For Jim and Nancy Moir, life is one big avian adventure. The celebrity couple talk to Deana Luchia about mallards, puffins and paint...
For many people, Jim Moir will always be Vic Reeves, his comedic alter ego.
Alongside comic partner Bob Mortimer, he enjoyed huge TV success for decades: the pair are revered for their anarchic mayhem and whimsy in shows such as Shooting Stars and Vic and Bob’s Big Night Out, which was last on our screens in 2019.
Since then, Jim Moir (his real name) has turned his focus to painting and birdwatching, combining these twin passions in his most recent TV show, Painting Birds with Jim and Nancy Moir – a collaboration with his wife, the actress, model and presenter Nancy Sorrell. Two series aired on Sky Arts a couple of years ago.
If you’ve never seen the show, take a look – some of the episodes are available on YouTube.
Jim and Nancy Moir
Jim and Nancy’s exuberance and enthusiasm for birdwatching and the countryside will have you reaching for your binoculars or paintbrush. Or both. And this boundless positivity is much in evidence when I zoom in on them at their home in Kent. It makes them, I feel, the perfect guides to the wonders of the great outdoors.
For Jim, the apprenticeship has been long. Originally from Leeds, he moved to County Durham when he was five and spent a lot of his time in the countryside.
“It’s just where I was happiest,” he explains. “Looking at birds…messing about making rope swings. I was one of those boys who wasn’t interested in football. So there was a small group of us, or sometimes just me on my own, who would go and explore the countryside instead.”
Nancy hails from Chigwell, in Essex, a hop, skip, and a jump away from Epping Forest. Yet it wasn’t until she met Jim, almost 25 years ago, that she became an avid walker and birder.
Jim and Nancy Moir
Today, her delight in birdwatching is contagious. She beams when she talks of holding a kingfisher, enthuses about the cuteness of goslings – she calls them Ryan Goslings, after the Canadian actor – and reveals her excitement “when Jim says we’re going to go and look for a nightingale”.
I vow to pick up my bird book and get outside as soon as we’ve finished chatting.
Birdwatching is something anyone can do. You don’t even need binoculars to spot some birds, says Nancy.
“That’s the great thing about it. Anybody can look out of their window and see birds. They’re everywhere.”
In their TV show, Jim painted the birds that he and Nancy spotted. A skilled artist, he attended art school before focusing on comedy and now paints every day in his studio at home. It is not only a joy but a compulsion.
“If I didn’t paint anything on a particular day, I would feel that something was wrong. So I kind of have to do it.”
Today, he says, began the way most other days begin.
Jim Moir painting
“I woke up about 4.15 with loads of ideas [for paintings] in my mind. So I got up and started making them happen.”
He’s successful too, frequently selling paintings and prints, and his subjects are incredibly varied – not only birds, but also actors, musicians and monarchs.
“I don’t know where the influences come from, but they fly at me from all angles, at all times of the day,” he says.
The comedy with which Jim is indelibly associated shows up in many of his works. Hardly surprising, given that he has always seen the two media – comedy and painting – as interchangeable.
Many of his TV sketches, he insists, could equally well have ended up in picture form instead. It was circumstance – the failure of the BBC to recommission Vic and Bob’s Big Night Out – that finally persuaded him to focus fully on art.
“I could see the way that TV was going; that not many people were getting commissioned to do anything. So I kind of planned ahead and decided to go back to just painting. It’s my full-time profession now.”
Jim and Nancy Moir
That said, he’d love to do another bird show with Nancy; to share that passion for nature, the joy of spotting a rare bird or seeing a common species in a new light. I hope he gets his wish. Not only is it the kind of positive, fun TV that we could all do with right now, but it would also inspire us to get out and about.
As for working together as husband and wife, the couple have no problem at all. It’s easy, they insist, because they are each other’s best friend.
“We’re together all the time,” says Jim. “We’re like a little bubble and the rest of the world is outside it.”
I don’t often interview couples – it’s not the easiest of conversations, making sure that each person has equal time to talk – but these two are a dream, bigging each other up, laughing easily, finishing each other’s sentences.
They take it in turns to tell me a story about a recent boat trip on the Norfolk Broads and their sightings of otters and bats, as well as their views on the sadly underappreciated mallard.
When Jim points out that mallards are the only ducks that quack, Nancy quacks on cue. When Nancy tells me how much she loves the sound of a widgeon, Jim obliges reciprocally and makes the appropriate noise – whatever a widgeon sound is called, he’s spot on.
“I’ll do the puffin,” says Nancy, continuing the imitative theme. “It sounds a bit like Kenneth Williams, doesn’t it?”
She nails it exactly: the noise that comes forth is Kenneth Williams to a tee. Or, as Jim points out, Dot Cotton.
I could merrily spend all day with this pair. But they have birding and painting to do, a walk in the countryside to enjoy. Before they go, however, I can’t resist asking them for the secret to such joy and contentment. The answer is entirely predictable.
“Just look up and enjoy what’s around you,” says Nancy. “Nature makes you feel fantastic.”
For Jim’s art visit: Jimmoir.com
Bird watching nearby
Are you new to birdwatching? Don’t get in a flap. We have plenty of accessible sites on our patch...
London Wetland Centre in Barnes has six hides for keen birders. Lapwings, shovelers, bitterns, kestrels and sedge warblers have all been spotted this summer.
- Thorpe Park isn’t just rides. Owing to the bodies of water that surround it, the Chertsey theme park also plays host to such waterfowl as widgeons, common pochards, common terns and little ringed plovers.
- Windsor Great Park’s forests, heaths, lakes, ponds and wetland make it a favourite spot for cormorants, gadwalls, fieldfares, herons and great crested grebes.
- Epsom Common boasts over 100 different types of birds that visit or live year-round on the nature reserve. Head here to spot wrens, woodpeckers, herons, blue tits and great tits.
