The problem with this time of year, explains Bill Bailey, is that your feet start to get itchy. His feet do, at least. Since he and his professional dance partner Oti Mabuse were crowned winners of Strictly Come Dancing in 2020, the comedian and actor has discovered a hidden passion for dance.
“I miss the dancing on a Saturday night, I must admit,” he says on a Zoom call from his Devon home. “I don’t miss the hours and hours of training, the blisters and the long days and the staggering home. There were a couple of times when I got back from training and I physically couldn’t get out of the car. I think I might’ve phoned my wife and said ‘Just leave me in the car, I’ll be fine. I’ll spend the night here – I’ve got to get up in the morning anyway, so just, y’know… bring me out some porridge, or something.’” He chuckles.
“But I’m watching [this year’s show] now with a critical eye. It’s like, ‘Ooh, that hand position isn’t quite right, his shoulder’s a bit high…’, and I’m thinking, ‘What have I become?’”
Bailey, who made history as the oldest Strictly champion at the age of 55 (he’s now 58) in 2020, admits he is slightly envious of the competitors on subsequent shows, who were not bound to social-distancing rules, as he was at the height of the pandemic.
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“We would literally go and train in a tiny isolated bubble, then get back in the car and go home – and that was it,” he explains.
“Even when we were filming the live show there was no audience, just a handful of some of the crew, so it felt even less real. If we’d had a big crowd, it would’ve felt like, ‘Wow, something is happening.’ So that was the one thing that Oti and I never got to do – dance in front of a big crowd, do the tour, do Blackpool and all these things people go on about.
“I’m still hoping that that will happen one day. I’m holding out for a dance in front of a big crowd; I think that that will be the final bit of the bingo card.”
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Strictly season also means the run-up to Christmas, which is a time of year that Bailey admits he’s had a mixed relationship with over the course of his life. Although he loved the festive season as a child, it wasn’t until he and his wife Kristin had their son that his grown-up ambivalence towards Christmas changed.
“So there was me one year, saying ‘Nah, don’t want to make a big deal of Christmas,’” he says. “Fast-forward to me as Santa, with all the presents, the Christmas tree, the fake snow – we just went all in. But the one thing I love about it is the getting together with families, friends, neighbours. That element of it, I love.”
As well as their son Dax, now 20 and a recently qualified scuba-diving instructor, Bailey and his wife Kristin will be joined by his dad Christopher, who now lives with them in London.
“Most 91-year-olds think ‘I’ve had enough of London, I’m going down the countryside’, but my dad’s completely the opposite and he’s headed to the Big Smoke to make his fortune,” he chuckles. “So it’ll be a happy throng, I think.”
He enjoys the prepping element – the peeling and chopping is “quite meditative”, he says – but leaves the cooking to others. His role at Christmas, he explains, is to prepare a quiz.
“One year, I sort of pranked everyone,” Bailey recalls. “I said ‘I’ve got a quiz’, and it was the UK citizenship test – but I didn’t tell anyone. I just put these questions in and everyone was going ‘Bill, what have you done? This is so hard,’” He laughs at the memory.
“It was all these obscure bits of information about the judiciary. And at the end of it I said, ‘None of you passed. So you’re all out.’ Except my dad – he was the only one allowed to stay. It’s amazing how people you’ve known for a while can get resentful if a quiz is too hard. They really don’t like it.”
After Christmas Bailey will be resuming the tour for his new show Thoughtifier, which comes to Ireland in February.
“I came up with this word which I really liked, which is a compound of ‘thought’ and ‘amplifier’,” he explains of the show’s origin. “And I thought in a very simple way, that was a good start – because I think that’s a description of what stand-up is, in a way: it’s like the day-to-day absurdity of life but amplified comedically.
“And then I was reading about the history of thought and I realised that [as humans], thought came before anything else; before language, music, any of that. So the show is very much about what it is to be human.
‘It seems impossible, doesn’t it, to hope for peace. Right now it feels like that’s a long way off
“I’m kind of expanding on that and thinking about our ancestors, and what was going through their minds on a basic level, and how that’s changed over the years to folk myths and legends, and then eventually religion – and eventually more critical thought.”
Each era, he says, will provide a jumping-off point for “a little comic thought, an idea, a reimagining of what human progress has been about really. I try and get the audience involved and I make fun of the whole AI thing as well; I’ve filmed myself in a kind of cheap, glitchy bit of home-made AI,” he says with a grins. “And there’s lots of music, as well, along the way.”
Bailey is known for his intelligent brand of comedy and for being a thoroughly nice guy, so it comes as no surprise that Bill Bailey’s Christmas wish for this year is a simple but important one.
“Well, it seems impossible, doesn’t it, to hope for peace,” he says with a solemn nod. “Right now it feels like that’s a long way off. And I kind of fear for how the world is; it kind of feels like we’re at a critical point where things could get much worse. So yeah…” He trials off with a somewhat resigned sigh.
“We just all have to be good to each other. Maybe there’s a corresponding goodness and kindness in the world, so we just have to add to all of that to try to counteract the conflict.”
Bill Bailey’s Thoughtifier comes to Dublin’s 3Arena on February 9th and Belfast’s SSE Arena on February 10th.
