Will the real Bill Bailey please stand up?

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/jul/11/bill-bailey-standup-comedy-paddleboarding

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Bill Bailey is wearing sort of all-purpose water wear (it’s not a wetsuit, but it is figure-hugging like one). He is standing up, looking towards the horizon, much like the captain of a solid, seaworthy vessel - except that he’s on a paddleboard, only one and half times his own length. I, meanwhile, am clinging to my board, rigid, fingers splayed, like a stupid dog on a raft. At this stage, I am still pretending to interview him as we go, a ridiculous pantomime that I give up about 40 seconds later. Mainly, I just want him to paddle off so I can be saved.

“You’ll find that keeping your balance [ha!] can be tough over an hour or so,” he says. “Every time I get on a board, there’s an initial process where you have to recalibrate your balance, then you relax into it and get into a rhythm. You can stop looking at your feet and you’re in that zone.”

Standup paddleboarding (SUP) has been popular in the US for many years and came over here around eight years ago. It’s a relative of surfing, with a nod to kayaking; you simply stand upright on a board and propel yourself forward with a paddle.

“It started in the Fifties in Hawaii, but really,” Bill Bailey muses (he muses a lot … it’s kind of his signature, high-octane musing), “When I saw these Aboriginal bark canoes in Australia, I thought, that’s the first paddleboard. There wasn’t much room on them to put anything in, you had to stand on it and punt. So it’s something humans have done for thousands of years.” The scene seems incongruous to me, partly because we are conducting our conversation out on the water, tantalisingly close to the civilisation of Marks & Spencer in Paddington but perilously prey to the depths of the canal (around 3 feet deep).

Bailey discovered SUP while on holiday with his son a couple of years ago, when someone gave him a racing paddleboard and he fell straight off it. This unaccountably filled him with enthusiasm for the sport, and now he goes regularly to his SUP club in Paddington, as well as independently with his son, with his Scandinavian neighbour and with a surprising number of other enthusiasts. I think you’d still call the sport fairly niche, but it’s got its own competitions, so surely mass uptake can’t be far off.

Bailey has a huge number of high-risk hobbies. “I like jetskiing, quadbiking, paintballing. Road bike cycling, I love that. I like going for a walk.” He sounds like an 18th century man of letters with an infinite amount of time and also Groupon vouchers. “When you’re doing those things, you’re thinking about jokes,” he insists. At the moment, he is on the cusp of touring a new show, Limboland, which he has already performed in Australia and New Zealand. “A lot of it is done,” he says, “but shows always change, they’re always in flux.” This is where a paddleboard comes in handy. Uncontactable, undistractible, concentrating but not concentrating, these are the perfect conditions in which to allow jokes to flow around other jokes.

Apparently a lot of comedians are this way; adrenaline-heads, favouring snow sports particularly for the elements of peril and alcohol. The other thing they always say about performers generally is that they’re much fitter than you’d think. Even if their whole shtick is that vanity is a stranger, and they never wash their hair, they cannot help but become refusnik-sporty through the sheer physical endurance of both performing and touring. “I forget, really,” Bailey says, “because I’m just so used to it. I tell people what my schedule is and I can see them recoiling, ‘You do what? You do 10 shows and then spend 15 hours getting to the next one?’.” And you can see his rude health, as well as his love of the water (he also dives).

Now Paul Hyman enters the water – he is the director of Active 360, the main paddleboarding company in the UK. “The first thing is to get you standing up,” he says, self-evidently. Or, of course, I could just be towed to the edge and dragged out like a plastic bag. “It’s much, much easier if you do it in one move.”

Gah. Of course he was right. It’s like pulling off a plaster or driving a skidoo across sheet ice; stealth doesn’t help. Only boldness will do. About a year later (well, 15 minutes), I was standing, and I never looked back; mainly because I didn’t really want to do anything rash like move my neck. No really, it’s not hard, once you’re on two feet. The paddling is easier than both punting (less weird) and rowing (cleaner angles). It’s one of those satisfying sports (do we call it a sport, yet? Oh go on then) that you can pick up quite fast, taking a five mile round-trip on your first go, while leaving substantial room for improvement. I could even turn my vessel around by the end of it.

“You look cool! Are you Bill Bailey?” many people yelled (with variations – sometimes just “Are you Bill Bailey?”) from the shiny little bridges that go over the canal. “Everywhere I go, now,” he said, “I just look for places to paddleboard. I went across Stockholm harbour: it’s a bit hairy because it’s quite choppy and there’s a Finland ferry just on the next bay. They use the water as a resource, as all European cities do. Thames water is quite barren in that regard. There’s a lot of working boats, but not people using it expressly for fun. Why eschew fun?”

We pelt along the water, past the scuzzy plastic bag area, alongside the houseboats, and in no time we’re in Little Venice, being self-righteously honked at by tourist boats. It’s uncannily like the atmosphere between (some) drivers and cyclists. Bailey rises above all that. “We went boarding once in the evening, and there’s so much light on the Thames you don’t really need safety lights. The wind drops. It’s a unique way of experiencing London. You can’t see it like this any other way.”

Then there’s the paddleboarding itself. “What I love is that it’s so straightforward – there’s not too much that’s technical, the only things you have to plan are practicalities; you check the tides, then you get dropped off, you pump up the board, you give the pump to someone. You paddle. And then someone has to pick you up at the other end.” He snorts in amusement at what he’s just said.

There probably aren’t many careers in the world so obviously packed with fun and meaning, so plainly rewarding, as being a standup comedian of international renown. But what seems to really delight Bill Bailey is the sheer charm of a life where he’s found both a ridiculously slow yet exhilarating hobby, and a person prepared to pick him up at the end of it.

Bill Bailey’s Limboland is touring the UK 4 October 2015 to 2 July 2016; billbailey.co.uk