Bill Bailey: a comic maestro of bits, bobs and barbs at the Tories

Bill Bailey performing at Latitude festival in Suffolk in 2021. Photograph: Dave J Hogan/Getty Images

Forty years into his performing career, you know what you’re going to get with Bill Bailey. Musical noodling: some comic songs, some batty instrumental experiments. Surrealist fancy. An approach to show construction for which the word meandering would suggest something altogether too dynamic. Bailey does what he, and not what anyone else, pleases. Give or take a victorious stint on Strictly, he didn’t get where he is today by dancing to anyone’s tune but his own.

His new offering, Thoughtifier, changes the formula not a jot, save for the occasional cameo from opera singer Florence Hvorostovsky to beef up this nihilistic birthday song or that ditty about Henry VIII. As someone who’s used to seeing Bailey onstage alone, it can’t not be interesting that he’s now got a sidekick with him. But Hvorostovsky – a glamorous contrast to our wurzelly main man – is only an intermittent presence here, in a show that focuses on giving Bailey’s adoring crowd (in this case at Brighton Centre) what they want. That could be the grumpy barbs at the Tory government that open the show (describing Rishi Sunak as “a poorly rendered AI cardigan”), or it could be the cheerful acknowledgment that most of us are as old and unadventurous as Bailey is. (“Anybody know any Taylor Swift?”)

This is not, then, a comic striking out into new terrain. Need it be? Bailey’s last show, En Route to Normal, was his first since Covid, and the relief to be back in front of live onlookers was palpable. It was also his first since winning Strictly, introducing his live work for the first time to an expanded audience. It wasn’t a sure thing that they’d like it. Bailey may be one of our biggest-name comics, a national treasure no less. But that status wasn’t inevitable. Watch his live work over the years, and you don’t see an act nailed on for fame. It’s homely, yes, and unchallenging – and sometimes joyfully funny. But it’s also eccentric, now and then crotchety, and nerdy too.

Having only recently reconnected with live audiences, then, and brought a load of new fans onboard, this might not be the moment for Bailey to switch up the shtick. But occasionally tonight, for we long-term Bill-watchers at least, the familiarity (including some same-old jokes about the West Country accent) feels a bit weary. So does Bailey himself in the first act, which finds our host getting miffed – or pretend-miffed – at the supposed unresponsiveness of the crowd. There are a few routines that land weakly here (like the one about nuclear fusion) and musical interludes that disappear before they really get going. But there’s also a very funny riff on false reports of Bailey’s death on Twitter, focusing more on the grammar than the gravity, and a precious audience participation sketch involving Bluetooth-enabled bouncing balls and a Phil Collins drum solo.

We’re in Bailey’s sweet spot with that one, where music happens in an unexpected way, and silliness is happily overlaid. The show’s finale attempts something similar, as the 59-year-old brings out his “laser harp” for a bit of classical/rave fusion. But, spectacular visuals aside, the connections the routine draws between Pachelbel’s Canon and house music remain elusive, and the comic payload refuses to detonate. No matter: we’ve been amply entertained by then, by a sweet comic song about supermarket romance and a very fine one-liner about Van Halen’s song Jump. There’s also a faux-French number (revived from Bailey’s last touring show) about a boy’s relationship with a pigeon, and an operatic duet with Hvorostovsky, sending up Carmen with stoopid subtitles.

At such moments, watching Bailey play Bizet on the piano, his new partner’s voice shaking the rafters and the jokes franchised out to an upstage screen – or later, when he wigs out for his encore, playing an Irish reel on a mandole – you can’t help but wonder whether he mightn’t like to be doing more of this, whether his musical style must sometimes feel cramped by the ambling, bits-and-bobs nature of his comedy. This, after all, is a man who once took the stage of the Royal Albert Hall to perform with the BBC Concert Orchestra – although even then, he pottered more often than he cut loose. Maybe his next live show will be an opera or oratorio of his own, making new demands on Bailey’s talents? Or maybe we’ll get more amiable tinkering in the spaces between music, whimsy and sound. If the latter, well, as he proves again in Thoughtifier, no one does it better.