The first and only series of Is It Bill Bailey? aired from February 20 to March 27 1998 on BBC Two. The title is taken from a Rizla game where someone sticks a rolling paper on your head and you have to guess the person's name on the paper. That's Bill from the opening credits a rolling paper on his forehead. Little hand written questions appear in the show's graphics that take us in and out of the different scenes.
It was a BBC Scotland production that hasn't ever been rebroadcast or put on DVD. Not sure why, the show isn't awful or anything, it made me laugh but then I like the Bill Bailey style of comedy. The TV series is a bit like his stage show, jokes and musical numbers, with filmed comedy sketches stuffed in around them. The Wikipedia says: Many songs and routines featured in the show were first performed in his Cosmic Jam tour and TV show Asylum and several were later used during his Bewilderness tour.
His jokes are pretty whacky but his musical numbers are the best. His 60s Belgian Jazz version of the Doctor Who theme was totally entertaining and right up my street. He parody's the music of some pop stars and there are 3 or 4 bits with Cockney music that I thought were pretty silly and worth seeing for the music, or cockney, fan. There's no doubt that Bill is a talented musician who like injecting comedy into the music. He's the Victor Borge of his day.
Bill wrote much of the show with help from Sean Lock, who's listed as the Script Editor, and Martin Trenaman. Joining Bill in the sketches, a lot of which were filmed outside, are Simon Pegg, Geraldine McNulty, Forbes Mason, Norman Lovett (briefly in one episode) and several other people I wasn't familiar with. The director of the 6 episodes was Edgar Wright. You might recognize some of his later work, Spaced, Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz. Those are all worth having in your video collection but I'm not sold on Scott Pilgrim Vs The World and I'm flip flopping on The World's End.
I watched them all in one go and enjoyed the bunch of them. You can see the whole series on YouTube, there's a link up in the title at the top of the post. The quality of the video's is fairly good for something taken from a VHS tape.
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