Bill Bailey answers the phone from the offices of his production company in West London, not far from his home. It’s been a long morning of press interviews already – or in Bailey’s words, he’s been “blithering on about myself in a rather increasingly less comprehensible way”. After a couple of coffees, he warns, he may not be making any sense. “If I start rambling uncontrollably, you’ll have to just – ‘Bill! You’re taking nonsense!’ – reign me in.”
While I consider the gross unlikelihood of me interrupting this immensely loved British comedian, no matter how far he embarks down a particular tangent, he’s already launched into talking about what’s been a busy 2014 so far. For a man who’s most visible (to Australian audiences at least) through his television ventures, from Black Books to QI, the year has been relatively TV-free.
“I’ve really been focusing on the live stuff the last year, particularly after I made this documentary for BBC [Jungle Hero] about Victorian naturalist Alfred Wallace,” he says. “An extraordinary thing happened as a result of that; I ended up in the Natural History Museum in London with David Attenborough, who’s probably one of my greatest heroes, unveiling a statue of Wallace in the Darwin Garden.
“That sort of took over the whole [of 2013], really, and this last year I’ve been touring in Europe, which is another first – I’ve been performing in Scandinavia and the Baltic states; ex-Soviet countries, places I’ve never been before. So it’s been quite a year of firsts and revelatory experiences.”
Bailey’s next endeavour is to debut his Limboland stand-up show on Australian shores this month, taking in the Sydney Opera House during the Just For Laughs festival. Like a lot of his shows, he says, there’ll be anecdotes, music and tales of travel – one of Bailey’s greatest passions – but the subject matter will be “more reflective and personal” this time.
“A lot of it is about recollection of the last few decades of my own life, and the name implies also a state of unknowing, a pivotal point in my own life, and looking forwards as well as back – so it’s not a negative thing, it’s a state of weightlessness, if you like.
“Calling it Limboland is saying this is a country, this is a place perhaps we all inhabit – a place of not knowing what is what, and increasingly [so] in a world where the sort of absolute institutions or the things upon which I would rely and also think were unimpeachable were now revealed to be flawed and corrupt and completely not as we see them. So there’s sort of an acceptance of that and maybe a finding your own truth in it in your own life, and part of it is having fun with that.”
Speaking of perceptions versus reality, Bailey used to tell a joke about members of the public who couldn’t believe a celebrity like him would be walking around like ‘normal’. “When they see me taking the bins out or going to the shops, they just look at you like, ‘How can you be doing this?’” he says.
“There’s a huge gap in that perception [between celebrity and reality]. It’s probably bolstered by the fact there are a lot of people in the public eye that are like that, and a lot of people that do like to have all the trappings of fame; they like to have minders and people to give themselves a sense of their own importance. I don’t know, I find them to be a bit hollow, and not only a bit hollow, it’s fake. It’s a strange oddity, and maybe that’s another limbo – the nature of fame. It’s so fickle and transitory, you have to see through that.”
Catch Bill Bailey’sLimbolandatJust For Laughs 2014atPlayhouse,Sydney Opera Houseon Thursday October 16, tickets online.
