“Oh, noooooo! It didn’t work! Blimey! You’re not serious? What a disaster!”

The title of Bill Bailey’s new live show and DVD, Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide To The Orchestra, seems fairly self-explanatory. Unfortunately, seeing as the advance copy his publicist couriered to Hot Press failed to play, the hirsute and troll-like (his own description) 45-year-old English stand-up has to give me the lowdown over the phone.
“It’s basically a rather irreverent guide to an orchestra,” he explains. “It’s the sort of show that I’ve always wanted to see - and that’s an orchestra playing lots of great music but somebody explaining a bit about what’s going on and how the orchestra fits together and what instruments they’re playing... really what roles the individual instruments have within the orchestra and how the sounds are made and how we kind of respond to the sounds.”
Bailey will be performing his Remarkable Guide at the O2 on November 21 with the aid of The Lombard Philharmonia Orchestra, accompanied by Anne Dudley, one of the UK’s most celebrated composers and arrangers. He says that the show has so far attracted a fairly different kind of audience to the type he’s used to. “Lots of kids come to the show and have enjoyed it, and concert goers who see concerts all the time, they enjoyed it, and also people who have never been to a concert.”
He puts this down to his eclectic but listener friendly musical choices. “A lot of the music I talk about is very accessible, very well known, it’s you know, standards from the classical repertoire – Rossini and some Mahler and some Bach. There’s all sorts of fantastic TV music, some theme music, great film music, so there’s a whole range of different music, all of which people will be familiar with, and I’ve written a kind of narrative which brings it all together.”
It’s hardly surprising that Bailey would do a show based entirely around orchestral music.
A classically trained musician, he’s always incorporated music into his surreal comedy routines. But did he ever consider becoming a professional musician?
“Yeah, well there was a time when I considered that, when I was at school and studying music to quite a high level. I then went and did an associate-ship in the London College of Music so I pursued it to quite a high degree. So then, when you get to that stage, the options of employment are quite limited at that point because you’ll either become a teacher or an orchestral player. That’s what it seemed to me anyway, and I thought, ‘I don’t have the patience, I don’t think I can teach’. And also the piano is not really an orchestral instrument anyway, so you’re sort of a bit limited - so it would have to be, you know, solo playing or whatever.
“And so I was sort of in two minds as to what to do, but the thing is, what came to the fore was I really love the spoken word, I always have done. I realised that music wasn’t going to quite cut it in terms of what I wanted to do. So really I have ended up with the perfect job for me which is a combination of everything.”
In his 2008 DVD, Tinselworm, recorded live in Wembley, Bailey laughs about the fact that it took more than 20 years of hard graft for him to make it to that legendary stage. But was it really such a struggle for the Bath-born comic?
“Well, not really,” he admits. “I mean I started in my early twenties and sort of just drifted along really for about ten years, doing odd jobs and playing in bands and being in theatre companies. I did a lot of touring at that time as well, but it wasn’t until really sort of in my thirties that I concentrated on music and comedy. And that’s when I sort of got a bit more success because I just sort of focused on incorporating the music in a much more detailed way than I had before and that’s really what has kind of defined my style. I think comedy is such a competitive world, you have to find your little niche and that’s where I found it.”
An only child, he first became interested in comedy at a very young age. “I was always involved in the comedy at school. Me and a couple of mates would be the ones who were thinking of ideas and sketches and characters and funny ideas and, I think I’ve always been sort of, inspired to do that, I just I’ve always had that. I suppose as an only child I spent a lot of time conjuring up stories and tales. I just devoured books and stories and tales and lots of music and then, of course, when I discovered comedy that was like being forwarded into a little club, it was like a little secret world, listening to Monty Python records with my cousin thinking, ‘Wow! people think like this, this is great!’ I think comedy is a way out for many people, it’s an outlet of expression, it’s a freedom of expression in a way... and that’s always appealed to me.”
We’re talking the week after Jimmy Carr hit the headlines for cracking a tasteless joke about British soldiers injured in Afghanistan making a great paraplegic team for the Special Olympics. Bailey hasn’t heard about it (“I’ve just been away for three weeks”), but I ask has he ever found himself in trouble over a offensive gag?
“Yeah, I mean of course there’s been the odd comment where what you’ve said has affected someone in a certain way. Like most recently I wrote a song for Tinselworm; it was a kind of parody of the overwrought emotional sort of rock, emo rock, which is also very much heart on the sleeve, overtly bombastic sort of rock. And it’s kind of the bands are certainly very pale, and lots of dark hair and fringes, and in the song there’s a bloke that works in Starbucks and he sort of cuts himself to get attention and a lot of people were offended by that.
“You know, some people write in and say ‘Well, it’s self harm and it’s quite a serious thing’. And you sort of think, yeah actually you’re right it is and I’ve flippantly included it in a song. But then you do think, well it is a character. You invent the character that has these attributes and I think it’s a very fine line, it always is, it’s very difficult to know really, and I’d like to think that most of the time I do know instinctively how to approach a joke, what the angle is of a joke. Because in some ways you think comedy, there shouldn’t be any boundaries, there shouldn’t be any restraints about what subject matter you can talk about. It’s how you approach it and it’s a very subtle thing, it can be, it’s just mercurial really, you can’t always put your finger on it.”
Generally speaking, Bailey says he never sets out to offend. “By and large, jokes tend to work better if they don’t appear to be overtly cruel or the victim is helpless or vulnerable. I think comedy like that is very difficult and dangerous in some ways because you’re in a position of power, you’re a comic cracking wise.
“I always think that comedy is better if you can go laterally and you can almost sort of approach a subject from an unusual or an unexpected angle, and then maybe even illuminate that subject by the angle that you’ve taken. I think if you take too much of a sledgehammer approach it can actually almost work against you.”
While he’s been performing stand-up for many years, Bailey is probably best known to Irish audiences from his regular appearances on comedy quiz shows such as Have I Got News For You?, Never Mind The Buzzcocks and QI. His most memorable TV turn, though, was undoubtedly as Manny, Dylan Moran’s long-suffering assistant in cult sitcom Black Books.
“I was watching a bit of an episode the other day and I was reminded what a blast we had filming it. It was great, great fun, you know it was a really great time. And in stand up as well it’s great being part of a team, you know. Stand up is quite a solitary profession, you spend a lot of time in hotels, travelling around, hanging out in bars with all sorts of weirdos and you know I kind of liked the team effort, the team element of it. I loved it actually.”
Do you think it ended too soon? I always thought a fourth series might have worked.
“Yeah, well that was up to Dylan, that was his call. It’s hard enough writing stand up just for one person, you know, but writing for three, four or five characters and stories and all the rest of it, trying to make it funny and make it interesting and original every time, you know it took its toll on him. I used to just look at him sometimes and just think ‘poor guy’. He was just torturing himself over this show and I think he was mentally ill over it. His face was just going redder and his hair was getting madder and I just thought, ‘man you’ve got to stop if it’s doing that to you’ – and when he said he didn’t want to do it anymore I kind of thought, ‘yeah well I get that, I can see that, you know, you don’t need that much torment in your life’.
“I would have loved to have done more because, you know, I was reading some newspaper the other day and it was calling Peep Show series 8 the ‘sitcom of the decade’, and I thought, ‘do you know what? Black Books could have been that!’ We could have done eight series.
But it’s great to have done eighteen great shows, rather than shows that you just think, ‘Ah well, you know . . .’”
What are Bill Bailey’s plans for 2010?
“I’m going to be doing a new TV series for the Beeb about sound and then writing a new show. I’m writing a show about Alfred Russell Wallace, the explorer, who is a contemporary Darwin who has kind of been, in essence, wrongfully airbrushed out of history as the rightful originator of the Origin of Species.
“I’m also working on a book - just a kind of combination of tales and a bit of a sort of satirical tale and a bit of, you know, there’s partly my own experiences of travel woven into it, so I’ve got a year of a lot of stuff to do. I’ll probably hole myself away with a bottle of cherry brandy and some French Fancies.”
Are you a happy kind of guy generally?
“Yeah, I’m generally optimistic, yeah, I think so,” he laughs. “I’m easily swayed by optimism, you know, if you feel slightly cloudy in your thoughts about where we’re going and you sort of get a constant relentless, you know, doom about where the planet is at and whether the sun will go up, what will happen to the Arctic and will we be under water... you get these sort of dark thoughts and then actually do you know what? All I need is a nice cup of tea and a slice of cake and things tend to seem a lot rosier after that.”