Words matter. These are the best Bill Bailey Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
In 1994 I was doing a two-hander with Sean Lock in Edinburgh and there were more people in the cast than the audience. It was pretty grim, quite a chastening experience.
As I get older, I have a very strong urge to know about stuff. I want to learn the names of trees and birds; that’s the sort of knowledge I want to pass on to my son.
At school, I was bored with the teachers, and there were moments where I felt they were singling me out.
I realised that the ‘future’ is different to how I imagined it. When I was a kid I thought it would be a bright, shiny Tomorrow’s World. It isn’t.
All kinds of things have gone into my shows – cajun and rock bands, Bollywood, Kraftwerk tributes, effects and so on. As long as it services the comedy, everything is up for grabs.
Twenty-two years I’ve been doing this comedy lark, so it’s been like a meteoric rise to fame… if the meteor was being dragged by an arthritic donkey across a ploughed field, in northern Poland.
As a comedian and satirist you have to be neutral, because everyone’s fair game. Once you show bias, you lose that.
My earliest memory is feeling soil between my fingers when I was around three years old.
Riding a horse and using a phone camera is tricky but if you don’t take pictures or record the moment, you lose it. You want to have a record of it.
I don’t like labels. I have always fought against that as a stand-up.
A lot of the time, you need to find the right home for ideas. You know, sometimes you think ‘oh this’d be a sitcom, oh, no it wouldn’t, it’d be a drama, or an educational thing, or a doco or something.’ I’ve got loads of ideas and you just have to keep sending them and pitching them.
We are almost in a time beyond jokes, beyond satire. When the Trump era is called the ‘post-truth’ period, then this is the greatest joke of all, albeit quite depressing.
I think gaming has influenced popular culture in a huge way. It’s worked its way into novels, and blockbuster movies.
My grandparents lived with us. And I remember watching ‘Doctor Who’ with my granddad on his new telly. These were the days before remote controls but my granddad, being quite a resourceful sort of chap, had fashioned his own remote control – which was a length of bamboo pole with a bit of cork that he’d glued on the end.
It’s been Bill for so long people think my name is William, but it’s not, it’s Mark.
I discovered I’m 60 per cent Viking. Well, more Danish, I suppose. I’m also two-and-a-half per cent Neanderthal.
I was asked to perform at the Olympics Opening Ceremony. But I was up a tree in Borneo filming a documentary about Alfred Russel Wallace! So it couldn’t be done.
There is something very poignant about plastic bags. These lonely plastic bags that gradually disintegrate.
You spend a lot more time on your own as an only child. And there’s space to allow your imagination to take flight.
I grew up in a little town between Bath and Bristol with my parents and grandparents in the same house. It was rural and idyllic.
I prefer the simple things and I love walking in the countryside, or going camping… but simplicity is hard. It’s easier to over-complicate things.
I’ve started doing Bikram yoga. You’re in a boiling hot room, bending over pretending to be a locust, you can’t do that at the gym.
I am pretty laid-back as a parent, but I do like a lot of activity. So I am constantly suggesting things to do that involve some physical activity: cycling, mountain biking and paddleboarding.
But being in ‘Doctor Who’ is a dream come true. I’ve been a fan since I can remember watching TV.
There was an existential moment – I don’t know if I want to call it crisis – when I turned 50 and I felt ‘this is interesting; how did this happen?’ It affected me in a way I wasn’t expecting. It made me pause for reflection.
My comedy comes from the actual music itself – they’re observational musical gags. I could take the music away and it would just be some words.
In my twenties, I floated around for years, doing the odd theatre job but mainly leading a hedonistic lifestyle, getting intoxicated in plenty of different ways in plenty of different places.
I don’t think any comic could say there isn’t a bit of them that doesn’t want to show off.
Paddle boarding: it’s the closest you get to walking on water.
Family helps you make clearer choices about things. Your priorities become clearer. Your obligations become clearer, and that is something I welcome.
The devil’s in the detail and sometimes if you’re thinking too big, you can miss the detail.
I said to my wife that if I had enough money I’d have my arms lengthened. Slightly longer arms would be great.
My grandfather had strong opinions. He was an argumentative character and quite staunchly socialist.
Comedy should be fluid. It should be both Left and Right wing.
I think that generally there’s a pressure to live the best life you can.
I did a show in this tiny town called Longyearbyen. We went snowmobiling around Svalbard and saw Arctic foxes, snow bunting, polar bear footprints and almost got lost in a blizzard.
I quite like confounding people’s expectations.
People perceive me as this kind of hippy intellectual, reflecting and communing with nature or in a pyramid somewhere chanting. Really, no. I love speed, fast things, quad and road bikes, and bombing down a mountain.
Melbourne has great eateries and you can go birdwatching.
I’ve always been reasonably upbeat about most things.
The Lib Dems are such terrible ditherers.
If you’re going to perform, you’re going to attract criticism. You can’t please everyone all the time. You don’t know how things are going to come out. But that’s part of the fun of it, the adventure of doing any kind of art.
In a way, I wish none of it had ever happened – Facebook, Twitter – if it had never happened the world would have just carried on serenely. It’s utterly redundant and yet we all have to be involved in it somehow.
When you’re a birder, you have all sorts of reference books, and you know about migratory patterns and technical stuff. Most people just look out the window, and say ‘is that a pigeon?’
I have sold stuff door-to-door, but not doors.
If you really push yourself you can perhaps achieve something you didn’t think you could.
I hate getting ill, it irritates me so I try to stay reasonably healthy.
Some musicians are a bit humourless about their art: they lose sight of the fact that as well as exercising their muse, they’re there to entertain.
Doing comedy around the world is a way of finding out how people tick.
I get a lot of nutters in my audiences.
I was always part of the end-of-term review at school. We would mercilessly mock any slight weakness in the teachers.
I used to like beer, but it makes me feel slightly queasy.
I think people are quite refreshed with politicians who aren’t concerned with what Arctic Monkeys track they like, but with the day-to-day, dull business of politics.
The point with me is that it’s always been, even with the stand-up, that the music has to be right. You have to take it seriously. You have to try and play it as faithfully as possible. That way it helps the comedy. Rather than just playing it in a silly way.
I had this plan that David Byrne was going to come through the West Country one day, think, ‘Who’s that guy?’ and ask me to go on tour with them.
Normally, with stand-up, it’s quite solitary, you write the material on your own, you perform it on your own, it’s all very much on you. Your own thoughts. You have to sort of modulate your own performance.
When the sun shines in Britain there’s no finer place on Earth.
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.
If you become famous but haven’t actually achieved anything, then your life has no real meaning – unless you’re spectacularly shallow.
The two worst enemies of comedy are lack of sleep and not having had a decent meal.