Bill Bailey (I)

Video: Bailey 'horrified' at appearing nude by accident

Bill Bailey has described his horror on learning that a moment when he accidentally dropped his towel during filming had been included as a nude scene in his new romantic comedy, Chalet Girl.

The comedian was joined on BBC Breakfast by actress Felicity Jones, who plays Bill's daughter Kim in their film about a young woman who leaves home to work on a ski resort.

Chalet Girl, which also stars Sophia Bush, Ed Westwick and Bill Nighy, is released in the UK on 16 March 2011, rated 12A.

Leading up to the British Comedy Awards, Comic's Choice invited five celebrated comedians - Alan Davies, Sean Lock, Jo Brand, Jessica Hynes, Lee Mack - to choose a shortlist and winner from among their own personal past favourites. Bill Bailey played affable host, something he does effortlessly.

Forgetting for one moment the universally acknowledged truth that no comic truly enjoys any laughter they haven't themselves produced, the show's premise was flimsy in the extreme. Not to mention confusing - Alan Davies nominated Chris Morris as Best Breakthrough Act for work done in 1994.

Davies also took part in a film recreation of an unsuccessful audition he once attended, as gratuitous a piece of padding as I have seen in a long time. This lack of coherence was reflected in the meaningless studio set design which threw together leather armchairs, old boilers, stuffed elk heads and bicycles combined to create the effect of a gentleman's club located in a garage.

Basically Comic's Choice was yet another excuse to disinter old archive clips instead of producing fresh comedy. Although, having said that, the archive clips were rather excellent, so I'm not complaining too loudly.

On the face of it, Comic's Choice looked as if it was going to be negligibly mediocre. It had the kind of jaunty animated title sequence we've seen a hundred times before, and the pre-broadcast description indicated that it was yet another clip-show, one of those comedians-talking-to-comedians affairs that can occasionally make contemporary broadcasting look like a vast job-creation scheme for underemployed stand-ups. The saving grace here is that one of the comedians (the presenter one) is Bill Bailey. Not only can he play his own signature tune but he's got a manner that somehow makes the format work, which is handy for Channel 4, since it's on every night this week, as a curtain-raiser to the British Comedy Awards this coming weekend.

That's the premise. The British Comedy Awards do flavour of the month, while this short series explores more durable supremacy, with each guest nominating and selecting their best of the best in various categories. Last night, Alan Davies was in the selector's chair, and quickly demonstrated one problem with the structure of the programme, which is that there's no proof in comedy. Davies had nominated Dave Allen as Best Male Comic, on the strength of a live West End performance he once saw. But, of course, there was no clip of that, and even if there had been it may not have made his case for him. It doesn't hugely matter, though, because Bailey is affable and funny enough to fill the gaps - on great form last night pretending to sulk about one of Davies's other nominations, the "sexy little jazz weasel" Noel Fielding, who once bumped him off a captain's slot on Never Mind the Buzzcocks.

When actors talk warmly about other actors who inspired them, the results are embarrassing, as a rule. But the same doesn't apply to comedians, for some reason: get them talking about other comics and the results can be tart, revealing and funny. That's the idea here as part of the extra hoo-ha that Channel 4 is drumming up around next week's British Comedy Awards. The idea is that Bill Bailey chats to a different comedian each night about his or her comedy heroes. What are their all-time favourite shows and which comedian would they give their own personal award to? Bailey begins with selections from Alan Davies - always smarter than he pretends to be - and later in the week there's hero worship from Lee Mack, Jo Brand, Jessica Hynes and Sean Lock.

If you've decided to spend New Year's Eve on the sofa, this feast of funny will see you through a hefty chunk of the evening. Earlier this year, two dozen of the nation's finest comics performed at London's O2 Arena to raise money for Great Ormond Street Hospital. They included Bill Bailey, Alan Carr (both backed by Stomp), Ricky Gervais and Catherine Tate. Not that it'll affect your viewing experience at home but, in case you're interested, this comedy extravaganza (first broadcast in April) was the self-proclaimed biggest stand-up show in UK history.

I met Ronnie Corbett once. It was during my time as a gossip columnist on this paper. I spotted him at a party and, somewhat starstruck, decided to approach and introduce myself. He was all right, I suppose, though not terribly polite. He didn't, he sniffed, read The Independent. More of a Telegraph man (must be the jokes). Anyway, he's 80 now, and BBC2 has devoted a few hours of scheduling to the occasion. First up was a rerun of The Two Ronnies Christmas Special from 1984, and then Being Ronnie Corbett, a fawning programme of dedications. We got Matt Lucas and David Walliams, Catherine Tate and Michael Palin, Miranda Hart, Rob Brydon, Stephen Merchant, and Bill Bailey. Even Bruce Forsyth put in an appearance. They all heaped praise on him, and deservedly so. After all, it wasn't them he was rude to at a party, was it? And he's jolly funny, or used to be, back in the day. Repeated clips of The Frost Report and The Two Ronnies were testimony to that. His more recent stuff, less so. That Extras sketch is great, of course - "a bit of whiz, you know? To blow away the cobwebs" - but, really, Ronnie, Little Britain? "I was just grateful to be included," was his explanation. And, to be honest, I believe him. This is a man whose raison d'être has been making people laugh; of course, he wants to keep up with the times. Why else would he agree to cuddle a half-naked Lucas in the least funny show on television?

The BBC is onto a good thing by celebrating this comedy legend while he's still very much alive and kicking. National treasures are usually whored out by broadcasters until every last drop of funny (and money) has been squeezed out of them, or ignored until they've passed away.

With its subject still in the land of the living, the mood of the programme was celebratory and jovial, with Corbett himself appearing as the star talking head. Of course there was plenty of retrospect as he looked back over his career, but the fact remains that Ronnie has clearly retained all his faculties and is still a very funny man.

For those who enjoy analysing and dissecting comedy - as opposed to merely laughing at it - it was a sweet little study of what makes this man so funny. His height (or lack thereof) is, of course, a major factor, but his natural talent is undeniable.

Corbett looked back fondly and honestly on his long career, with the help of more fashionable comedians like Stephen Merchant and Rob Brydon. Happily, given the many programmes the BBC is dedicating to him over Christmas, he suffers neither from the startling arrogance, nor from the false modesty that seems to afflict so many stars.

It's true that his particular style of comedy isn't to modern tastes and the old clips will look like camp variety acts to young eyes, but with everyone from Miranda Hart to Bill Bailey claiming to have been inspired by The Two Ronnies, it's hard to deny their appeal.

Given the insight promised by the title Being Ronnie Corbett, it's tempting to make a Ronnie-esque joke about what the weather's like down there for the vertically challenged comedian, but I won't. That doesn't count...

Little Crackers, the title of Sky's specially commissioned comedy shorts, is something of a hostage to fortune, underlining the fact that the snap doesn't work in all of them and the jokes are sometimes a bit duff. But Bill Bailey's "Car Park Babylon" was very satisfying. Bailey played a technologically obsessed loner who finds himself on the receiving end of supernatural punishment, after failing to show sufficient Christmas spirit. This is a fairly standard template for a Christmas tale, I suppose, but the pleasure here came from the agency of his comeuppance, which wasn't some chain-clanking ghoul but a malevolent car park pay station. Having taken his last remaining cash - to the accompaniment of comically extended whirrings and clonks - the machine began to communicate with him through a tiny speaker, talking in ways that suggested Bailey wasn't its first victim. The last shot you saw was the machine in bleak subterranean isolation, the tinny sound of Bailey singing a desperate Christmas carol leaking from its innards.

The feast of comic shorts continues with Jo Brand and Bill Bailey's offerings. Brand whisks us back to 1972 - when she is a hormonal teenager in a strop because her parents have moved house and her beloved cat Fluff is missing. But it's when the fondue set comes out that things get really ugly. In Bailey's wonderfully zany film, he's a modern-day Scrooge who finds himself trapped in an underground car park when the technological world turns against him. Only through the voice in the pay-and-display machine will he find redemption.

The excellent Little Crackers series continues with two more autobiographical comic shorts. First, at 9.00pm, Jo Brand takes us back to 1972, a time when fondue sets were all the rage and the comedian was a hormonal teenager sulking because her parents had moved house. Then, in the second of tonight's instalments at 9.15pm, Bill Bailey plays a modern-day Scrooge who finds himself trapped in an underground car park.