”.
There’s also some anti-Tory rhetoric: he calls Rishi Sunak “a poorly rendered AI cardigan”. “I mean, it’s a mild rebuke,” he says. He actually has stronger stuff to say. “I don’t think he looks entirely comfortable in his role as Prime Minister. I think it’s difficult for him, being the sort of person he is, with the background he’s had and the circles that he normally moves in, having to talk to ordinary people and empathise. I just don’t think he’s ever done that. It’s all new to him”. On the Government, he says: “They know the gig is up. They’ve just kind of given up, haven’t they?”
Any celebrity who dares to give a political opinion invariably gets dragged into the culture wars, though it’s impossible to think anyone could ever be upset with Bailey over anything. Even sounding croaky, suffering from what he calls a mid-tour cold and on his third interview of the day at just 10am, he is unwaveringly polite and easygoing – what you see on the TV is just what you get. If he wasn’t already, his stint on Strictly made him a genuine national treasure. “I take that with a bit of a pinch of salt,” he says. Nonetheless, “there was definitely an effect in terms of your visibility. Other people recognise you. And I’m sort of recognisable anyway. I’ve got quite a look”.
With the best will in the world, nobody expected Bailey to dance that well. There was more than a hint of a “joker” element to his entry, as if he was being set up to be the show’s yearly punchline a la Ann Widdecombe and John Sergeant. But he stunned everyone by taking it seriously – “I’m very competitive” – and, as the weeks went on, he belied his ambling, shabby persona with progressively elaborate routines.
Did he expect that of himself? “No,” he says flatly. “I thought I might do okay”. He was worried about his fitness, even though he was exercising regularly. “I thought, ‘It’s very likely I might get injured, twist my ankle, put my back out’. And the big unknown was, of course, how do you respond to choreography? And how can you express yourself through dance?” He says a lifetime of performance kicked in like muscle memory when the camera was on. “And I didn’t want to let down my dance partner Oti (Mabuse). So I thought, ‘I’ll give it my best shot’. Before you know it, you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s a quarter final. Blimey, how do we get here?’”. His winning was a thrilling feeling; he says the cross-generational viewing audience of the show means his gigs are now filled with people of all ages.
It makes him the ideal fit for the National Lottery Open Week, which aims to encourage people to put their phone down, go outside and discover a new hobby; from 9 March cultural landmarks, wildlife spots, sports venues, theatres and galleries are offering free entry. Research by the National Lottery says that one in four people consider scrolling on their phone to be a hobby; nearly 10 per cent say they have no other hobby. “It’s quite alarming,” he says. “But maybe not surprising”. Is he a doomscroller? “Absolutely not! But I do feel quite strongly about it”. He blames his own generation: “There’s always a report that says ‘Oh, look at these kids always on their phones’. Everyone’s on their phones! Are you kidding? And I think we as parents have a responsibility to lead by example.” Bailey has a son, Dax, born in 2003.
Bailey is true to his word. Taking a cue from the similarly serene Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, his new TV series Perfect Pub Walks with Bill Bailey sees him rambling around the countryside, stopping off for the odd pint en route, with men of what he calls “an older vintage” – comedian Alan Davies, broadcaster Trevor McDonald, singer Shaun Ryder and comedian Paul Merton – who open up about their lives, careers and personal struggles. It was inspired by the walks he used to take with his old friend Sean Lock, the comedian who died of cancer in 2021 aged 58. “We were best buddies,” Bailey says. “One of my fondest memories of Sean was our walks together and the kind of conversation that we had – you talk about just nonsense, but then it would flow into theories, politics, history, language, philosophy, psychology. It was a huge loss. And I think about him all the time”.
I get the impression he feels it’s an important premise: showing middle-aged men it’s OK to be vulnerable, and to talk about what’s bothering them. “I do think that,” he agrees. “And I think walking is a way of unlocking that. Because you’re not looking at someone. It sounds weird, but in a pub conversations can be quite intense. But when you’re walking, and you’re outdoors, the conversation is just part of the walk. I’ve realised that it’s actually very therapeutic. It’s certainly a way for men to talk about things that perhaps they’d find difficult to talk about.”
Coupled with his other current series, BBC’s Bring the Drama – a reality show featuring eight amateur working-class actors who had been shut out of the increasingly privileged world of acting – it seems Bailey’s work has taken on real purpose. “There has to be a reason for it now, something which actually has some benefits to others. I feel that very strongly, an educational desire, to share information with people and get people to be inspired.”
You wouldn’t get this sort of genuine empathy from AI. “I think we have to celebrate what we do as humans, and actually celebrate human interaction and activity. There is so much that AI couldn’t replicate. The AI comedy festival ain’t happening just yet.”
National Lottery Open week runs from 9th-17th March (lotterygoodcauses.org.uk/open-week). ‘Bill Bailey’s Thoughtifier’ is touring the UK. ‘Perfect Pub Walks with Bill Bailey’ continues on Tuesdays at 9pm on More4. ‘Bring the Drama’ continues on Wednesdays at 9pm on BBC Two and on BBC iPlayer