Why do even big-name comedians make
their own pre-entrance “Please welcome...” announcements? Partly, I
suspect, so that they can get some material out of it, as Bill Bailey
did at the top of the second half of his press-night performance. It’s
five years since I last saw a full show of Bailey’s, and I still
recognise some of the material: it may be a different techno backing
with different George Bushisms sampled on top, but the principle is
clearly the same. The
Tinselworm
tour itself has already spawned a DVD, so there is a sense of stuff
being retired here as he prepares to move on; exit Bush, enter the
beginnings of an Obama segment.
The half-stoned surrealism – what former
Never Mind The Buzzcocks presenter
Mark Lamarr once summed up as “cheese and weasels” – is much less in
evidence now. (Bailey himself has since also quit that TV comedy quiz.)
The driving vision is the same, but there’s a sharpness now, at times
even a touch of viciousness. His routine about Swiss banks and Nazi
gold, for instance, is so genuinely motivated and so mordant that it
would not be out of place in a Mark Thomas show. His phrase-making has
also moved further to the fore, as he casually revels in phrases like
“slack-jawed Luddites” to describe shoppers at self-service supermarket
tills, or decries “horse-faced drivel-monger” Lionel Richie (“I know,”
he admits, “pot/kettle”).
The eclecticism of Bailey’s material is as delightful as ever: having
opened with a seemingly new bit about bouncy castles, he works up to a
pitch where he can switch topics in seconds from the Large Hadron
Collider at CERN to postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard without
straining. I doubt that more than a handful in the audience spotted
that, in one of his foreign-language outbursts, he has also taken the
time to work out what the German is for “pretty please”. And the music,
of course, holds everything together (want to hear some Country and
Western played on an oud? – Bailey’s your man), to the extent that his
pacing backwards and forwards suggests that he feels slightly ill at
ease when not behind an instrument. My last review of Bailey worried
that “reliable” can be a double-edged term; so it can, but one of those
edges is positive.
Written for the Financial
Times.