The two times comedian Bill Bailey 'died' while on tour

UK comedian Bill Bailey is heading back to New Zealand later this year with his new show, Vaudevillean.

The actor, multi-instrumentalist and multi-lingual performer is known for his roles in Never Mind the Buzzcocks, QI, In the Long Run and Black Books. He also hosted the debut season of New Zealand’s own panel show Patriot Brains.

Bailey told Sunday Morning when he heard the description of vaudeville – a type of entertainment popular in the late 19th and early 20ths centuries, including singing, dancing and comedy- it was a perfect fit for his shows.

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"When I've heard descriptions of my show as being 'this wouldn't look out of place in the 1890s'. I take that as an enormous compliment."

On his new tour, he's promising more music, more instruments (he's learning to play a traditional Swedish instrument called nyckelharpa as well as the aerophone) and involving the audience more.

But coming back to New Zealand, Bailey is trying to put one incident of a "terrible embarrassment" behind him. He recalls it as a "comedic parlance of dying on your ass".

About 30 years ago, Bailey agreed at the last minute to do a gig at an Auckland hotel after one of his shows.

"I didn't think about what the gig was, who the people were, what the whole gig was about.

"Never again did I make that mistake ... I went out there. My wife was there and [Irish stand-up comedian] Jim Owen... and he'd been on, and I was going on afterwards and then I went on.

"It was going down a storm and people were laughing away and slapping their thighs."

Before wrapping up, Bailey decided to play his 'Hats Off to the Zebra' song - a parody of 'Ebony and Ivory' by Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney.

"[The song lyrics were] 'they are black and white, they don't fight except for mating rights and territory'. It was a light-hearted look at mocking the whole notion of trying to bring different people together. But of course, little did I know that that was the entire point of the evening.

"And honestly, I've never known a gig [to] just turn around. It was a 180 kind of [turn] and it ended up shuffling off to silence. Jim Owen still talks about it now."

The second time Bailey remembers 'dying' is when the BBC infamously wrongly reported he had died.

"I remember reading it, looking at this sort of thinking, 'wait, what?' And the curious [thing] was what people's reaction was. I mean, my tour manager phoned me up when he read it and he asked me if I was all right. Well, I'm not dead. So that's an immediate bonus.

"It was very odd and it turned out it was another Bill Bailey. It was a Bill Bailey in America, who was a much-loved DJ in Kentucky...

"I mean, I thought for a good while I was actually dead, technically dead and I could have actually gone on and I think back now I could have gone shoplifting or something," he joked. "I was dead, perfect alibi."

Living in a three-generation household, the author of Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to British Birds and My Animals, and Other Animals also has a fondness for taking care of all sorts of animals, including three-banded armadillos, ducks, chickens, rabbits, partridges, pheasant, sunbirds, lizards, frogs, hanging parrots, black cockatoos, palm cockatoos and more.

His love of animals has raised suspicions with police, when their geodesic dome of exotic birds and greenery registered a high heat signal, he says.

"We got regularly visited by police helicopters. They would come and hover directly above the garden. I'm sure they thought they'd hit upon some sort of marijuana farm ... I would go outside and wave at them and then they would eventually leave.

"So we've decided to simplify our lives a little bit, Jim, and make life a bit easier. So currently we have parrots and lizards."

At one point, a Malay Game chicken, called Kid Creole, "double ninja kicked" him and became vicious, he says. The breed is "two and a half, three feet off the ground, vast, great long-necked velociraptor type things" and used to be bred for fighting.

"He was fine with everyone else. It was just me. Of course, no one believed me. They just said, 'oh, yeah, the chicken attacked you, Bill. Yeah, 'course it did'...

"I was a prisoner in me own home. I couldn't go out in the garden. He would just run at me. And no one believed me. This went on for years."

During the pandemic, one of his chickens caught the attention of people when it crossed live to a TV channel instead of Bailey after his slot was unexpectedly bumped up.

"It took me a few minutes to get to the laptop, during which time one of the chickens had jumped up onto the back of the chair and his head leaned round into the laptop camera.

"So when they said and 'live from West London, Bill Bailey', there was just a big chicken's face in in the camera, just peering into the camera. And on the screen, it just said 'Bill Bailey'.

"I never lived that one down."

Bill Bailey is on tour across 13 cities in New Zealand between 29 October and 23 November.