Interview: Bill Bailey, comedian

Published on 08/11/2011 12:43

Comic Bill Bailey found Scotland one of the most beautiful places on earth. He tells Lee Randall why travel broadens the Dandelion Mind

For years, Bill Bailey yearned to strike out for the Highlands and Islands as a kind of antidote to the madness of the Fringe.

“It was wishful thinking that after the festival a bunch of comics would emerge blinking into the September sunlight and take off. Of course it never happened. Often, if you’d had a successful Fringe, you’d continue to tour the show around Britain, or over in Australia and New Zealand.”

But May 2010 finally saw Bailey’s dream become reality, performing his show, Dandelion Mind, along some of those roads less travelled. “It was one of the most enjoyable and inspiring experiences,” he enthuses. “Often the journey to the gig was special and involved passing through some beautiful bits of nature – a mountain pass, or we’d get a ferry and see sea birds and porpoises, mist hanging off sea cliffs. I remember beautiful light reflecting off the houses of the harbour as we entered Orkney. On a day off we caught a boat to St Kilda, which was stunning.”

Bailey realises he’s romanticising the trip. “I imagine it gets pretty bleak, windswept and cold in winter up in the Shetlands and Orkney. But I recall standing on the beach at Scapa Flow, looking over a limpid sea like glass, the colour of turquoise, thinking, ‘This must be one of the most beautiful places on earth.’ ”

Put that in context: Bailey’s passport bears some of the most exotic stamps, for he’s a frequent visitor to Indonesia, and even married his wife, Kristen, in Banda. He tells me that a recent trip found the Bailey family in Seram, in the Maluku province. “A friend has built viewing platforms in the tops of the trees. You get hoisted up in a harness. These are emergent trees, so they’re higher than the jungle canopy, about 140 feet up. You get a 360 degree view, and see the most extraordinary wildlife. All the life is in the canopy, so it’s a rare opportunity to see the birds, lizards and insects and mammals. We slept up there in hammocks.”

A glance at his schedule explains the need to switch off, and Dandelion Mind was itself conceived as a antidote to the arena tour he began in 2007. “In hindsight I realise some of the material was influenced by the [large] size of the venue. That’s back to front. The show should grow from a small beginning and then expand. The deliberate purpose of the Scottish tour was to write a show I could perform in front of a handful of people, and then maybe perform in an arena one day.”

Scripted sections are interwoven with improvisation that often involves audience input. “I like to engage them in debate, but not to humiliate or pick on them,” says this gentlest of men. “Whenever I’ve seen aggression towards an audience it’s always made me uncomfortable. I ask simple questions, not pressuring them to be funny or to be the butt of a joke. Things like, ‘Does anyone have this?’ ‘Have you done that?’ ‘Are there any nuclear physicists in the audience?’ There’s so much out in the audience, and you’re shutting yourself off from it if you come out with an aggressive stance. I would rather celebrate and embrace it.”

He’s not long back from touring in the US, where he convinced a room of New Yorkers to take part in a call and response singalong. So much for Manhattan cynicism. “It’s a lovely moment when everyone’s part of something greater than the sum of its parts. That encapsulates what a comedy gig should be, with the comic as the lightning rod, the Norse mischief god, getting the audience to do something they wouldn’t necessarily do.”

Should you miss Bailey’s Scottish dates, look out for him in the Doctor Who Christmas special. He can’t tell me much about it, acknowledging that “there is an extraordinary amount of secrecy. “Apparently fans trek for miles to wherever they are filming to try to get pictures of the characters. We were kept in a tent so nobody could see us. But being in Doctor Who is a dream come true. I’ve been a fan since I can remember watching TV. It was so scary. Even now, I see a Cyberman and get a bit of a twitch.”

Can he tell me whether he plays a goodie or a baddie? “A sort of bewildered half-bad goodie,” is his clear-as-mud reply. “I was crashing around in a fantastic costume, but thankfully I wasn’t aliened-up. If I’d had a big octopus mask on, my seven-year-old son would never believe I was in it!”

And next year, Bailey begins pulling together a BBC documentary about his hero, Alfred Wallace. “He was a co-originator of the theory of evolution, but he’s been airbrushed out of history. Here was a true visionary, who was deeply moral and socially aware, with ideas way ahead of his time about the communal ownership of land and the distribution of wealth.”

Wallace, a Welshman, crafted the theory of how species diverged over the centuries, which led to the formation of new species. “That was something which eluded Darwin for many years. Wallace’s letter to Darwin was the spur for him to publish Origin Of Species. He should be mentioned in the same breath as Darwin, always.”

As our conversation comes to a close, I tease Bailey, telling him that his romantic view of Scotland is doomed. Touring in November ensures daily encounters with rotten weather and early afternoon darkness. With a laugh, he says, “You have to go to Scotland at all times of the year – in order to appreciate the times when the sun does come out.”

• Dandelion Mind is at the Playhouse, Edinburgh, 16 November; Aberdeen AECC, 18 November; Dunfermline Alhambra, 19 November; and the SECC, Glasgow, 26 November