Bill Bailey on AI and cancel culture: ‘So tedious. It’s just absolute teacup, storm’
The comedian and ‘Strictly’ winner talks to Jasper Rees about bombing on stage, hosting the BBC’s new talent show and why he thinks the art of comedy is somewhere between folk music and papier-mâché workshops
Halfway through our hour together, Bill Bailey stops talking and starts coughing. One hand shutters his mouth and is then clasped in place by the other. The pale blue eyes, default-set to bulge even when he’s at his most chilled, flare open ever wider. That roundheaded cranium of his, backed by grizzled fronds of cavalier frizz, tinges pink. Still the coughs come, deep and guttural and alarming, until eventually they end.
“Do you know what this is?” he says, having caught his breath. “I’ve had a whooping cough for the last four weeks. It’s the most terrible thing. I thought it died out in the 1880s. I thought only pasty Victorian urchins got it but no, Muggins managed to get this thing, just pre-tour.”
It first manifested while he was on holiday in a mountain shack in central Indonesia. “You can’t breathe and you start choking and then you try to inhale air and you make this terrifying death rattle and people think he’s a goner.” The convalescent phase, he has been advised, can last for 10 weeks. His current tour, which has already been to New Zealand and is about to take him all over the UK and the rest of Europe, starts any day. He’s prepped a disclaimer in case there’s an episode mid-performance.
“I’m going to say, ‘If I start choking, don’t worry, it’s called a tracheal spasm. Sounds like a concept album that nobody really wants, like some collaboration between Putin and Lukashenko. Like some xenophobic quasi-fascist folktronica.’”
The tour goes by the name of Thoughtifier. Like other shows of his, its title encapsulates in a quirky Baileyesque coinage what he perceives to be a stand-up’s job description. See also Dandelion Mind, Part Troll, Qualmpeddler, Tinselworm. “There’s the silkworm, that’s your classy worm. It has a social function. Silk, high-end. Comedians are tinselworms, gaudy, trashy. But it’s what people want.”
While those people are catching him live, the rest can find him once more on their telly as part of a talent contest. He’s not competing this time, but hosting a BBC Two series that puts aspiring, untrained actors through their paces before, in the final episode, giving them a showcase. The idea behind Bring the Drama is to widen the pool in a profession often seen as unfairly privileging a type of actor you might call Dominic Cumbermayne.
The eight participants, chosen from nearly 2,000 applicants of all ages and including a taxi driver, a social worker and a retired policeman, learn the ropes of the business with a casting director who has them playing scenes in costume on the sets of hit BBC dramas, coached by the likes of EastEnders’ Natalie Cassidy and Line of Duty’s Rochenda Sandall.
“The idea of it intrigued me initially,” Bailey says. “Actors are not normally drawn from this sort of pool. It tends to be people who’ve had a drama school education or, let’s be frank, have a few quid or their families have been involved. There is some other way in, rather than just sheer talent.”
Bailey’s start in life involved a private education at what he calls “an old-fashioned grammar school”. He’s adamant that it didn’t arm him with the brazen confidence instilled by posher schools. “If anything this desire to find another path was kind of discouraged. ‘You have to go to college.’ I had to find my own way.” When he filled out a careers advice questionnaire it predicted he’d make a good diplomat or museum curator. “I laughed and thought this is total twaddle, but now when I tour round the world with a brand of British comedy that celebrates Britishness and sends it up, there’s something about that which has now after all these years come true.”
Opinions are what drive social media. The whole thing is like a nuclear submarine of opinion
He feels a compulsion to share knowledge of people, he says. In Thoughtifier, this concerns artificial intelligence. In the show he asks ChatGPT, which replies in the voice of a drawling Aussie he calls Terry, to pitch a film script about rival New Zealander fishermen. “And within less than a second the whole pitch is there. It’s like a magic trick. And it’s fully realised with a title: Tides of Redemption. This whole film makes perfect sense and you think, my god, I can see why this is such a threat. But then you ask it, ‘Terry, pitch me a film about two rival cheese shop owners.’ And it’s the same film.”
When he asked it to create a Bill Bailey show, it came up “with a lot of stuff about weasels and woodland creatures and obscure musical instruments and I’m thinking, yeah, it’s pretty good. But there’s something missing. Snark it can do. Puns it can do. It can’t originate. A lot of comedy is about human experience. I take that as a definite challenge to become more eccentric, more idiosyncratic. That’s where we have to go. More human than human.”
Of course, there are other existential threats to comedians. The traditional one is simply going out of fashion. Can he retain his countercultural status playing to 65,000 at the Sonisphere metal festival at Knebworth. “It’s difficult to square that one away. I went to see Lee Evans just before he stopped doing it and he said something like, ‘You know when you’re waiting for the bus?’ And I was like, ‘No, Lee, come on. You’re at the O2, you came here in a limo.’ You have to find other ways to do your comedy.”
Bailey achieves this by plugging back into the source. Before the UK leg of Thoughtifier, he played a warm-up above a south London pub. He declares himself “ridiculously excited now still after all these years”. He keeps abreast of what grassroots comics are saying via Channel 4’s Sean Lock comedy bursary for young stand-ups, set up in memory of his late friend and writing partner. Comics can’t be coached the way actors can, so his advice to them is about morale. “Do as many gigs as you can. Even the ones you think are going to be a nightmare. They might not be. Take a punt on yourself. Don’t be discouraged by a bad gig. Get back on the horse.”
He’s reminded of his debut at the Comedy Store when he raced through 15 minutes of material in five. “So then I had to improvise, with mixed results. It was a very salutary lesson.” Comedians being soloists, these trials must be endured without the collegiate support that aspiring actors give one another in Bring the Drama. “When somebody else has a bad gig, it goes round like wildfire. People would delight in it! It’s schadenfreude. That gig is always lurking and you think that’s one I’ve dodged.”
The other trap for all comedians is social media. Bailey had one such stumble last year when in an interview he expressed himself baffled by the trajectory of Graham Linehan, with whom he worked on the Channel 4 sitcom Black Books. There was a pile-on, and when his Twitter account disappeared it seemed he’d become a scalp of cancel culture.
“Oh God! So tedious! It’s just absolute teacup, storm.” He rolls those eyes. “What I was actually saying was, ‘I can’t believe that someone who is so loved and so well respected, his life has become derailed.’ That’s what I was referring to. Not his views. Everyone’s got views. Opinions are what drive social media. The whole thing is like a nuclear submarine of opinion.”
Nor, he clarifies, did he leave Twitter, as X was then still known. “I got a message saying, ‘Somebody has tried to break into your Twitter and you haven’t got this two-factor authentication set up.’ So what I did was just switch it off and switch it on again. But, of course, if you’ve won Strictly, it’s reported in the Daily Express.”
Talking of Strictly, if there were a dance-off of past winners would he be up for taking part? “You see that’s the sort of thing that gets the juices flowing. Because I’m ridiculously competitive. On holiday just recently with my son Drax and his pals, this kid goes, ‘Bill, I’ll play you at pool.’ I heard Drax say, ‘Don’t play him, he’s a hustler.’ I beat all of them.” So who could he beat at Strictly? “Well, I think I might do OK in the male winners – I think I’ve got that. But I don’t know about some of the women. Rose Ayling-Ellis is a natural dancer. Ellie Leach is very good. I’d really have to pull out the stops.”
The hour is up, the whooping cough conquered. A last thought for the thoughtifier. Shelley nominated poets as the world’s unacknowledged legislators. Has that role now been passed on to comics?
“I prefer the quote of Diogenes, one of the Stoics, who said that philosophers and dogs are undervalued for their contribution, and I would add comics to that list. We’re always seen as the lower end of the arts spectrum. Comedians play stadiums, arenas. I’ve got to say comedians are keeping regional theatres going.” So, once dubbed the new rock’n’roll, can comedy now claim the status of a performing art? Bailey ponders for a moment.
“No,” he says. “We’re somewhere between folk music and papier-mâché workshops.”
‘Thoughtifier’ will tour the UK until March. ‘Bring the Drama’ premieres at 9pm on 14 February on BBC Two and iPlayer
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