Bill Bailey talks to Steve Pratt about his life as an actor, musician, comic and TV and radio presenter

BILL BAILEY is back on tour with his show Qualmpeddler, although the places he’s visiting – Newcastle and York among them – are rather less exotic than his recent travels. The comedian, musician, actor, TV and radio presenter and author (to name but a few) has been living the wild life for a BBC2 documentary series about an explorer and naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, he considers has been “airbrushed out of history”.

He travelled in Indonesia and Borneo exploring the life and work of Wallace, Darwin’s rival in the race to crack evolution.

That follows wildlife series such as Wild Thing I Love You (about protecting Britain’s wild animals) and Baboons With Bill Bailey (no prizes for guessing the subject of that series).

“The Wallace film about the Victorian explorer was a labour of love. It took about five years to get it made,” says Bailey of the two-part series seen on BBC2 last month.

While that was being shown he was preparing to hit the road again with the 2013 UK tour of Bill Bailey: Qualmpeddler, which he’s already taken around Australia and New Zealand. The press down under decided this showed Bailey as “a true 21st Century polymath”, adding “A unique comedic gift, a pitch-perfect musician, a talented actor… all this makes for a show that is at once funny, incisive and musically astonishing”.

All of which makes the show difficult to describe, except to say it obviously showcases the many talents of this particular performer. His qualms are about the modern world and he’ll be channeling these feelings of unease and apprehension into Qualmpeddler. It sounds like the sort of show you need to witness rather than try to describe.

The tour will keep him busy, except for a break in the summer, until November.

“You have to be prepared in many ways, mentally obviously and physically. It can be quite gruelling touring,” he says.

“You are spending a lot of time away from home. I do a show every night for twoand- a-half hours and it’s not just me sitting on a sofa. There’s a lot of leaping about. You have to be quite fit. I didn’t think about it when I was 22. You worry about what you eat. You can very easily end up eating Cornish pasties all the time.”

The venues he’s visiting are theatres and concert halls but not arenas, which he doesn’t think are the best places to do comedy (although, as comedians know, they are the best places to make a lot of money).

“I’ve played all around the country and in various parts of the world but I get the feeling having done and seen comedy in arenas that comedy is not best served by the giant, enormous arenas,” he says.

“There’s sometimes a sense of occasion, that it’s a very big show. I have done that and put a big show on. But they can be very echoey, lonely, draughty places.

You’re just talking into a microphone.”

Qualmpeddler is no minimalist show with its comedy, music, dance and probably a few other things that resist being categorised.

The show has been honed Down Under. The set pieces, he says, require a lot of time along with the film inserts, animations and film section. They all take time to figure out the best way to perform.

“The stand-up thing is very fluid. I get bored with doing something so I do something else. It moves along quite a lot.

There’s topical material. Things happen in the news that I end up putting into the show. There’s a lot of visual elements and music, obviously, in the linking sections.”

Some of the material has a shelf life.

What’s absolutely number one one week sounds a bit old hat the next. So he tends to write shows not about issues of the day but more about his own experiences in such matters as history, language and travel.

“When you start out you don’t really know what you’re doing. You’re just trying to get laughs. Then you do a bit of travel and experience things. It takes a long time to get to that point but when you get there you think, ‘this is it’.

“I did chicken out of what I was going to do sometimes. I had worked out some routines and in the middle of a gig abandoned it and started to make fun of it and realised what I wanted to do.”

He is, he admits, very analytical about comedy. “I like to pull something apart, find out what the nature of the comedy is about. The idea of a joke and how it works in a traditional sense. That idea – three blokes go into a pub sort of thing –is all you need.”

Like many other comedians, he’s discovered people in Australia and New Zealand like British humour. Australia particularly, he says, has become much more Anglophile in its comedic tastes.

“That’s partly due to YouTube. That’s really had an impact on people’s comic sensibilities.

They audition you and figure out what you do. People become aware of you,” he explains.

They know him for more than comedy in Australia. His Wild Thing series have been particularly popular. Once it’s “out there on the net”, it never dies.

The Wallace documentary and his TV forays into wildlife aren’t an indication that Bill Bailey the comic is going to disappear.

“Comedy is what I do,” he says.

“Everything else is a bonus. That’s why I get up in the morning.

􀁧 BILL BAILEY: QUALMPEDDLER Newcastle Theatre Royal, June 3-5. Box office 08448-112121 and online theatreroyal.co.uk

York Barbican: Oct 30-31. Box office 0844-8542757 and online yorkbarbican.co.uk