Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2008. My cast away this week is the comedian and actor Bill Bailey, lauded for his hugely inventive stand-up, he's carved out a highly successful

on-stage career with an altogether atypical approach.

He's also a familiar face on television, from his regular appearances on quiz shows like have I got news for

you, QI and never mind the buscocks.

His act, described by one critic as a masterpiece of high concept silliness, is short on ego and long on whimsy an exploration of his

unending curiosity with the world and all its contrasts and contradictions something of

a specialist subject for the man himself at school he was a gifted pupil who gave up

on his education and a pitch-perfect piano student who flunked his music school

entrance. Comics he says are all a bit neurotic, brilliant, strange, a bunch of egotistical lunatics.

And so Bill Billy, I'm wondering from that quote which particular boxes you tick are not egotistical? I don't know.

I'm having watched you on stage.

Perhaps I am unaware of it.

Brilliant, strange, neurotic, any of those?

Certainly neurotic in the way that you can get quite obsessed by it and it's you get so

obsessed by that it sounds mad to a normal person you mean what do you mean you

can't sleep because you can't think of this way this punch line is going to work or you can't think how this good bit of routine is going to work or you're up till 3 o'clock in the morning trying to make this routine fit with another bit of routine. It sounds inconsequential and mad and a bit

neurotic but actually that's what we do. Do you rely entirely on yourself when you're

at home are you saying to your wife come on come on come into the kitchen and yes this is good?

Oh yes yes definitely I mean she's a great sounding board for all this stuff.

I get a very very concise and quite harsh critique which is good

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