Any standup will tell you: to make it as a comedian, you first need to find your angle. For a young Bill Bailey, then a long-haired, goateed Glastonbury fanatic, it didn’t take much searching. “I was portrayed as this sort of bewildered hippy who just exists on a different plain, out in the woods somewhere. And it wasn’t quite true!” he tells me. “But it wasn’t a million miles off.” Bailey would go on stage interspersing absurdist musical routines with material about sneaking into festivals and rolling spliffs. Today, as he sits down to talk to me about his latest project – Extraordinary Portraits, the returning BBC series about fine art – it’s hard to shake the sense I’m looking at a very different animal.
He is, he jokes, “much more suave and sophisticated” now. To anyone who knows Bailey from his old standup, his role as the docile oddball Manny on the sitcom Black Books, or even his triumphant 2020 stint on Strictly Come Dancing, the most immediately obvious change is his hair: gone are the shaggy record-shop-proprieter locks that for decades defined the Bill Bailey look. “I remember I was on a crowded Tube and the doors closed on the back of my head, trapping my hair; I had to sort of style it out until the next station,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘Yeah, maybe this is a sign.’” By the end, he adds, it had “become a bit unruly, to the point where I’d see photos of myself at a smart family function, and think, ‘Oh my God, some dodgy old bloke from the fairground’s made his way into the wedding.’”
