On the eve of his latest show, national treasure Bill talks rhythm and views with Country Walking Magazine...
As I was preparing to chat to Bill Bailey, I tried to work out if there was one common element that unites all the myriad things we love him for. A phenomenally talented musician. An enduringly loveable stand-up comedian. The winner of Strictly Come Dancing 2020. A devoted birdwatcher. And a man who likes to relax by paddleboarding and (here’s the rub) walking. Then I realised what it was. Rhythm.
From the ebb and flow of making an audience howl with laughter to the simple swish of footsteps; from the sound of birdsong to a top-scoring samba: Bill Bailey is a creature of rhythm.
“I think – hope – most of us are, in some way,” he says when I suggest it.
“I think it’s probably down to our connection with the world, and especially, at some deep level, the natural world. The passing of the seasons, the coming and going of different bird species, the motion of walking. As humans, we live by rhythms.
“We might replace some of those with the artificial rhythms of modern life, but they are always there, dormant. And we start to feel them again as soon as we go for a walk.”
This concept is right at the heart of his latest stand-up show. Titled Thoughtifier, it promises ‘a magical, musical mystery tour of the human mind, along with some other pressing matters about whales, biophilia and unrequited love’. The key word (for us) is biophilia: a love of nature.
“We might seal ourselves into houses, offices and cars, but as humans our whole evolution has been about adapting our minds and bodies for being outdoors. It’s where we are meant to be,” Bill explains.
“Our senses, our upright posture, the mechanics of our feet; the innate knowledge that our ancestors roamed around to hunt for food or look for shelter. Everything about us is designed to enjoy being part of that great, vast biosphere out there.”
He says if you want to see that connection forming (or re-forming), all you have to do is take someone for a walk. “It can happen on any walk, but especially a long-distance walk,” he says.
“After a day or two, people start saying things like, ‘can you smell that?’ or ‘there’s rain coming’. Their senses are coming alive, and that’s biophilia.
“I love feeling it, but I love seeing it happen in other people even more. So that’s a big part of what I’m exploring in the show because I want more people to fall in love with that experience.”
Bill’s passion for walking runs deep. It began with family walks in his native West Country, when his mum imbued in him the words ‘I want you to love nature’ like a mantra. Later he would snaffle a map from his dad’s vast library of OS sheets and head out ‘to see how far I could get’.
But it was as a young stand-up that his passion fully matured, thanks to the years he spent going for walks with his fellow comedian and best friend, Sean Lock. It was a joy they shared for decades, right up to Sean’s untimely death from cancer in 2021, aged just 58.
“Any spare moment we had, we’d make a plan, hop on a train and go,” Bill recalls.
“And we would talk about anything and everything. Whatever was going on in our lives we could either talk about it or get away from it just by doing some miles over the Chilterns or the Downs, and I am so grateful for that. It’s one of the many reasons I owe an awful lot to good old walking, and to Sean.”
The influence of those walks continues. In 2022 Bill walked a 100-mile stretch of the South West Coast Path with friends, family and fellow comedians, raising £110,00 for Macmillan Cancer Support in memory of Sean.
And it was his conversations with Sean which inspired Bill’s 2024 TV series, Perfect Pub Walks. Each episode saw Bill take a well-known face for a walk–and-talk. He took Alan Davies to the Peak District; Sir Trevor McDonald to Constable Country in Suffolk; Shaun Ryder to Somerset and Paul Merton to the Jurassic Coast.
The series was about the conversations as much as the scenery; there were laughs of course, but each companion also opened up about profoundly personal subjects like grief, addiction, the immigrant experience and depression.
“That all came from the walks with Sean, the way they could go from silliness to depth in a heartbeat. In fact a lot of the time I was thinking, ‘Sean would have loved this’.
“Walking elicits conversation in a way that sitting down for an interview rarely does. You’re just batting the conversation back and forth, there are pauses and silences, and then suddenly you’re talking about something massive. I was so glad to get the chance to do that with people who perhaps hadn’t experienced that before.”
He says the idea was particularly affecting for legendary newsreader Sir Trevor.
“To a guy who grew up in Trinidad and came from a background of coming to London and having to work so hard to make his way in the world, walking through fields in Suffolk was a strange concept for him. But he absolutely adored it. He told me afterwards it was one of the best things he’d ever done on television. I mean, wow.”
Long-distance walking is a particular passion for Bill. He has walked many of Britain’s National Trails (he particularly loves the Ridgeway) and has taken on many big treks around the world. Last year, he and a group of friends completed the notoriously tough Cape Wrath Trail (capewrathtrail.org.uk), which runs for 200 miles through the far north-west of Scotland from Fort William to the north coast at Cape Wrath.
“It’s a tough old stroll,” he understates.
“You can’t go at it half-baked. It requires a lot of planning and you have to be ready for some really tough days. One minute you’re on a forest track, the next a sheep trod, then no path at all.
“It’s not waymarked and you can’t fully rely on devices because of bad signal and long days that drain the battery. There are days where you think you’ve reached your limit – but you just have to push on.
“But it was absolutely incredible. Everything you see is astonishing. Rocks that are millions of years old, immense lochs, wild moorland, mountain hares, golden eagles. All of us were a little bit changed by it, in the best way.”
Did he have a favourite memory from the trail?
“Getting to the Shenavall bothy, by Loch na Sealga,” he replies.
“A long, hard day of walking, finishing at the confluence of two glens, surrounded by Munros. You look in every direction and there’s no evidence of modernity. No planes overhead, no roads, no pylons. It was incredibly beautiful.
“We met some students in the bothy and we just talked all evening. There was no point even trying to use your phone. So both outside and inside, it was like a scene from a completely different era.”
A lack of digital resource was no problem for Bill, especially as he adores paper maps.
“I still get such a thrill from unfolding a map and visualising the landscape from a bunch of lines and squiggles,” he says.
“I get excited seeing contour lines and thinking ‘woo, that’s gonna be fun!’”
We finish up by chatting about whether walking is a source of inspiration for his comedy and music, or a chance to switch off.
“It can be both, whichever you need at that moment. That’s the beauty of it,” he explains.
“I like the comfortable rituals of getting all the gear together and heading off up a footpath; switching off the brain for a bit and just being present with what’s around you.
“But I quite like it when an idea strikes and I can record it on my phone. But I’ve learned not to do it when people are around. A few times I was recording with my phone in my pocket and I’d pass people coming the other way, and I could hear them saying, ‘That was Bill Bailey. He was talking to himself.’
“And somehow they never sounded surprised.”
● Bill Bailey performs Thoughtifier nightly at Theatre Royal Haymarket until February 15th. His new book My Animals, and Other Animals is on sale now. Find out more at billbailey.co.uk and via Instagram @billbaileyofficial. And you can still catch Bill Bailey’s Perfect Pub Walks on demand at channel4.com