He may be on his way to superstar status - a film debut alongside Brenda Blethyn in Saving Grace, a burgeoning double-act with Dylan Moran in Channel 4's latest cult sitcom, Black Books - yet still Bill Bailey in the flesh looks like a Hawkwind roadie on a bad night.
This is not the only horrifying aspect of Bailey's all-new, post-Edinburgh tour. There is Carol Vorderman's saliva, for example, which Bailey has sampled from her consonant announcments on Countdown and gleefully replays at great amplification and reduced speed until it sounds like Richard Whitely being boiled in his own gastric juices.
Then there is an entire improvised section inspired by an afternoon visit to the dungeon-theme museum opposite the theatre. "I wanted to see the Pit of Despair" he complains. "But it was shut. Still, I spent some quality time in the Cafe of Misery and the Gift Shop of Disillusionment".
If there is anything resembling a theme to this year's show it's the concept of time; and if there's anything wrong with that it's because, in Bailey's company, it disappears too quickly. Alarmed at the apparent brevity of the first half, the audience could be seen checking their watches to discover that Bailey had been on stage for a good 50 minutes. It is simply that an hour at the speed of Bailey's thought seems barely the length of a quick tea-break.
Perhaps it's because Bailey has been reading a Brief History of Time - in the spirit, he explains, of relaxed empiricism, whereby if someone vaguely describes what might have been the case he is prepared to believe it. So if Steven Hawking concludes that the universe is saddle-shaped, he'll accept that on the basis that Hawking is the cleverest man on the planet.
Surprisingly, Bailey spends more of this show behind a mic stand than at his synthesiser: which is a pity, because the sheer joy of hearing him mutate the Moonlight Sonata into a cockney knees-up cannot be surpassed. Nevertheless, his aural demonstration of the ambulance sirens of Europe is a new tour-de-force. "Out of the way everyone", it seems to proclaim: "baldy-beardy genius sauntering through".
Bill Bailey is at the Junction, Cambridge (01223 511 511), tomorrow, then tours to Sheffield and Leeds.
