It's only rock 'n' troll

Bill Bailey has taken offence. I'd suggested that his new West End show, Part Troll, reprises the brilliant George Bush rap from his previous show. True enough, Bailey still pastes cut-up samples of Dubya's clangers over a pounding dance backing. No arguments there. But rap? Oh please...

'It's drum'n'bass,' Bailey insists. 'Never, ever do a comedy rap. It's one of the unwritten laws of comedy. Never ever do that. The first rule is this: keep saying funny things. And the second rule is never, ever do a comedy rap. If you ever do that you have to go and live in Tristan da Cunha. Sorry, but you've touched a nerve.'

But comedy drum'n'bass, that's all right? 'Yes, yes, that's all right.'

Mock pedantry aside, the 39-year-old stand-up is as genial and quick-witted as appearances on panel shows such as Never Mind The Buzzcocks have led us to expect. He's happy about starting his first full-on West End run, at the theatre where Michael Barrymore's comeback plopped into showbiz history last month. He was offered Barrymore's scenery - and spent a fleeting moment musing the 'ironic japery' that the shiny floor and chrome bandstand might afford. But he declined. Before now, Bailey has performed on nights off for other West End shows. This time he'll do it his own way.

Part Troll's mix of stand-up and musical parody is fired by Bailey's irritation with the lack of passion in culture and politics, he explains. And its presentation has been influenced by a ten-week stint in New York last year. He wanted to see how his act would work somewhere where nobody knew him. He learned the value of slickness in a town with no patience for the shambling charm of some British acts. But he didn't change a word - well, apart from material about white South African bounty hunters that New Yorkers took as racism. 'They didn't get the Afrikaner voice,' says Bailey. 'They thought I was making fun of black people, that it was a silly "howdy doodah, watermelon" accent.

A polar wind blew through the room.'

He took a condensed version of Part Troll to Edinburgh this year, where he also tried his first straight acting job in the courtroom classic Twelve Angry Men. He'll return to the role for a West End run next April, along with fellow comics such as Jeff Green and Stephen Frost. But a 1950s wig means it's not immediately obvious which juror is Bill Bailey...

'That was a common reaction,' he says. 'People I'd worked with on TV series' day in day out, just had no idea who I was. They came out and said: "Oh, it's such a shame you couldn't be in it, Bill. Did you fall out with the producers?" You get used to someone's shape, their posture or hair.' Such widespread non-recognition is also a tribute to his acting, though. 'Yes, I was flattered, obviously.'

He'd like to do more straight acting. But the next 12 months are already mapped out. He starts rehearsing the third series of Dylan Moran's sitcom Black Books while he's still in the West End. There's a new series of Buzzcocks in the New Year. After Twelve Angry Men, he takes Part Troll on tour. He'll always do stand-up, he says; he loves the idea of being able to forever tinker with a show, finessing a phrase or polishing a joke at anytime.

Does that make him difficult to live with sometimes? 'Probably, yeah.' He doesn't know how things will change after his wife gives birth to their first child next month. But he's looking forward to the oddness of it all.

'Being a father, a parent... wow. What responsibility. There are these books about this which say things like, "By now you'll probably be singing to your child in the womb..." What? Already I've failed as a parent, and he's not even born.'

Part Troll, Oct 13 to 25, Wyndham's Theatre, Charing Cross Road WC2, Mon to Sat 7.30pm, Sat mats 3pm, £19 to £38.50. Tel: 0870 060 6633. Tube: Leicester Square

Bill Bailey