Bill Bailey
- Bill Bailey is also the name commonly used to refer to a popular song with the full title of "Won't You Come Home Bill Bailey".
Bill Bailey, self proclaimed 'confused hippie' and 'part troll', (born 1964 as Mark Bailey) is an English comedian, actor, and musician known for appearing on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, QI: Quite Interesting and Black Books. He was born and raised in Bath, England.
Early years
Bill spent the majority of his childhood in Bath, where he attended King Edward's School. He excelled in music, but also claims to have been good at sports, which often surprised his teachers. It was here that he was given his nickname Bill, when a music teacher once sang the old wartime song Won't You Come Home Bill Bailey in class.
He spent his early years listening to Monty Python records, and rehearsing with a band called the "Famous Five", which he himself confesses were rubbish. However, he is a classically trained musician and received an associateship with the London College of Music. Despite this, he has said that he always had the temptation to be silly with music; a trait which would influence his stand-up years later.
Bill often mythologises his early years in his stand-up. In his show Bewilderness he claims to have attended Bovington Guerney School of Performing Arts and Owl Sanctuary. He often talks about a succession of jobs he had before become a comedian, including lounge pianist and accompaniment for a mind-reading dog. The latter is verifiable, as a clip was shown in his Room 101 appearance.
He also talks about his role as a Disenfranchised Owl in an experimental Welsh Theatre Troupe (mentioned in an interview with Australian newspaper Post). Other acting roles included a part in a Workers' Revolutionary Party stage production called The Printers, which also featured Vanessa Redgrave and Frances de la Tour. His trivia page on IMDb also claims that he was awarded Best Actor in the 1986 Institut Francais awards.
However, it wasn't until he accidentally wandered into a John Hegley gig one day that he decided to become a stand-up comedian.
Career
Early stand-up
Bill began touring the country with other comedians such as Mark Lamarr and Phill Jupitus, and in 1989 he formed a double act, the Rubber Bishops, with Martin Stubbs. They achieved a certain amount of success on the club circuit, partly due to their rigorous schedule - sometimes as many as 3 or 4 gigs a night. It was here that Bill began developing his own unique style, mixing in musical parodies with deconstructions or variations of traditional jokes ("How many amoebas does it take to change a lightbulb?"). Stubbs later quit to pursue a more serious career.
In 1994 Bill performed Rock at the Edinburgh Fringe with Sean Lock, a show about an ageing rockstar and his roadie(script-edited by comedy writer Jim Miller). It was later serialised for the Mark Radcliffe show on BBC Radio 1, but the attendances weren't always great, and on one occasion, the only person in the audience was comedian Dominic Holland. Bill confessed in an interview with The Independent that he almost gave it up to do a telesales job.
He persevered, however, and went solo the next year with Bill Bailey's Cosmic Jam. The show was very well received, and led to a recording at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London which was broadcast in 1996 on Channel 4 as a one-hour special called Bill Bailey Live. It wasn't until 2005 that this was released uncut and under its original title. It marked the first time that Bill had been able to tie together his music and post-modern gags with the whimsical, rambling style he is now known for.
After supporting Donna McPhail in 1995 and winning a Time Out award, he returned to Edinburgh the next year with a critically acclaimed show that was nominated for the Perrier Comedy Award. Amongst the other nominees was future Black Books co-star Dylan Moran, who narrowly beat him in the closest vote in the award's history.
Television
Though he had not won the Perrier in 1996, the nomination had been enough to get him noticed, and in 1998 the BBC gave him his own television show, Is It Bill Bailey?
This was not Bill's first foray into television. As early as 1991 he had been appearing in stand-up shows such as The Happening, Packing Them In, The Stand Up Show, and The Comedy Store. He had also appeared as captain on two panel games, an ITV music quiz pilot called Pop Dogs, and poorly received Channel 4 sci-fi quiz show, Space Cadets. However Is it Bill Bailey? was (except for his 1996 special, Bill Bailey Live) the first time he had written and presented his own show.
Over the next couple of years, Bill made guest appearances on shows such as Have I Got News For You, World Cup Comedy, Room 101, Des O'Connor Tonight, Coast to Coast and most notably, off-beat Channel 4 sitcom Spaced. Bill played Bilbo Bagshot in two episodes of the series, written by Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson and directed by Is it Bill Bailey? director Edgar Wright, and it is undoubtedly one of the factors that contributed to his enduring cult appeal.
In 1998, Dylan Moran had approached him with the pilot script for Black Books, a surreal Channel 4 sitcom about a grumpy bookshop owner, his put-upon assistant, and their neurotic female friend. It was commissioned in 2000, and Bill took the part of the assistant Manny Bianco, with Moran playing the owner Bernard, and Tamsin Greig the friend, Fran. Three series of six episodes were made, and the series built up a large cult fanbase, helping to provide the public awareness on which Bill could build a successful national tour in 2001.
Sean Hughes left his long-term role as a captain on Never Mind the Buzzcocks in 2002, and Bill became his successor. His style quickly blended into the show, possibly due to the fact that it was hosted by old friend Mark Lamarr, with Phill Jupitus as the opposing captain - as well as his background in music. Bill soon developed a rapport of sorts with the host, as Lamarr continually bullied him about his looks and his pre-occupation with woodland animals. Bill has now appeared in 6 series of the show and has said nothing about leaving it, although Mark Lamarr is taking a hiatus from the show during the first 2006 series (although not hosting, Lamarr will continue to produce the show).
Since then, Bill has made many other guest appearances. When intellectual panel game QI began in 2003, he quickly became a regular fixture, alongside host Stephen Fry and comedians Alan Davies and Sean Lock. Other television appearances include a cameo role in the drama series Jonathan Creek as failing street magician Kenny Starkiss and obsessed guitar teacher in the Holiday epsiode of Sean Lock's Fifteen Storeys High. He later appeared with Lock again as a guest on his show TV Heaven, Telly Hell. He has also appeared twice on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, and has been interviewed on shows such as Richard & Judy and BBC News.
International tours
In 2001, Bill began touring the globe with Bewilderness, which became a huge success. A recording of a performance in Swansea was released on DVD the same year, and the show was broadcast on Channel 4 that christmas. A modified version of it also proved successful in America, and in 2002 Bill released a CD of a recording at the WestBeth Theatre in New York. The show contained all his trademarks, popular music parodies (such as Unisex Chip Shop, a Billy Bragg tribute), "three men in a pub" jokes (including one in the style of Geoffrey Chaucer) and deconstructions of television themes such as Countdown and The Magic Roundabout. A 'Bewilderness' CD was sold outside gigs, which was actually just a mixture of studio-recordings of songs and sketches Bill had done in the past, and has later been released to shops as Bill Bailey: The Ultimate Collection... Ever!. That same year he also presented a Channel 4 countdown, Top Ten Prog Rock.
Bill premiered his show Part Troll at the Edinburgh Fringe in the summer of 2003. A critical and commmercial success, he then transferred it to the West End where tickets sold out in under 24 hours, and new dates had to be added. Since then he has toured it all over the UK as well as in America, Australia and New Zealand. The show marked the first time Bill had really tackled political material, as he expanded on subjects such as the war on Iraq which he had only touched upon before in his Bewilderness New York show. He also talks extensively on drugs, at one point asking the audience to name different ways of baking marijuana. A DVD was released in 2004.
2005 finally saw the release of his 1996 show Bill Bailey's Cosmic Jam. The 2-disc set also contained a director's cut of Bewilderness, which featured a routine on Stephen Hawking not seen in the original version.
Other appearances
In 2000 he had a small role in British comedy film Saving Grace, and also voiced the sperm whale in 2005's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie.
Bill has also proved to be a talented dramatic actor in two Edinburgh Fringe shows directed by Guy Masterson. He played Juror Number 4 in a 2003 version of Twelve Angry Men featuring 12 comedians, and also co-starred as Oscar in a 2005 production of The Odd Couple, alongside Alan Davies and several other comedians, including Owen O'Neill and Ian Coppinger. Both of these performances received generally good reviews.
Radio appearances include 2 episodes of The 99p Challenge, I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, and Just a Minute respectively, as well as presenting Good Vibrations: The History of the Theremin, and appearing on Loose Ends.
Music
Bill is a talented pianist and guitarist. His stand-up routines often feature music from genres such as jazz, rock and classical, usually for comedic value. Favourite instruments include the keyboard, guitar, theremin, kazoo and bongos. He is also part of punk band Beergut 100, which he founded in 1995 with comedy writer Jim Miller, and which also features Martin Trenaman and Phil Welans, with Kevin Eldon as lead singer. Trenaman and Welans had previously appeared in Cosmic Jam under the name "The Stan Ellis Experiment", and Trenaman and Eldon later featured with John Moloney in the Kraftwerk homage "Das Hokey Kokey" on the Part Troll tour. Bill claims that himself and the 3 other performers are a Kraftwerk tribute band called Augenblick. To mark the final gig of the Part Troll tour on 1st January 2005 the band reappeared on stage after the "Das Hokey Kokey" joke to play an hour long encore of music.
Future
Bill has stated that he will begin his next tour in America, before bringing it to the Edinburgh Fringe. He is also working on a comedy entertainment show with Sean Lock, which he says is " a bit like the League of Gentlemen".[1]
Trivia
- Has absolute pitch (also known as 'perfect pitch'), mentioned in this UK Guardian article.
- According to comedy folklore, after a reviewer once criticised his act for its lack of jokes, he returned the following night to perform a set composed entirely of punchlines. [citation needed]
- The 'BB' logo on his T-shirt, which also appears at the beginning of the Bewilderness DVD, is actually the logo for comic-strip character Bastard Bunny. This is mentioned in an online interview with "Stand and Deliver".
- Winner of the Best Live Stand-Up award at the British Comedy Awards, 1999.
- Provided the voice for the 2002 BMW MINI adverts.
- Wrote and performed the 2002 British Airways adverts, in which, through the use of music, he took a humorous look at a variety of notable global locations.
- Was listed by The Observer in 2003 as one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy.
- Bill is due to appear in the 2006 film, Hot Fuzz.
Selected works
Tours
- Bill Bailey's Cosmic Jam (1995)
- Bewilderness' (2000-2002)
- Part Troll (2003-2004)
TV/Film
- Is it Bill Bailey? (1998)
- Spaced (1999-2001)
- Black Books (2000-2004)
- Never Mind The Buzzcocks (2002-2006) (As regular team captain)
- QI (2003-2005) (As a semi-regular guest)
DVDs
- Bewilderness (2001)
- Part Troll (2004)
- Cosmic Jam (2005)
CDs
- Bewilderness New York (2002)
- The Ultimate Collection... Ever! (2003)
- Part Troll (2004)
External links
