Bill Bailey at the Riverside Studios

Earlier this evening I saw Bill Bailey at the Riverside Studios after being invited at the last minute, prompting a mad dash across London and arriving with just minutes to spare before the performance started.

As it was a solo show and a warm-up before his forthcoming performances at Wembley there was no “support” comic and Bill just wandered onto the stage to rapturous applause. The gig was weird and the material variable in quality. I’m not sure if it was because Bill was still working on his set but he seemed a little nervous throughout, although this might have been aided by the near-constant audience participation. There was no heckling but people were adding their own thoughts to the performance, myself included; I accidentally halted a joke about Dawkins’ The God Delusion when Bill asked for opinions on it and I gave a short answer that seemed to intimidate the rest of the crowd. Despite incidents like this, he managed to waffle on in his own whimsical manner and keep the crowd entertained, which shows the mark of a true comic unlike a cock like Gervais, but it just seemed to unnerve him and the performance lacked the confidence you see in his work on DVD.

I’m hoping he carries on working on this set as there was material repeated from much older performances and I’m not sure if it was the delivery or the material, but it lacked the polish I’ve come to expect from Mr Bailey. Even his encore was weird as during that awkward “walk off and shuffle back on 3 minutes later” period he played a silent video montage of callbacks of the entire show, just in case you’d missed a gag. So kind of like the ending of each Saw movie, but without the insta-grunge filter and quick edits.