Bill Bailey on AI and cancel culture: ‘So tedious. It’s just absolute teacup, storm’

The comedian and ‘Strictly’ winner talks to Jasper Rees about bombing on stage, hosting the BBC’s new talent show and why he thinks the art of comedy is somewhere between folk music and papier-mâché workshops

Bill Bailey: ‘When somebody else has a bad gig, it goes round like wildfire. People would delight in it!’ (PA)

Halfway through our hour together, Bill Bailey stops talking and starts coughing. One hand shutters his mouth and is then clasped in place by the other. The pale blue eyes, default-set to bulge even when he’s at his most chilled, flare open ever wider. That roundheaded cranium of his, backed by grizzled fronds of cavalier frizz, tinges pink. Still the coughs come, deep and guttural and alarming, until eventually they end.

“Do you know what this is?” he says, having caught his breath. “I’ve had a whooping cough for the last four weeks. It’s the most terrible thing. I thought it died out in the 1880s. I thought only pasty Victorian urchins got it but no, Muggins managed to get this thing, just pre-tour.”

It first manifested while he was on holiday in a mountain shack in central Indonesia. “You can’t breathe and you start choking and then you try to inhale air and you make this terrifying death rattle and people think he’s a goner.” The convalescent phase, he has been advised, can last for 10 weeks. His current tour, which has already been to New Zealand and is about to take him all over the UK and the rest of Europe, starts any day. He’s prepped a disclaimer in case there’s an episode mid-performance.