When an international act announces a New Zealand tour it generally means a show in Auckland, sometimes Wellington and, if they’re lucky, Christchurch. When comedian Bill Bailey announces a New Zealand tour, he actually means New Zealand. Damn near all of it.
In November the beloved and irreverent funnyman will spend a month playing 14 shows across the land of the long white cloud. The genial pace sees him stopping in at usually overlooked spots like Nelson, Palmerston North, Hawke’s Bay and Invercargill. This can be considered a belated silver lining to Covid’s dark cloud.
“Because of the pandemic the UK was in lockdown in 2021 so the only place in the world where I could tour was New Zealand,” he explains. “So I came and did a tour in all of these places I’d never played before. I loved it so much I thought, ‘I’ve got to do that again’.”
Two years later, he’s making good on the thought. That show was titled En Route to Normal and was a welcomed blast of joy in an otherwise incredibly abnormal and dark time. He says the shows were some of his most memorable thanks to the good vibes generated by audiences overjoyed at finally having a night out after being locked down for so long. He was feeling much the same way as those that’d come to see him.
“My first night on stage was in Wellington. I literally hadn’t done any live gigs for a year. This is something I do all the time. I’m always working, always gigging, always doing shows. And honestly, I gotta tell you, I was overwhelmed,” he says. “It hit me. I got a little bit choked up and a bit tongue-tied because reconnecting with an audience like that was such an amazing experience. It made me realise why I love it, and how much I’d missed it. I guess it’s a bit of a lesson for us all. You don’t realise how much something means to you until it’s taken away.”
Then he laughs and says, “For a minute there, I was in a little bit of a wobble. But 30 years of touring experience eventually kicked in. I pulled myself together and managed to put on a show. It was fantastic.”
Bill Bailey performing live.
The flow-on effect of that tour is that we now fall outside of his usual touring cycle. This has allowed him to build a relaxed schedule and he’s already begun planning out how he’ll spend his free time.
“I’ve got a few things on the list. Maybe diving up the Poor Knights,” he smiles, thinking about Northland’s famed marine reserve. “I’d like to get down to Stewart Island again, maybe stay down there. It’s just so, so pretty. There are so many birds down there. We had a lovely time.”
This visit will be his eighth to Aotearoa. Between those and his hosting of TVNZ’s popular comedy panel show Patriot Brains I wonder if he’s beginning to feel like an honorary Kiwi.
“Yeah, I hope so,” he says. “I feel very much at home there. It’s one of the places I’ve loved to perform over the years. I find that the Kiwi humour is very similar to our humour in the UK. There’s a similar sense of the absurd, a similar revelling in all of that, plus a healthy scepticism towards authority which I detect from most Kiwis. There’s a proud connection with the land and an outdoorsy, can-do spirit, which I really like. It’s a beautiful country, and I’m an outdoorsy person.”
Comedian Bill Bailey. Supplied for TimeOut.
The new show is called Thoughtifier and can be considered a direct response to all the doom and gloom in the news and on our social feeds. He describes it as positive, upbeat and celebratory. The classic Bill Bailey-esque absurdist twist on this is that he’s in such good spirits about humanity’s many flaws.
“Like a lot of people, I’m avidly reading all of these doom-laden reports about how humanity is doomed, how, AI is going to take over and we’re going to be rendered useless,” he explains. “I just think that now is a time to celebrate the fact that we are flawed and we are reckless and a bit stupid and clumsy.
“How can anything replicate that?” he says with comic exaggeration. “No thing would consciously replicate me as a perfect human. I’m a terrible template for a robot.”
He describes human thought as the last alamo of humanity in the AI revolution, saying that it’s our “random, stupid, completely bonkers thoughts,” that is the secret to humanity’s success.
“If you look at human history, it’s down to a lot of individuals who took risks, had a moment of insight, a moment of sheer brilliance of just a bit of blind luck,” he grins. “It’s something that has propelled us forward as a species. That’s the thing that fascinates me and inspired me to pursue this idea. This is what will keep the AI chatbots at bay.”
Comedian Bill Bailey is touring New Zealand in November.
As we talk about humanity’s flaws the conversation drifts to the Ukraine war (“Trench warfare, brutal grinding battles of bloody destruction, and death were something I thought we’d never see, again in our time”), the doomed Titanic submersible (“the flip side is that adventure sometimes doesn’t pan out. It was grim news, but humans are like this, we’re headstrong, sometimes reckless. We’re always looking to see what’s around the corner”) and people using AI to write a sitcom (“just terrible results”). But through it all he sounds in remarkably good spirits. Even optimistic.
“Yeah, I know,” he says, sounding genuinely bemused. “Probably with no reason. Like, everyone’s saying the world’s about to end. There’s potentially more pandemics with terrible superbugs lurking in the saliva of some bat somewhere about to bring us all down. There’s war. There’s bloody AI.”
Then, stifling his own laughter, he slips into the voice of disapproval.
“What? This bleeding bearded hippie… look at him. What’s he been smoking? He thinks everything’s gonna be fine?!? You idiot.”
Then he laughs loud and hard and says, “But that’s good. I don’t mind that. I’ve always seemed to be out of step with public opinion. I have always been bucking the trend.”
Then with a mischievous glint in his eye, Bill Bailey says, “When I’m doing that, I think I must be doing something right.”
Bill Bailey tours his new comedy show Thoughtifier around New Zealand in November. For dates and tickets visit bohmpresents.com
