Bill Bailey
Comedian and musician
Telesales. I refused to wear a tie, but my argument that “They can’t see what we’re wearing” didn’t wash with the manager and I lasted a week.
What is the worst job you have done?
Question
What most recently made you cry?
Identity & self
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
Question
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
Failure & regret
Question
Aside from a property, what is the most expensive thing you have bought?
Money & investment
Question
What would you like to be remembered for?
Death & what remains
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's long-running Q&A repeatedly asks this standing question, with minor tense variation.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Selling stolen mangoes to pay for a cinema ticket, aged eight.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 29 September 2018 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 232 →Leafleting for a window company when I was 12. I remember putting them through letterboxes thinking: I’m going to sell drugs, because this is rubbish.
Frank Cottrell-Boyce
British screenwriter, novelist and actor
I spent an advent in my late teens throttling turkeys.
When I was younger, I signed up to a job agency and thought I would be doing secretarial work, but they assigned me to clean toilets in a factory in Oldham.
More from Carlos Acosta
View profile →A few nights ago I was crying in my sleep, dreaming of my dead parents.
In 1989, in Cuba, about to board a plane for Milan, where I was going to school for a year. The visa didn’t arrive in time, so I couldn’t board. The plane crashed and people died.
The time I told my father I hated him, causing him a lot of pain. He passed away six years ago, and my mother eight years ago.
A 1955 Jaguar XK120. It was not in very good condition and, little by little, I brought it back to its former splendour.
As someone who made a difference.
More on craft & work
- What do you consider your greatest achievement? 193 answers
- How does a new work begin for you? 70 answers
- How do you know when a piece of work is finished? 69 answers
- What do you do when you feel creatively blocked or stuck? 69 answers
- How much rewriting or revision do you do? 51 answers
- What is the part of your job that people would be surprised is most of your job? 47 answers
Also answered this
David Harewood, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Ralf Little, Adjoa Andoh, Michael Flatley, Cybill Shepherd
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All craft & work questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject