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Comedian Stephen Bailey: ‘My new show is like having a night out at the local carvery’




Funny, warm, witty and, dare I say it, lovable, stand-up comedian Stephen Bailey is on his way to Cambridge this week.

The talented comic and TV presenter’s new show is titled Crass, but the man himself is anything but in real life, as I found as he spoke to me from his home town of Manchester.

Stephen Bailey. Picture: Tom Pitfield
Stephen Bailey. Picture: Tom Pitfield

“I love a live audience, I just love that you get an immediate reaction,” he says, “like you can feed off of their energy to give even more back.

“And my favourite bit about it is you’re the start of someone’s night out really, so you set the tone for how the rest of their weekend’s going to be.”

Stephen, 37, whom I previously saw perform stand-up at The Maltings in Ely in 2022, notes that he used to cite Glasgow, Leicester and Manchester as his favourite UK cities in which to perform – “but now I’ve definitely opened my horizons,” he explains.

“Like there’s not anywhere, which I think is a good sign, where I’ve said so far ‘oh, I wouldn’t go back there’.

“I really like everywhere… what I like actually is I think you have ideas where you go ‘Cambridge is a bit posh, Oxford is a bit posh, Bath’s a bit posh’ and then you think certain places look like they’re going to be on fire...

“But I feel like once you get to all these places, you realise that actually we have more in common than we don’t – so it’s a nice thing really, to go: ‘I don’t think we’re that divided as a country’.”

I thought Stephen may not like being described as ‘lovable’. Turns out I was wrong.

“I love being lovable!” he exclaims. So the rising star of stage and screen (television appearances include Coronation Street, Tipping Point: Lucky Stars, Richard Osman’s House of Games and Celebs on the Farm, which he presents) doesn’t want to be considered ‘edgy’ or ‘out there’?

“No I really don’t,” he replies, “my dream in life is to be really basic and mainstream so that everyone loves me.

“And I will say actually about my shows, I honestly thought all my audience members would be really hot gay men – it’s not, there’s more straight people than gay people at my shows. I don’t know where it’s all gone wrong…”

Describing his new show Crass, Stephen says: “The way I like to word it is it’s basically like having a night out at the local carvery with your closest friends – the people that you would only trust to say certain things to.

“You’d have to be a moron to not know what’s going on in the world or the country; it’s hard – it’s a really hard point in time, I sort of just want everyone to switch off for two hours and just have a laugh and a bit of light relief. And I think we deliver on that in this show.

“I feel like let’s leave the issues at the door, and it’s just good, observational humour, I think.”

Stephen Bailey. Picture: Tom Pitfield
Stephen Bailey. Picture: Tom Pitfield

Stephen notes that much of the show’s material centres around his “cringiest stories” and he also touches on his six years working at Sainsbury’s.

“I will never stop talking about Sainsbury’s!” he says. “It is a wealth of knowledge, although some of the stories that I’ve got left, I’m going to have to start saying ‘when I worked at a supermarket’ because I don’t need them to come and bite me in the bum.”

At what point did Stephen decide to try and make it as a stand-up comedian? “I moved to London after I’d graduated uni and finished at Sainsbury’s,” he recalls, “and I was working in production, in TV, and I thought ‘I don’t want to be serving people coffee’.

“I remember once having to go and get a salad for Jameela Jamil and I really didn’t want to do it…

“And then I was moaning about it so much that people were like ‘oh God, you’re so funny, you should try stand-up’, like people used to always just say ‘try stand-up’.

“I sat on it for about a year and then I was like ‘OK, I’m going to try stand-up one day’ so I just did it.

“I didn’t know what to talk about, I had never had any experience, but my friend who I lived with at the time, she was very, how do we say this… she dated a lot of men at the same time – so I told people that on stage and they really laughed, and I thought ‘oh, there’s something in that’.

“Then as I was developing more and more, I tried to write jokes where it’s like ‘everyone’s got a Nectar card, everyone’s got this’ – and then a friend of mine was like ‘your natural everyday stories are so funny, I would just start there and work backwards’ – so that’s what I did.”

Stephen Bailey, hailed as a “superstar in the making” by British Comedy Guide, will be bringing Crass to the Cambridge Junction (J2) on Friday (19 April).

[Read more: Alex Lingham of Anglia Comedy: ‘I took that well-known path from construction to comedy’]

Tickets, priced £18, are available from junction.co.uk. For more on Stephen, go to stephenbaileycomedy.co.uk.



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