Smash hit

At King Edward’s, he tried to study everything, devouring language, the arts, science and — his greatest passion — music.

“I loved the intellectual challenge of music. I was the only A-level student. But I also loved the physical challenge of sport. I was captain of the cricket team, played football and rugby. So they couldn’t quite work me out, the teachers. And I was always getting into trouble. In the end, when I got the qualifications, they were all really grudging. ‘We all thought you were going to fail.’”

Perhaps that’s the reason we love Bill Bailey so much. He’s the figure we all recognise, no matter where we went to school: the playground eccentric, bright enough to bamboozle the teachers on their own ground but never showing an ugly desire to lead or control, content to entertain and inspire in the way that only a true British eccentric can. Certainly, his audience seems to represent the entire country — cardigans and piercings stand side by side in the foyer at Bailey gigs. He loves that. “It is extraordinary,” he says. “I’ve got the freaks, among whom I count myself, the hard-core sci-fi lot, the gaming lot, the crusties and the old punks, the families, the mothers — such a lovely audience. Whenever I’ve done gigs with other comics and they’ve had my audience, they come off going, ‘What’s going on? This is a great crowd.’ And I love ’em for that, because they ’re generous to other acts, too. They’re the best of Britain.”

That sounds like the view of a patriot, I tease. “I am,” he turns it back on me. “I’m very passionate about being English, but about the good things of being English — tolerance, fair play, justice, sense of humour, self-deprecation. I’m not a flag-waving, jingoistic patriot, but then, I don’t think we are jingoistic as a country, really.”

He feels that another Bailey oddity — the mix of love for the traditional with a desire to remain iconoclastic — is part of his national heritage, although the iconoclasm has diminished slightly since he became a father. “There is a sense that you’ve entered proper adulthood,” he nods thoughtfully. “It’s another challenge. You change — you can never go back — but it’s about how you move on. It impacts on some people completely, so their former life just goes. You hear all these stories — you never go out, you never do anything. I can see how you’d get like that, but we’ve lived, travelled, had very rich and fulfilling lives. That’s surely something that you can bring a child into?” He warms to his theme. “I suppose if there’s one thing I’ve always known it’s that perception and reality are usually completely different. People always make assumptions about me, for instance, and they’re always wrong. I used to say that I wanted to be successful and have a long career simply because, looking at me objectively, it’s so unlikely that I could. I’ve kept on out of sheer bloody-mindedness, just so people would say, ‘How can this be?’”

Black Books is on C4 on Thursday at 10pm; the Part Troll tour starts on May 4

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