Jim Bailey on the Carol Burnett show

[Anthony Simon]

Like a lot of people here, I suppose, I trawl the internet for stuff about CDing/female impersonation etc. So Jim Bailey was a fairly amazing exemplar and I've just been looking at his stuff to see how he converted his male face into a variety of female ones.

This has led me to look at his videos (there's one with a shortened version of him doing his makeup). For some reason I kept coming back to this one (partly, I think, because I craved the dress and the hair):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5h2gYb_Y6jM

The way Carol Burnett kept hanging onto him, with their arms interlocked, kept coming back to me. In the end I decided she was saying, in this physical move, that she thought he was precious. And then it occurred to me that people out there should see us in something like that sort of light is just what we crave.

[DonnaT]

He was good!

Died last year

[Anthony Simon]

Yeah, he was only 77.

I don't know, I guess this is a bit crazy, but the extraordinary level of what he did - like such a voice, some of his amazingly convincing impressions - seem to kind of break the bounds and give him an afterlife.