Written by 
Bill Bailey says his scariest animal moment was when a jaguar pounced on him in the Amazonas region of Brazil.
Her name was Lulu and she was an army base mascot, but she was still a jaguar — not small and slinky like a cheetah, but tiger-sized.
“It was the speed with which this jaguar leapt on me — it happened in a flash,” he says.
“If you were prey, you’d have had no chance. One minute I was looking at her and by the time I registered she was coming at me, it was too late. I was on the ground being rolled around.”
It happened because Lulu’s Brazilian keeper had said to approach her from the front, the way you would a horse.
“Sorry my English!” he shouted as Bill duly walked towards her head-on. “I meant never! NEVER approach from the front!”
But by then, Bill was pinned to the ground underneath 75kg of apex predator.
“It was quite an amazing experience in some ways,” he says. “She was just playing with me, but I didn’t know that at the time. In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t embarrass myself and start screaming — I just froze.
“Jaguars are so much bigger than you imagine, and they don’t fear anything. You can creep up behind them and they’ll just turn around and take you out.
“So approaching a jaguar head-on is like challenging it – ‘oh, you fancy your chances, do you?’” He pauses. “So yes, it was a bit of a moment.”
I’m speaking with the eternally affable Mr Bailey on Zoom about his new book, , “a memoir of sorts” featuring dogs, cats, birds, chameleons, giant rabbits, tortoises, chickens, bats, dormice, whale sharks, tarsiers (me neither), adders, otters, badgers, baboons, eagles, minke whales, jaguars, and Madagascan hissing cockroaches.
Like him, it’s funny and interesting; you find yourself snorting with laughter as you learn stuff.
How, for instance, the underground interlinked tunnels of badgers setts are often hundreds of years old, passed down from generation to generation, making badgers “very much like the aristocracy, but better at digging.”
Or how many babies Madagascan hissing cockroaches have at one time.
“It just so happened that we’d been given two Madagascan hissing cockroaches as a gift, and my son [Dax, now 23] had seen that they’d had six babies,” he says.
“At an animal encounter group in Central Park Zoo in New York, one of the kids asked the zoo keeper how many babies these cockroaches had and the keeper didn’t know.
“So my son put his hand up, ‘I know! I know!’ The whole crowd was looking around at us, like, ‘who are these weirdos’? It was a great day.”
Apart from his wife Kris — who shares his love of animals, nature, and adventure travel — Bailey’s book is mostly about the creatures he’s met.
His enthusiasm for radioactive sea lice is as keen as his love for Molly the cockatoo, Dolly the tortoise, and his warring chameleons Posh and Becks.
He says that watching nature programmes on telly is not enough, that we need to get out there and be within it ourselves, to feel it, and reconnect with our own animal nature.
“Animals really do enrich your life in ways you can’t imagine,” he says. “They make us better people — you have to be more responsible. It’s not about you, the focus shifts so that your life isn’t so self-centred.”
He describes the psychological benefit of caring for animals: “You’re not as prone to introspection because you have an animal that needs to be fed, exercised, or whatever, and that focus in itself is enormously beneficial.”
Yet Bailey is neither vegetarian nor vegan. “I was vegetarian for a while, but I cracked,” he admits.
He recently visited an underground organic farm in central London, growing veg in disused train tunnels: “Old tube lines! No carbon footprint! These are the kinds of science-based solutions that I want to support.
“I’m fascinated by any new solutions that will feed people, because there are so many of us.”
His main message is that we need to connect, or reconnect, with nature.
“The natural world is much diminished, and part of that is down to us, which is a subtle subtext in the book,” he says.
“Species regularly disappear. In order to appreciate these creatures you have to see them, be near them — the proximity of nature is so important.” (An hour before we speak, a headline pings: “73% of wild species have gone extinct in the past 50 years.”)
While most of us don’t get the opportunity to access wild animals the way Bill does, or host a menagerie of rescued animals at his West London home — from Balinese street dogs to rabbits so huge they scare off foxes — we can all still access nature, even in the city.
“It’s something we all crave,” he says, “even if it’s just hearing birdsong, or being out in the woods, or seeing a bird land in a bird bath.”
“Any kind of encounter is a reminder that we need this, that being in nature is our natural state. We’re in danger of losing that.” Absolutely.
Before we go any further, we need to talk about Bill’s famous skullet — the floating ring of hair that fluffed like clouds around a bald shiny summit. It’s gone.
Aged 59, he looks like a younger Brian Eno — silver beard and remaining hair closely trimmed.
“I finally decided to get it cut off,” he says. “So I went to the barber’s at the end of my road and explained how it was my trademark, how I’d had it long since my 20s, and he just went ‘yeah whatever mate’ and” — Bill makes an unceremonious chainsaw noise — “it came off in about seven seconds.” He says he likes it.
Bill Bailey is a genuine polymath — comedian, musician, composer, TV presenter, panel show funny guy, actor, dancer, writer, memoirist, conservationist, and artist (he illustrated his book with pencil drawings of the animals).
His appeal spans generations — from my partner seeing him perform in a London pub in the early 90s, to my teenage niece knowing him as the 2020 winner of .
His audiences stretch from , , and to the rambling genius of his stand-up shows, the multi-instrumental jamming (his Kraftwerk spoof is unparalleled), and his growing role as a kind of neo-psychedelic David Attenborough figure.
“All those other things I’ve arrived at as a result of comedy,” he says.
A funny moment in the book is when he is making a nature programme about otters and is required to hold a handful of otter poo as the camera rolls.
Out of the corner of his eye he spots a newspaper headline about his friend Simon Pegg about to star with Tom Cruise in a Mission Impossible movie.
“This Hollywood glamour on one hand and this eminently non-glamorous thing of sitting there in the rain holding cold otter doings, thinking: ‘Really? Really is this what I want to do?’” he laughs.
“But you could argue that fame is ephemeral and nature is rewarding – that’s my take on it, and that’s what I’m going to keep telling myself.”
In terms of career identity, he is foremost a comedian.
“I did toy with the idea of putting ‘troubadour’ on my passport, but I went for ‘comedian’ in the end,” he says.
“That’s my job, I suppose — I can’t imagine doing anything else. And it works fine —except in America, where they give you a bit of attitude at the airport. ‘Oh, comedian, huh? You think you’re a comedian? Give us a joke then’. And I’d just got off long-haul.”
Born in Somerset in 1965, half way between Bath and Bristol, Bailey’s parents — a nurse and a GP — instilled in him their love of nature and the outdoors.
One of his earliest memories is being knocked over on a Devon beach by an enthusiastic red setter (he had flashbacks to this when the jaguar floored him in Brazil).
As a small child, his talent for the piano became apparent. The reason he’s so relaxed on stage comes from his classical training.
“It feels relaxed because it’s something I’ve done since I was a child,” he says.
“As soon as I realised I had a facility to play the piano, I was about four or five, I’d pick out tunes I heard on the radio and my mother encouraged me.
“I’d perform a piece for the family, for school, it’s been something I’ve done since as early as I can remember.
“I learned piano to the level of associateship at the London College of Music — which was quite a testing, difficult thing.
“I had to prepare and perform a recital for a panel of judges. It was an incredibly daunting prospect, I was still a teenager.
“It was incredibly influential, it helped me get over performing nerves. I’m glad I did it, I love the piano, I play it every day.”
He likes composing and collaborating with other musicians.
“The last couple of tours I’ve worked with opera singers, and I love that,” he says.
“I’m writing different pieces of music that will involve a violinist. That side of my creative life, I will work more towards – I love working with people, particularly musicians, on large scale projects.”
As he approaches his 60th birthday in January, he’ll most likely be incorporating a forthcoming tour of Australia with travel and animal encounters.
He and Kris love the wildlife of Indonesia, and married there in 1998. They’ve been together since the 1980s, when she moved onto his houseboat on the River Thames with her dog. Their menagerie has since “sort of snowballed”.
She once persuaded him to put on a suit and tie to collect a Devon Rex cat — the ones who look like bald aliens — from a mad lady who they had mistaken for an aristocrat.
He remembers “the brain melting stench of rancid cat urine … it was like being hit in the face by a frying pan made of solid ammonia.”
Despite leaving the “nuclear fallout zone of moggie micturition” without a hairless cat, he and Kris remain devoted to each other. The book is dedicated to her.
More recently, Bailey — not prone to making statements about spirituality or spiritual encounters — went diving around a dwarf minke whale which, despite their name, are still 10m long.
The minke whale song is like the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth – da da da DAAAAH. Bailey could feel these whale music vibrations under the water, and hummed back the same notes through his scuba regulator. The whale answered.
“Could this be the greatest moment of my life?” he wonders. “Trading Beethoven phrases with a whale?”
Nothing – not even starring in Mission Impossible – could come close.
- Bill Bailey’s , published by Quercus Books, is out now.