The Bailey Show

Unlike most of his fellow professionals, stand-up comedian Bill Bailey is obviously an early riser. The hirsute and troll-like (his own description) 46-year-old has scheduled this Hot Press interview for 9am on the morning of Saturday, September 11. Unfortunately he’s calling me, and by 9.30am, the phone still hasn’t rung.

So while we sit, yawn and wait, a little background...
Although he’s been successfully performing stand-up for many years now, the Bath-born comedian, and classically trained musician, is probably best known to Irish audiences from his regular appearances on comedy quiz shows such as Q1, Never Mind The Buzzcocks and Have I Got News For You? Bailey’s most memorable TV turn, though, was undoubtedly as the hapless Manny, Dylan Moran’s long-suffering assistant in cult sitcom Black Books.
Having stormed the Dublin O2 last year with the widely acclaimed Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra, he’ll be returning to the same venue with a brand new show called Dandelion Mind on September 30 and October 1 (both shows will be filmed for his live DVD). Featuring his trademark musical interludes, observations and stories of the road, Dandelion Mind is, according to the press release, “based loosely on the theme of doubt (or is it?), as we follow Bill from his real-life saga of being trapped by the ash cloud, to his barely contained rants about celebrity, TV, creationism and Michael Winner.”
The phone eventually rings at 9.45am. “How are you, Bill?” “Very good, thanks,” comes the reply in that instantly recognisable voice. “Actually, not very good. I’ve got a bit of a cold and I managed to slip a disc in my back, but other than that…”

OLAF TYARANSEN: Your new show is called Dandelion Mind. What’s the meaning of the title?
BILL BAILEY: Basically I think I was inspired by an Escher painting where birds sort of turn into flowers or something. It was one of those extraordinary sort of visuals – almost like a trick – and I just thought, ‘Actually yeah, that’s what my thoughts feel like’. You know, spores floating off from the back of my head. And so I just thought, ‘Yeah, that kind of sums up the way you can’t switch off your thoughts’. They’re always constantly floating off. And also, I’m so easily distracted. You know, I’ll be reading one book, then I’ll read another one, and another one, and another one, and another one. So there’s constantly things happening all the time.
Would you say that you have ADD?
Probably that, yeah. I’m already now looking out the window at a squirrel, you know.
Where are you calling from, by the way?
I’m at home. In my little bunker.
Do you do all your work from home, or do you have an office?
I’ve got a kind of garden office, so I just hide myself away down there and work. But I have an office as well, which I go to sometimes. But because I work odd hours – antisocial hours – like you end up writing sometimes all night, and so it’s quite handy to be at home.
There’s always a lot of music in your shows. Do you have a recording studio?
Yeah, I do have a studio. It’s just a kind of rehearsal space more than a recording studio. And so I have my equipment there. It’s quite handy having it all set up, you just turn up and play music. The trouble is that my show is mostly a combination of music and stand-up so I can’t really work on both things there. What usually happens is, the desk that I’ve got my books and writing set up at have also got a keyboard and an accordion next to them, and in the recording studio bit where I am trying to make the music bit I’ve got a pile of books and a computer next to them. So it’s very hard to split the two up.
Any reason why you chose Dublin to film the live DVD?
Just because the audiences are great in Dublin. The crowds are brilliant and always have been in all the years I’ve been going to Ireland. Also, I performed there last year with the orchestra show [Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra], and I really liked it and I had a really good night. So when I was due to record the new DVD and I was thinking of places to go, Dublin seemed obvious. And I like the shape of the venue, the sort of amphitheatre feel about it. And I just love being in Dublin. It’s a great place to be for a few days, and I had a great time last year when I came and performed at the Olympia for a few nights. And it’s been like that ever since I started coming to Ireland. I’m sure lots of audiences are very responsive to all kinds of performers, but I don’t know, I always feel like I’ve had a certain kind of affinity because I play a lot of music, and there is a sort of tradition of people getting up and playing instruments in Ireland. Maybe there’s something in that. I don’t know what it is, but I always feel like people are really up for it. You know a Monday night crowd in Dublin is the same as a Friday night anywhere else [laughs].
Is there a lot of added pressure on you because you’re filming a live DVD?
Actually, I always really love doing the recordings. I mean, the show is just like another gig, really. The thing I always get concerned about is whether the audience will feel comfortable. You know, because what you don’t want is for people to feel self-conscious that they’re being filmed. And so I always try to make the filming as low-key and unobtrusive as possible. And that’s the only reason why I’ve chosen a bigger venue, because there’s a kind of trade-off with these things. The larger venues aren’t necessarily as intimate as the smaller venues, but you know, smaller venues, you put cameras in and then lights everywhere, it makes it like a TV studio audience because they always need more lights and to make sure that the audience are more lit, and there’s cameras everywhere, and people wandering around – it turns into something else, you know. Because in small venues it’s very apparent that there’s a crew there and there’s cameras and everything. And in my experience it just meant that audiences don’t behave quite the same as they would in a normal gig. Whereas if you have a big venue like the O2 you can put cameras in there and crew, and nobody notices. They get sort of lost in the size of the venue. So it’s a bit of a trade-off, but for the recording I think I’d prefer people not to know they’re there.
Do you get many heckles at your shows?
Oh yeah! All the time, but you know, that’s part of it. I mean, I quite like a bit of banter with the crowd anyway. It keeps you on your toes.
There’s apparently an anti-celebrity rant in the new show. Are you against the whole cult of celebrity?
I think so. Probably because I’ve reacted very badly when I heard people calling me a celebrity, because I don’t see myself as that at all. I remember I was doing some kind of interview – a TV interview, that was it – I did a sort of government campaign about trying to encourage parents to talk to their kids about drinking, and I went on some daytime TV show in London. And the presenter made some very sort of snide comments, ‘Celebrities? Why do think people listen to celebrities?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m not’. And she said, ‘Yes, you are’. And I said, ‘No, I’m not’. And we got into some kind of rather pointless argument about the nature of celebrity and forgot all about what we were supposed to talk about [laughs]. And afterwards I was so angry because she had just turned it into some, you know, ‘Here’s another celebrity getting on the bandwagon’. And I was trying to explain the fact that it wasn’t that.
So she had a problem with you doing something positive?
The way I look at it, if you can use whatever fame you have to highlight something – if you can bring awareness in a way, if you can use it for some good – then why not? And so it became a kind of, ‘If you are get into an argument about that, then …’ And afterwards I said, ‘What am I so pissed off about?’ And I realised that really, to me, it’s just an annoying by-product of working for twenty years and doing comedy for twenty years. You know, inevitably what happens is that you become well known off the TV, and acting, and stand-up. But then I think now, today, in our perception of what celebrities are – that they’re sort of these kind of pampered twits who just crave fame for fame’s sake. And I’ve never been like that, and it’s something which I distance myself from. So I was very… yeah, there is a general broadside against the whole nature of what celebrities [are], and the word itself, how the currency is now devalued.
Although in terms of using ‘celebrity’ for a cause, you are very involved in the International Animal Rescue aren’t you?
That’s right. Well, I think if there’s something that is dear to your heart then you have to do it. If you’re well known, that’s what’s going to happen, but I feel that there’s almost an obligation in a way, because you think there’s got to be some good you can use this for. And I think that there’s times when you ought to do it. You have to sort of play the game a little bit. Sometimes it’s not the most comfortable of arrangements, but I think the important thing with charity or any sort of endorsement, or anything that you get involved in, it’s something that has to be personal to you – just because there’s so many of them. Every day I get seven or eight requests to do a charity gig or endorse some charity or other. So it amounts up to about thirty or forty a week, and I think you have to be very clear about the ones that you want to support.
And do you have any rescued animals at home?
Oh yeah, we’ve got a whole menagerie of beasts. Dogs; cats; birds; fish; chameleon; rabbit; guinea pig; whale; stick insect. We’ve got the full range of species [laughs].
Something else that your show covers is the myth of intelligent design.
Yes. Creationists – you would think – are sort of harmless and quite comical when there’s this overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, but they are actually gaining ground. And [are] very organised and well-funded, and you know, they are coming. They’re coming over here to Europe. And 2010, I read somewhere, is the year that there’s this big push to try and overturn the idea of evolution as a set scientific hypothesis, and to just push the idea, ‘Well, it’s just a theory’. And I find that very disturbing when there’s a kind of undercurrent of anti-intellectualism, which is driving it, and there’s sense of trying to play upon people’s scepticism about science. And I think that’s genuinely a very worrying trend, particularly when recently there’s this idiot trying to burn the Koran. You find that religion and science – that these subjects get polarised – and it seems to be taken over by self-publicising gimps like this Tony Parsons or whatever his name is [Pastor Terry Jones].
It’s not Tony Parsons!
Yeah [laughs]. It just offends and annoys me, and again, it just makes you angry and you feel you want to vent spleen about it.
The last time we spoke you were making a film about [British naturalist] Alfred Russel Wallace. How’s that progressing?
Well, I’m still working on it. It’s always been a constant long-term project. I have a great friend who is the curator of insects at the Natural History Museum, and he runs an Alfred Russel Wallace website and a memorial fund and so on. And so we started working closely with him. The idea is to either make a film – a long drama documentary – about it, or a series of films about it. But it’s hard to get made because, you know, broadcasters range from not knowing who he is, to saying, ‘Oh no, that’s not really for us’.
No interest anywhere?
I went to the BBC, saying, ‘Why don’t we make a documentary about it?’ I told them, ‘I’ve got great access. I’ve got this chap – my friend George is in contact with the surviving Wallace family, and they’re really keen to do it. And it’s a fascinating story. And I’ve got some great access in Indonesia, I’ve got very good contacts there. I’ve got a contact in Halmahera in Ternate. We’ve tracked down the house that Wallace stayed in, and where he came up with the theory of evolution and wrote it down, and sent it to Darwin, and Darwin was then prompted to publish his own version. We’ve got all of that’. And they were like, ‘Oh? Oh no, we haven’t got any more budget. No.’ He says, ‘We’re doing all the Darwin programmes.’ ‘So you’re doing an entire season of Darwin?’ And this is the head of Factual at the BBC – he goes, ‘Oh yeah, Wallace. Oh yeah. I’d forgot about him.’ [laughs] You know, you just think, ‘Oh well, what is the point? What is the bloody point?’
And I realised that hardly anyone knows about it or cares enough, and trying to get broadcasters involved is very difficult. And actually on that, you know this film, Creation with Paul Bettany, which was a story of Darwin come back from the Beagle and I remember reading a review of it, and it was saying, ‘Who is this guy Wallace? This seems like a much more interesting story’. You just put your head in your hands. You know, ‘Yeah!’ [sardonically]. So anyway… I’ll keep plugging away.
You were working on a book as well. Is that almost complete?
Yeah, I’ve had various offers of publishing advances which I have managed to fend off, only because as soon as you go down that road you’ve got some huge deadline looming, and I’m just very aware that there’s a lot of other things on. But it is happening: I kind of add things to it periodically, and build up a kind of bank of material. A lot of it is just reminiscence or stuff that’s happened to me over the years. The trouble with some of it is, I read it and I think, ‘That’s quite funny. That’s going in the show’ [laughs]
Michael Winner is apparently another subject of your ire in Dandelion Mind.
Yeah, well only because he’s got his own cookery show where he judges people. You know, you think, ‘Well who cares?’[laughs]. It’s like one of those programmes where you think TV couldn’t plumb the depths any lower, then suddenly – oh no, it can, yes!
Doubt is another theme of the show...
Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s connected with religious doubt for one thing. That’s one kind of doubt. There is mind doubt, you know, your own self-doubt about yourself. And I’m very wary of certainty now as I get older. You find that people who are sure about things – I find that slightly suspicious. It’s partly about keeping an open mind and being questioning. I think that’s what it’s really about. It’s always staying curious.
I presume you’re not religious?
Not particularly, no. It’s not to say I’m not actually fascinated by people with faith and who are religious, because that’s the majority of the world. If you don’t have any particular faith, or you don’t believe in God, then you are in a minority. And huge, mass movements of people always fascinate me because I think, ‘What is it? Why have 65 million people bought this book? Why do people do this? Why is there six billion Christians, and five billion Muslims in the world?’ I need to know. I need to know what drives people to do that. And there’s an element of that… there’s an element of how doubt is sewn in people’s minds about rather unpleasant issues.
Like climate change or something?
Yeah. Things like in the 1960s, the marketing companies would sew doubt in people’s minds about smoking and cigarettes. And they managed to keep this doubt up for about thirty years. And it’s interesting that there’s a very, very similar parallel with climate change. You know, there’s always a very well-funded and very powerful lobby cropping up and saying, ‘Well, you know, we’re not sure and we still don’t know and da dada da da…’ And that keeps this fuel of this fire of doubt. And again, it’s quite worrying [and] disturbing that all these people are willing to go along with it when all the evidence points clearly to the contrary. There’s another section of the show, which I’m actually trying to figure out right now, and that is there’s a kind of condition, which was really developed – a theory developed – in the ‘60s about dissonance in our heads, and that is that we don’t like dissonance. We don’t like two conflicting opinions. We always pick one – the path of least resistance. And it’s very hard to turn around the public view of something. It takes years, it could take generations. And marketing companies have very cleverly realised that, and so they just keep stoking up the doubt, and they can spin something out for years. And in the intervening period lots of damage is done. So, things like that just infuriate me. I’ll probably sound like some mad conspiracy theorist [laughs].
Speaking of which, today is the ninth anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers. Do you put any credence in any of the conspiracy theories surrounding the events of 9/11?
Well, I just think there are so many unanswered questions. If I had been involved – if I had a relative, or a friend, or a family member had been killed – I would still be banging on people’s doors, ‘I want answers!’ You know, ‘What the hell happened?’ There’s so much conjecture, and some of it is just twaddle, conspiracy, loopy-loo nonsense, and a lot of it is just genuine... There’s just great gaps in the facts.
How do you mean?
Well, for example, how was it allowed to happen in the first instance? The plane that flew into the Pentagon – there’s no footage of it. This is a building which has probably more cameras than any building in America, and they’ve got no footage of it. What the hell happened? And what the hell happened with the plane that was disintegrated? You know, there’s hundreds of questions and inconsistencies. And one of the most extraordinary coincidences, I think, which still baffles me, is that [on] September 11, the day that the planes were hijacked, they were running a drill – the Aviation Authority and the Air Force were running a security drill, basically with that very much in mind. It was a drill if, say for example, domestic airliners were hijacked and flown into American cities. And the drill was happening that morning, and so consequently, that morning when reports started coming through of planes being hijacked, a lot of people said, ‘No, no, it’s just a drill. Just a drill.’ And the July 7 attacks in London where these blokes put bombs on to buses, and tube stations, and tube platforms, and tube trains, exactly the same thing happened. There was a drill, a security drill, happening that morning with the idea that bombers would take bombs on to the tube and the bus. And I just think two security drills about identical attacks on the same day – I mean, I don’t know, is that a coincidence or what? I don’t know.
Yeah, it’s certainly very odd.
It’s odd, isn’t it? It’s very odd. There are these great groups of September 11 relatives, and friends, and survivors, who are desperate to know. I mean, they need more facts, because it’s an act of mass murder. It’s a giant crime scene, and yet what’s come out is a very sort of vague and unsatisfactory outcome. I mean when they arrested some of these people, they claimed that they knew some of the names of the bombers, and then of course, it turned out that three of these bombers were still alive and living in Saudi. Well, where the hell did that come from, then? Where did these names come from? Blair was very good at this, as a politician: you sew the doubt into people’s minds that the people who are questioning it are conspiracy theorists. And as soon as you say ‘conspiracy’ then people immediately have this picture in their minds of these sort of slightly crazed and fanciful fantasists who think that there’s a conspiracy of world-government and everyone is out to get them. So that immediately spikes the gun, it kind of devalues what they have to say. It’s a very clever way of neutralising any further debate about it because anyone who sticks their neck above the parapet – a professional, say, from an organisation says, ‘Well I think that the government knew more. I think there was some sort of… whatever it was it’s fishy. Something’s fishy here. I need to know what’s going on.’ I mean, they risk their reputations by being called conspiracy theorists.
Have you read Blair’s book?
I haven’t, no, but I’ve read excerpts of it, and some of it seems… the sections about relying on alcohol, I think that’s hilarious [laughs]. The people I know who are relying on alcohol, I think there’s a big gulf between that and him. And some of the cheesy personal stuff about… I don’t know. The more I see and read about him, I find it just doesn’t ring true. So much of it just seems like an act.
You are a Labour supporter though, aren’t you?
I am, yes. I have been all my life.
Moving back to your own career, I know there was an online petition for you to play a role in the forthcoming movie of The Hobbit. Did you go for the part?
I did. I did audition for it, and we’re still waiting to hear back.
Okay. Well, I hope that happens.
You know, it would be great. I’d be in my natural home [laughs].
You’re obviously a fan of fantasy and sci-fi.
Yeah.
Finally, is it true that your son is named Dax after a character in Star Trek?
Well, yeah, he’s called Dax, yes. But it wasn’t after a character in Star Trek, no. That was another myth put about by the internet. It’s a name that we came across years ago, and it’s actually a French name. After an old spa town in France. But I didn’t even know that. Some friends of ours had a kid and they called it Dax, and we thought, ‘That’s a cool name. I’ll store that away in the memory until such time as we have one’. But yeah, calling my son after a giant parasitic slug... I think that would be harsh.

Bill Bailey performs his new show at The O2, Dublin on September 30 and October 1.