The comedian, musician and author has just released a book about birds which he wrote and illustrated himself and has arrived in Australia for his Larks in Transit tour, a collection of travellers’ tales compiled over 20 years as a travelling comedian.

“I’m obsessed with birds at the moment, they’ve taken over my life,” he tells Weekender from Dublin.

“Just last week I finished a book on birds. Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to British Birds. I wrote the thing when I was on tour and I illustrated it myself too, so I’ve done all the drawings and notes.

“It’s good when you’re touring to have something to focus on, to distract you, because it gets pretty relentless. Sitting down and sketching for a couple of hours can be quite therapeutic. 

“I love drawing and I used to get involved with the design of posters, DVD covers, that kind of thing. I tend to get very hands-on with that.”

Bailey is a classically-trained musician known as much for his acting and television presenting abilities as his stand-up comedy. He is a talented guitarist and pianist and has, he says, “perfect pitch”. 

When asked if there is anything he is not good at, he is quick to answer.  

“I tell you what, there’s something I used to like doing and I must admit I have really neglected, and that is anything to do with home improvements,” Bailey says. 

“I had this vivid memory just the other day of hanging a door in the house, putting up some shelves and putting some skirting in – I used to do all that.

“And then what happened was that I had a wobble. I lost confidence. I tried to make a mailbox to hang on the back of the front door to catch the mail. We’ve got an outer door, then a passage way and then a side door, and all the mail was just falling through and if it rained the mail would just turn to mush.

“So I made this mail box, worked all day on it and I was really pleased with it. So I’ve hung it on the back of the front door and the thing was so big that the door wouldn’t open.

“I completely misjudged it. You couldn’t actually get in or out of the house but the mail was fine, dry as a bone.

“We ended up burying the cat in it. I thought I was making a mailbox but I was actually making a cat coffin.”

The cat didn’t die after being squashed against the wall by the over-sized mailbox?

“No, the cat died of boredom watching me make the mail box,” he replies.

Bailey himself was declared dead a couple of months ago. 

“The thing was, I was on tour and I was quite ill. Before the tour I was in West Papua on a dive trip and I must have picked up a bug,” he says. 

“Now this thing wouldn’t leave me alone. And then I turned on my phone and someone had sent me a tweet asking “Is this true? Bill Bailey dead”. I felt half dead at the time, that’s for sure.

“Briefly there was this weird thought that ‘Wow, look at that I’m dead and I can do what i want’. It was quite liberating. I could go into town and rob a record shop and just go nuts and I’d be like ‘Well I’m dead, so it couldn’t be me’.

“Then I thought, oh shit who has seen this, everyone is going to panic. So I texted my tour manager to tell him to let everyone know I was all right. I said ‘Neil, I’m dead. Look at this’.

“I wasn’t entirely pleased with the photo they used, I must say. 

“Then he came back with quite a weird response, he said “Are you all right?”.

“It turned out it was an American DJ called Bill Bailey who had died, and it was the middle of the night and someone half asleep on the news desk has gone “Billy Bailey! He’s dead!” and put it up. They took it down but someone had already taken a screenshot of it. And off it went.”