Bill Nighy (13:39)
than William, Hey, William. I am a William, obviously, and I have never really been called William. William used to mean I was in trouble. My mother. I think my mother liked to call me William. I was named for my grandfather. Her father, she hated Billy. She had a brother, actually, called my Uncle Billy, but she hated Billy and she didn't want me called Billy. And if anybody came to the door and said, can Billy come out to play? She'd say, we have no billies here. And you can kind of measure, you can kind of judge how long people have known me. I've always been called Bill. But there is Bill, there's Billy, there's Will, which my dad favored because he felt it was a sort of Dickensian name like Will, and he wanted me to be called Will. But nobody ever called Me Will. And then, of course, come on, there's Willie, which my highly paid and high powered colleagues find difficult to survive. They're like children. I'm now looking at a room full of people almost choking, trying to stifle their laughter. Because Willy, obviously is a slang term for male genitalia. There are worse slang terms for male genitalia than Willy. But it's also my name. So you can imagine that can be problematic over the years depending on, you know, particularly at school, given that they couldn't do my second name either. So I would be Niggy or Nidge or Nux. I used to be called Nux because I had funny hands. So they would call me Nux Nye, which was another thing. And of course, nervous, as we've talked of before, nobody ever asked me when I got my first job as a professional actor, nobody ever asked me, what do you like to be called? So they just put Bill Nye in the program. And I never thought anything. I didn't think anything about it. So there I was and I was Bill. And then when I worked on a little bit and had a few jobs and I got a job on the radio, BBC Radio 4, and they actually said to me, what do you like to be called? And I said, I thought, oh, here we are. Because when I was a kid, I thought William was a bit, you know, naff. But as I grew older, I thought it sounded quite cool. You know, it's quite distinguished. William and BBC Radio were the first people who ever asked me this question. And they said, what do you like to be called? And I said, well, I'd like to be called William Nye. Sorry, that's mispronouncing my name. William Nighy. So they called me William Nighy on the thing. I'm kidding, of course, but actually the BBC announcer took about 30 years not to pronounce my name as Naiji, Naigi, Nyleen or Nigbee, which is fair enough. And then you would get people coming up to me saying, this is this bloke on the radio and he's called William Nye. And you go, yeah, well, that's me, you know. Anyway, so it didn't work out, so I went back to being called Bill. I think something's happened to Bill over the years. I think it's become okay. I think Bill was sort of not really that great for a while. And I think they mutate. I think names and other things, obviously in the language, they mutate over time and they become mistaken for something that's okay. And I think now Bill is sort of even, you know, I don't know. I don't get out much, but I think it's probably almost cool. But you're not a Bill, you're a William, so we'll stick with that. Thank you. Willy. I have been called Willy by people close to me, and it is a term of endearment and I really like it. And also when I talk to myself. Yeah, okay, yeah, I admit it. I talk to myself on a regular basis, particularly when I'm trying to encourage myself. If I get unnerved or scared, I always refer to myself as Willy. Okay? That is categorically too much information. No one needs to know that fact. But now you do. I know you want to turn back time, but it's too late. And now it's time again for our feature, a highly popular feature, I'm with the Band, where listeners send in the name of their teenage band and the lyrics to their signature song. And this week there's a contribution from Scott Brown in Dundee, Scotland. And he says, hello there. My submission for I'm with the Band. I used to play in a rock band called Writers I've Known. The name was taken from a line in J.D. salinger's Franny and Zooey, which I read not long after the band formed. The phrase was capitalized in the sentence for emphasis, and I knew immediately that I had to insist to my bandmates that we use it. It was often misheard by promoters and venues back when gigs were arranged over the phone as we were listed under names such as Waiters I've Known and Razors Unknown. Lyrics of one of our signature songs. Scott says, I can't recall the entire song, or rather my brain refuses to, but I came up with this line from a song called Cartwheels of Enthusiasm. And the line is your internal clock just melted like a Salvador Dali cliche at an art student party. Good God almighty, Scott, how did you fit that in? This was repeated several times over an extended buildup of palm muted guitar chords. Wow, that sounds good. We eventually abandoned singing altogether and became an instrumental rock band instead, much to everyone's relief. Well, that's very, very, very funny and very good, Scott. It reminds me of I read once that Bob Dylan and Sam Shepard, the playwright, sat down to write songs together and Sam Shepard would write out lines, and some of them were very, very long. They were collaborating on a particular line and Sam Shepard said, well, that's too long. And Bob Dylan said, don't worry, I'll get it in. Which is kind of thrilling because he could get anything in effortlessly. This episode's playlist is called it's okay I Caught up on Emails. And the first track is from Self Esteem and it's called Cheerfully Logic. And it's a very affecting lament, really, full of irony and grief with a beautiful musical setting. And then we've got a song from Beck, which is called Blue Randy, which starts with the lines, I was driving home in a Dodge Stratus to the contaminated side of town, which is not a bad way to start a song. The next song is from Guy Clark, who was a great country songwriter. And this is my favorite song of his and it's called My favorite picture of you. And it contains the lines, my favorite picture of you is the one where you're staring straight into the lens. Just a Polaroid shot someone took on the spot. No beginning, no end. It's just a moment in time you can't have back. You never left but your bags were packed. And the next song is by Craig Finn. And this is called Galveston. I really like the song very much and the lyrics are great, as you'd expect from Craig Finn, including the line, I was hoping Galveston was more like the song referring to the more famous song called Galveston by Glenn Campbell. And the next song is from another artist that I play a lot. She's called Jasmine Sullivan. Jasmine with a zed. And it's called Hurt me so good. And it's a I hate that I need you song. When you know how to hurt me so good, you know, that thing. Then there's a song from the artist that I thought I discovered and then realized that everyone I knew had been playing many years, which is a pattern in my musical life because I don't get out much. And it's only since I got a smartphone and started traveling that I discover artists that everyone else has known about for a thousand years. Anyway, Michelle and Degio, cello and outside your door, which is what we used to call in the old days a major groove. Actually, it's what we didn't used to call in the old days, a major groove. Lots of the things that you say we used to say in the old days, we didn't say in the old days at all. It's just an observation. That's the. It's okay. I caught up on Email's playlist. I hope it gets you through a cup of tea. This week's recommended book is Romantic comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld. All the titles and writers names will be included. In the show notes. And it is a romantic comedy and it's a very successful romantic comedy because it's very romantic and it's very funny and it's sort of backstage at Saturday Night Live kind of thing where one of the writers meets a pop idol, as it says on the back of the book. But it's not quite how you'd imagine a romantic comedy might proceed. It's a very satisfying book. I'll read a little bit from the very first page, which might give you an idea. It goes like this. You should not, I've read many times, reach for your phone first thing in the morning. The news, social media and emails all disrupt the natural stages of waking and create stress. Which is how I'll preface the fact that when I reach for my phone first thing one morning and learned that Danny Horst and Annabel Lily were dating, I was furious. I wasn't furious because I was in love with Danny Horst, or for that matter, with Annabel Lily. Nor was I furious because two more people in the world had found romantic bliss while I remained mostly single. And I wasn't furious that I hadn't heard the news directly from Danny, even though we shared an office. The reason I was furious was that Annabel Lilly was a gorgeous, talented, world famous movie star and Danny was a schlub. He wasn't a bad guy and he too was talented. But for Christ's sake, he was a TV writer, a comedy writer. He was a male version of me. He was pasty skinned and sleep deprived and sarcastic. And perhaps because he was male, or perhaps because he was a decade younger than I was, he was a lot less self consciously people pleasing and a lot more recklessly crass. After parties he was undisguisedly high or tripping. He referred often almost guilelessly, to both his social anxiety and his porn consumption. When he considered going on Rogaine, I had, at his request, used his phone to take pictures of the top of his head so that he could see exactly how much hair was thinning there. And when he applied the medication for the first time, I checked to make sure the foam was evenly rubbed in. And I was so familiar with the various genres of his burps that I could infer from them what he'd eaten recently. And now we come to the end of this episode of Ill Advised by Me. And I wish you well and thank you for listening and remember, it's nice to be important, but it's important to be nice. Bye bye everybody. Bye bye. Ill Advised by Bill Nighy is produced by Alice Williams and Chiara Gregori, with assistant production by Angelique Somers, pronounced Somas, and Charlotte Ross pronounced Ross. And it's an ipod. Studios production there's posh