Sometime around the second curtain call, you begin to wonder if Bill Bailey is ever going to leave the stage. There he is, bouncing up and down, leading the crowd in a singalong and bellowing at us about the value of the shared live experience. To all the established pleasures of a Bill Bailey gig, tonight’s adds the palpable sense of a man rejoicing to be back – however briefly – in front of in-person audiences.
That those audiences now include a quotient who know him mainly from Strictly Come Dancing is all part of the fun. Bailey’s act, after all, is the anti-Strictly, a non-mainstream confection free-ranging tonight across Polynesian tree snails, Rammstein riffs and the difference between hedonic and eudaimonic happiness. His genius is to bring arena-sized crowds along with this stuff by the force of his quirky enthusiasm and by neither pandering nor ever pretending to be anyone other than his idiosyncratic, off-the-beaten-path self.
He is certainly not bound by the convention that new shows (this one’s called En Route to Normal, ironically) contain wholly new material. Two of tonight’s comic highlights – a steel-guitar song about beating the devil at cards, and a skit setting Bailey’s domestic life to a heavy-metal soundtrack – are recycled from 2018’s Larks in Transit. But they amply repay a second viewing, and are crowded on all sides by bumper routines and anecdotes. Less so in the first half, where his theremin/iPhone duet feels like warming up. Quoting online reviews of Poundland, meanwhile, is by Bailey’s standards, well, cheap.
But his word-portraits of today’s rogues’ gallery of a cabinet are precious – as is a gag burlesquing the chaos of UK Covid regulations (“you can’t eat chicken in the bath – unless you’re wearing a onesie …”) By act two, Bailey has cut loose, with one zinging musical-comedy set-piece after another: Coldplay get a Turkish makeover, a vaudeville tribute is paid to the Last of the Cockney Sherpas, and our host croons a wannabe Eurovision chanson about un oiseau’s complex relationship with un petit garçon. Bailey clearly finds live audiences a joy to reconnect with – and the sentiment is warmly reciprocated.
At Bournemouth International Centre on 16 December. Then touring until 15 January.
