Bill Bailey: The laid-back stand-up guy

The comedian and actor Bill Bailey may be sharp on stage, but in reality he's amiably dazed. And he has perfect pitch - a useful quality in the new team captain of the music quiz 'Never Mind the Buzzcocks'. But then again, he does admit to being a Wurzels fan...

I meet Bill Bailey at the BBC, in the restaurant at White City, which is a very gloomy restaurant (please be reassured that licence fees are not wasted on unnecessary illumination) and when Bill arrives, it's rather like a big white forehead sailing towards you out of the murk. Bill has a lot of forehead. Bill may even have more forehead than face. Bill reminds me, a little, of that thing children do at school at Easter, when they have to draw a face on an egg, and always scribble it on too low down, and then glue some straggly bits of wool at the back, as hair, and a few even stragglier strands off the bottom, as beard. (Darling, how lovely, you say, before binning it with the pasta-decorated calendar.)

However, I do not point out this particular resemblance to Bill, as I think he might be offended. I think Bill is less after the painted egg look, more after the heavy metal look. Bill says that he is often mistaken for someone from Hawkwind or the drummer from Metallica. "You're Lars Ulrich, aren't you?" someone will say. "Afraid not," Bill will reply. "I knew it. That's so very Lars, pretending not to be him," they will say. Sometimes, Bill will pretend to be Aled Jones. "I'm Aled Jones and it's all gone wrong for me," he'll announce. It's fun, he says, to have people going away thinking: "Oh dear, Aled has let himself go." Bill can be very, very naughty. As well as very, very funny.

Bill is a stand-up comic, essentially, and a brilliant, surreal one – his history of the Celtic people, as told through balloon modelling, is quite something, as is his mad, keyboard exploration of the satanic nature of the Magic Roundabout theme tune. He is also, of course, an actor (Manny in Channel 4's Black Books) and, now, a team captain on the BBC's rock/pop quiz show Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Bill is, as it happens, substantially gifted on the music front. He plays piano, keyboards, guitar, drums, and has perfect pitch and, when he was six, once told his mother that the Hoover hummed in B flat. (Bugger. I always wanted a Hoover that hummed in B flat, but ours would only do E.) I ask Bill who his first musical heroes were. "Well, pianists were the first musicians I was in awe of, because the piano is the first instrument I learnt to play. My two heroes were both classical pianists, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Sviatoslav Richter, and particularly Richter playing Rachmaninov." Gosh, he may be frighteningly highbrow in every sense.

I ask him about the first record he ever bought. "Hmm...," he goes, as he thinks. Bill's not, I sense, a very speedy sort of person. He even seems rather out of it, rather dazed, although in the most amiable way. His expression is mainly one of stupefied wonderment. Mind you, he's like this on stage, too, so it's probably just him, might even be part of his appeal. First record, Bill? Come on, now. Chop, chop. "Well," he finally replies, "it was either 'I've Got a Brand New Combine Harvester' by The Wurzels or 'Down the Tube Station at Midnight' by The Jam." Bill, I say, a word of advice. As a friend. In future, drop The Wurzels. They're no good for your reputation. They are guaranteed brow-lowerers. They'll bring your brow down to ankle-level. I'll just put in The Jam, OK? I'll forget the whole Wurzel business. "Thank you," says Bill who, I think, would look pleased and grateful, if only he could let go of stupefied wonderment for a minute.

As it's a Tube-strike day, I ask if he got into the BBC all right. He says yes, he came by BBC car. He would like, sometimes, to not come by BBC car but this is tricky. "I live quite near [Hammersmith] and could walk here. In the past, I have walked here. But then, when you get to reception, they say they don't have clearance for pedestrians and so you then have to sign a lot of forms, just for coming in on foot. In the end you think: Oh, forget it." He has come in today to record an edition of Buzzcocks. When he writes, though, he writes from home, at the bottom of his garden, in what used to be a shed. "It was a very nice shed, but now I've knocked it down and built a bunker. It's four feet down with a grass roof. I call it the bunker of dreams."

Handy for wartime, I say. "That's right," he says. "I've already started stockpiling food." He adds that because of council regulations, his shed-cum-bunker cannot be used for commercial purposes. So, if he senses the beginnings of a funny idea, "I have to race into the kitchen to finish it off."

I admire Bill's sparkling rings which, aside from the forehead, seem to be the only other things capable of penetrating the dimness in here. (Tell me, do the BBC save on illumination so they can spend, spend, spend on unnecessary cars?) One has elephants circling it ("I got it in Bangkok") whereas the other is a plainer wedding ring. He is married to Kristin, a costume designer whom he met in Edinburgh when she was appearing in a musical comedy act. They married on Banda, a volcanic island in the eastern Indonesian archipelago. They didn't mean to get married on Banda. It was an impulsive thing. They were travelling in the Far East, and happened to hook up with a bunch of divers heading for Banda. Banda, Bill continues, is utterly beautiful. "When we arrived we thought, what an amazing place. More, what an amazing place to do something in. So we went to the little Dutch 16th-century church and asked the vicar if we could get married. 'Next Tuesday all right?' he said."

How wonderfully Hello!, I say. I can see it now, across pages two, three, four, five, six, seven and, possibly, eight, nine and 10. "Hello! would never have found us," he says. We have a bit of a talk about Hello!, agreeing that, in this heavily ironic age, it's so nice to still have something so resolutely un-ironic. "It is refreshingly... frank? Is that the right word?" asks Bill. I say I particularly love it when celebrities have babies and you get a peek at the nursery, my theory being that the more ludicrously and expensively overdecorated it is, the quicker that child will be off to boarding school. Bill is with me all the way here. Bill is almost animated. "Of course I love my baby. I've got the original Beatrix Potter drawings. Look how much we spend on it. Look how much we care for it. I've even got Beatrix's remains buried in the garden..."

Bill does not have children. Yet. He would certainly like some one day. Meanwhile, though, it's pets. He is big on pets. I know this because, on his website, there's a pet's corner and they are all pictured there. He has Rocky, a Lakeland terrier, and Ruby, another Lakeland terrier who will eat anything. "I once watched in mortification as the vet pulled a whole Sainsbury's bag out her arse." Plus there is a tortoise, Dolly, and a cockatoo, Molly, who, apparently likes mashed potato and Elgar. How is Ruby? "Sadly, she died," says Bill. Dolly? "Unfortunately, Dolly died too. She lived until 46, but finally went." Bill, have you ever thought of updating your website? "Should do, should do," he says, dazedly. I daren't ask after Molly. One can only take so many bereavements in a row. If it turned out that Molly had, say, fallen head first off her perch into her mashed potato, and suffocated, I do not know if I would be able to bear it. I can only hope that they played Pomp and Circumstance in its entirety at her funeral. Or "Land of Hope and Glory", at least.

Bill was born and brought up in Keynsham, a town in north Somerset between Bath and Bristol. "Now it's all been built up, but when I was little there were country lanes and a tree you could play in." I tell him he sounds like one of those grumpy old men who say: I remember when this was all fields. He does not deny it. "But I do remember when it was all fields. I can legitimately say that."

So, yes, Bill is a West Country boy but lost the accent as soon as he could. "The West Country accent isn't the coolest, sexiest accent in the world, although The Wurzels have always done it proud." Bill? No more Wurzels. How many times do I have to tell you? "Sorry," says Bill. "Oops." He is 37, so grew up on Seventies sitcoms. Which were? "Porridge, Terry and June, The Good Life... Margot putting her gloves on to come out and help, and falling in the mud. Oh, how we laughed. And It Ain't Half Hot Mum. Those were the days." You didn't mind the set of It Ain't Half Hot Mum? Those six potted palms that made it look more like a Hilton lobby? "When I first went out to the Far East, and did see the jungle, I did think: It's not like It Ain't Half Hot Mum at all!"

His mother is a midwife, his father a (now retired) GP. Both are musical, both play the piano, and as Bill was growing up, "we would actually gather round it for singsongs". What songs do you remember? "'Magic Moments'. Which they were." He is an only child, and attended King Edward's School in Bath where, academically, he was rather brilliant – a model pupil, as well as a sufficiently gifted pianist to attain an associateship at the London School of Music – until he turned 16. "Then it all went to pot and I started enjoying myself in a non-academic way." He formed a band, The Famous Five, "even though there were six of us, of course," and went on to ricochet between polytechnics and colleges while trying to get a theatrical career started. Why the theatre? "I've always had this desire to perform. I don't know what it is, or where it comes from. It's just always been there."

He ended up joining a Welsh experimental theatre group where "I played a disenfranchised owl trying to bring the woodland together through revolutionary politics." He is fond of the Welsh. His grandfather was in a Welsh male voice choir, and Bill does like Welsh male voice choirs, although isn't too sure about the cheap bottle-green blazer they're all made to wear. "Makes them look like Golf Club treasurers." Bill also thinks the Welsh could try harder with their national dish, cheese on toast. He wonders what happens when big ambassadorial receptions are announced. "Does someone go: 'Ohh, a big ambassadorial reception. Quick, get the grill on?'"

He came to London in 1985 and, through a friend, became involved in the Workers' Revolutionary Party and even took part in a WRP play about the print unions starring Corin Redgrave, Vanessa Redgrave and Frances De La Tour. "It was quite an eye-opener, just to see this essentially quite militant bunch of thinkers. I was very charmed by it and swept up by it but always had a nagging suspicion that it wasn't quite right. I didn't totally believe. They all have this total faith. It's unshakeable.

"It was fascinating watching Corin Redgrave. He'd stand up in rehearsal and give the most amazing, articulate, off-the-cuff speeches about the state of Britain, the state of the unions, the fact the country was ripe for revolution, and you are thinking: No, the country is not ripe for revolution. People moan a bit about the buses being late and the council tax going up but they are not ripe for revolution.

"I admired their intentions and sentiments, but also had a lot of fun at their expense reading the WRP newsletter. There was even a slant to the football coverage. The left-wingers were always given a lot more coverage than the right-wingers." The play opened on the day of the World Cup Final in 1986, "so not many people came". Bill had tried to tell Corin and Vanessa about the match but they wouldn't listen. "Not now, Bill," they would say. Bill thinks maybe "these people are not in touch with the people as much as they think".

He's an absolute one-off, in his amiably dazed way. I wonder if I could get my son to capture that look of stupefied wonderment next time he does an egg. "Look. It's the lovely Bill Bailey," I would say. I might not even bin it. The pasta calendar always has to go, though. Complete rubbish, those.

'Never Mind the Buzzcocks' is on BBC 2, Mondays, at 9pm